Kurdish principalities came under the Ottoman rule in the sixteenth century within the context of the Ottoman-Safavid imperial rivalry and until the Tanzimat policies of the nineteenth century, Kurdish nobles maintained a degree of "autonomy" recognized by successive Ottoman sultans. This "autonomy" entailed various hereditary administrative and fiscal prerogatives -most important of which was their unhindered control over land and agricultural revenues. This paper analyzes the nature of the Kurdish nobles' rule over their territory with an eye to will reveal the extent and the degree of their "autonomy." It challenges the dominant trend in the literature which gauges the extent of the Kurdish nobility's autonomy or the limits of the Ottoman state's sovereignty merely by looking at what was stated in the governmental documents on the administrative status of these principalities -i.e. in the imperial orders, law books, etc. and demonstrates the actual ways in which this original agreement between the Ottoman state and the Kurdish nobles were materialized on the ground. Prior to the Tanzimat, the Kurdish nobility of Palu, one of these principalities, interacted with the Ottoman state through three interconnected realms: economic (through mines); fiscal (through taxation), and military (through providing soldiers in times of military campaigns). Each of these realms granted special prerogatives but also put certain responsibilities to the Palu nobility. As they assisted for the procurement of the mines, they were given immunities in taxation and participating in military campaigns. At the heart of this arrangement was the accepted notion of the Palu nobles' uninterrupted control over agricultural revenue. With the Tanzimat, the imperial state set out to undercut the Palu nobles' rule over agricultural land -while maintaining their administrative authority. Indisputably, the original agreement of the sixteenth century provided the larger framework in which the Ottoman state interacted with the Palu nobility. What determined the actual outcomes on the ground, however, was constant negotiation between the two parties. Prerogatives and responsibilities were defined within the context of the permutations of these three interconnected realms (i.e. mining, taxation, and military) and the leverages the parties held in each realm. Through the analysis of these realms of interaction between the Ottoman state and the Kurdish nobility from the late eighteenth century to the early Tanzimat era, this paper demonstrates the nature of the Kurdish nobles' control over land, the degree of their "autonomy" and the limits of the Ottoman state's authority.