Predatory rulers attempt to extract as much revenue as possible from the population, but that does not mean they are unconstrained. Scholars have often focused on rebellions as such a constraint due to the costs they impose on rulers. However, rebellions also involve severe costs for participants, including risks of injury, punishment, or death. Given these costs, I argue that commoners frequently opted to resist predatory extraction by fleeing, especially during the pre-industrial era. To explore the implications of this contention, I model the dynamic between a revenue-maximizing ruler and a peasant, who chooses to comply, flee, or rebel. This model shows that when rebellion is relatively costly, flight, rather than rebellion, serves to constrain the ruler. I provide empirical evidence for this insight by drawing from the case of indigenous exploitation in colonial Peru. First, I demonstrate that the Spanish Crown set lower tax rates where indigenous peasants could more easily flee. Using a difference-in-differences design, I then show that when peasants were subjected to overextraction through forced labor in mines, they responded by fleeing rather than rebelling. These findings provide a new perspective on the dynamic between rulers and their subjects that can be applied to numerous phenomena and settings.