In 1885, the widow of Etienne Pisani, a deceased dragoman (translator/interpreter) previously employed by the British Embassy in Istanbul, sent a petition to the Ottoman Sublime Porte requesting that plans move forward in opening a bank by her family. Etienne died in 1882, but before his death, he was granted an imperial ferman by the sultan to establish a bank in Istanbul. After his death, the investors that Pisani put together had grown anxious, and wanted to move forward with the plan. Mrs. Pisani sent more petitions, prompting debates about the legitimacy of the bank between the Ottoman State Reform Council, the Special Chamber, and the Şeyhülislâm. The ferman, however, was eventually annulled, and the bank did not open. This incident raises questions about how non-Muslim dragomans positioned themselves in Istanbul in the nineteenth century. Outside of their duties as translators and interpreters for the foreign embassies that employed them, many dragomans, such as Etienne Pisani, constructed lucrative plans to increase their own social and economic position in Istanbul. How were they able to do that? This paper introduces a new, critical and conceptual framework of what I call intra-imperial space to analyze the space that some non-Muslims, and dragomans in particular occupied in the Ottoman imperial capital. Intra-imperial space refers to the zone in between the imperial power that the dragomans served, and the Ottoman one that they were born into. Combining empirical evidence from The British National Archives (Kew, London), the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, and the archives of the Santa Maria Draperis Catholic Church (Istanbul, Turkey), with theoretical literature on empire, I argue that this intra-imperial space provided a political, economic and legal position that benefitted non-Muslim dragomans in Istanbul. Using the Pisani family of Latin-Catholic dragomans as an example, this paper examines how dragomans negotiated their status between two empires, integrated into the Ottoman imperial structure, and the techniques they used to move beyond a seemingly liminal status in an Islamic empire. In doing so, it contributes to the emerging literature by new generations of scholars uncovering agency among non-Muslim social actors in Ottoman history. This paper also challenges two long-standing assumptions about dragomans and non-Muslims in Ottoman historiography. The first is that dragomans were marginal-men, charged with simply translating and interpreting exchanges between the Europeans and the Ottomans. The second is that non-Muslims did not have the ability to participate in the Ottoman imperial structure.