This paper will explore the ways in which various identificatory labels came to demarcate the boundaries of loyalty in seventeenth-century Ottoman Eastern Anatolia. Specifically labels referring to the Kurds in the Ottoman-Safavid borderland region were utilized by both imperial and regional actors in order to locate center-peripheral relations. This paper will specifically investigate an Ottoman-Turkish translation of the Sherefname from the seventeenth century by which a local Kurdish scribe, in his introduction to the translation, makes bold claims for the ethno-linguistic superiority of the Kurds and the Kurdish language while simultaneously providing additional local histories of the seventeenth century that depict the Kurds as the ever loyal imperial subjects. This text in conjunction with comparative Ottoman imperial viewpoints on the Kurds provides a fascinating look into the complex imperial and regional markers of loyalty and difference. Moreover, I argue that the rise of ethno-linguistic terminology during this period did not mark some prelude to national identities but rather demonstrates the complexity and nuances of self-fashioning along center-periphery relations in an early modern empire.