In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a striking number of Ottoman military assigned to defensive or administrative posts in the provinces engaged in lawless conduct that brought great suffering to local urban and rural residents. Banditry became epidemic in the core provinces of the empire, Anatolia and Rumelia (as attested in local petitions to the authorities in Istanbul for help against marauders, approximately half of whom were Janissaries, provincial cavalry, or other functionaries). At the same time pasha generals in border zones were authorizing their soldiers to engage in raiding forays and seizure of captives, ignoring the rights of Ottoman subjects. This paper focuses on eastern Anatolia, in particular the province of Harput (modern Elazığ) in order to argue for the existence of internal frontiers. Harput is an example of a region that was semi-autonomous throughout this period. Despite the fact that its governors were the usual Ottoman figures, drawn from military-administrative ranks, they sustained their power through what we might call "officialized banditry”. While these local warlords might at first seem to belong to the long wave of the Jelali rebel-pasha, I will argue that their political practice, seemingly handed down from one governor to the next, constitutes a different phenomenon. The paper will outline this political practice as well as the attempts of central and local authorities to dismantle the walls that had gradually enabled Harput to become an autonomous fiefdom.