Change and Continuity in the Perception of the Kurdish Lands in European and Ottoman Sources

Scholarship on Kurdish history discusses the boundaries of Kurdistan in terms of its geographical limits and the political frontier. Be it geographical or political, most of these works present the limits of Kurdish lands more or less the same. While almost every modern study on the region elaborates on the boundaries of Kurdistan, the scholarship is silent about different versions of the name as well as the changing geographical boundaries and the center of Kurdistan throughout of centuries. In this article I shall not discuss where Kurdistan is and what the borders of the region are since numerous sources and maps already give enough information about this question. The question I am interested in here is what and where the Ottoman (not only the Turks but also the other ethnic groups lived inside of the Empire's borders) and European sources meant when they were referring to “Kurdistan” during the early modern period.