Scholarship on the history of the Kurds in the pre-Modern Middle East has predictably cast the spotlight on the storied political elite, such as the medieval Ayyubid dynasty, or on the disturbances of “restive” tribes in the countryside. Relatively little attention has been paid to the history of the Kurds in between, those townspeople whose ancestors had migrated from Kurdistan as early as late antiquity and made their homes in such cities as Damascus and Aleppo. The survival in these cities of residential quarters named after the Kurds suggests their social solidarity, if not insularity, as well as the ambiguous nature of their position relative to the larger urban population. A wide range of primary sources dating from the early Ottoman era (1500-1800) enables a more complete understanding of their assimilation and its limits. This study examines the residential patterns, occupational pursuits, and personal histories of the Kurds of Aleppo from the Ottoman conquest (1516) until the late eighteenth century. It re-evaluates the still influential generalization, perhaps most famously advanced by French Orientalist Jean Sauvaget (1901-50), that as a whole the Kurds of Aleppo settled in the northeastern suburbs of the city, engaged in only a narrow set of crafts and services related to the caravan trade, and remained only imperfectly assimilated to urban life. The study employs a combination of documentary and literary evidence. Cadastral surveys (avarizhane tahrir defterleri), used in conjunction with court records (sijillat), yield significant information on the aggregate wealth of Kurdish-majority residential quarters and the average material wealth of households in the same quarters. Probate inventories (mukhallafat), administrative orders (ahkam), and biographical dictionaries (tarajim) enable the reconstruction of the lives of selected Kurdish notables. Among those featured are the long-distance trader Mustafa ibn Muhammad Mamuk al-Kurdi (fl. 1566); the Governor of Kilis, Janbulad Bek b. Qasim (d. ca. 1586); the sufi saint Ahmad ibn ‘Abdu al-Qusayri (d. 1570); the brothers and soldiers Salim Bek and Hajj Abu Bakr al-Bulukbashi Ibn Balat (fl. 1680); and perhaps not a Kurd, but a major patron of their learning, the judge and merchant Ahmad b. Tahazada (d. 1773).