Abstract One way to understand what we, historians, do is to look at it as a negotiation between our concerns, questions and language, and those of the actors of the past whom we study. The ideal result of this negotiation is that we do not self-indulgently impose our world upon theirs, yet at the same time we prudently take the liberty of asking questions and using terms that do not emanate from the past we study in a simple way. Identity in the Ottoman world is a site where this tricky negotiation is played out. The concern, and sometime obsession, with identity labels stems from our post-modern capitalist world. It is not clear how much this mattered to Ottomans, and even if it did, they obviously used an entirely different language to express it. My paper attempts to figure out a set of identity dichotomies prevalent among state servants in the early part of the 17th century. I do this by looking at the poetics of Ottoman historical writing in a corpus of texts that represent the deposition and killing of Sultan Osman II in 1622. Reading this textual corpus I shall show that this assortment of identitarian dichotomies was underlain by the poetic garden/wilderness distinction. I then identify various dyads emanating from it: Istanbul versus provincial cities and Istanbul versus the Anatolian provinces; state servants in the capital and imperial palace versus provincial governors; and Janissaries versus Sekban. To return to the said negotiation, my paper uses an interpretative approach that is our own, but reconstructs possible 17th century identity chasms in the Ottomans’ own words.