In the seventeenth century, the term regularly used by the Ottoman state to characterize Orthodox Christian (as well as Jewish and Armenian) subjects on the corporate level was ta’ife (“group”), rather than millet (“religious community, nation”), which is not found in archival documents until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and did not come into common usage until the nineteenth century. We thus find phrases such as zimmi ta’ifesi, Yehudi ta’ifesi, and Ermeni ta’ifesi in seventeenth-century registers. Yet ta’ife was also employed by the Ottoman bureaucracy to describe an entire spectrum of groups into which Ottoman subjects could be classified, including categories as broad as gender (nisvan ta’ifesi) or as narrow as Ottoman officialdom (ehl-i örf ta’ifesi). Ta’ife was also frequently used in reference to professional organizations. The multiplicity of meanings inherent in the term is emphatically on display in petitions brought by members of two related cap makers’ guilds in 1657: Muslim and Orthodox Christian linen skullcap (takiye) makers and soft felt cap (arakiye) makers appeared before the Imperial Divan to explain the parallel internal crises in leadership that their respective guilds were experiencing at that time. In these decrees, Orthodox Christians and Muslims of each guild present arguments as to why their particular “group” should be permitted to select their guild’s kethüda (“warden”). The crisscrossing combinations of the term ta’ife in phrases such as zimmi takiyeci ta’ifesi (“zimmi skull cap makers’ group”) and Muslim arakiyeci ta’ifesi (“Muslim soft cap makers’ group”) reflect the Ottoman state’s understanding of the vast array of roles filled by Ottoman subjects of varying confessional identity: belonging to one type of ta’ife did not preclude belonging to several others in the seventeenth century. Though the arguments of the Muslim and Orthodox Christian parties in each guild at first appear straightforward, many layers of meaning are embedded in the indirect statement in which the decrees are written: the texts represent the Ottoman scribe’s summary not only of the petitioners’ claims but also of the petitioners’ versions of the opposing parties’ claims and why those claims were invalid. A close reading of these decrees is warranted in order to understand the connections between them and to better appreciate the significance of the term ta’ife in seventeenth-century Ottoman bureaucratic discourse. It will then be possible to better contextualize the significance of the emergence of the term millet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.