Safi ad-Din Ardabili (1252–1334), a Kurdish mystic, started the Safavid order. The Safavids were Sufis, and at first they were Sunni Muslims. (Safi ad-Din Ardabili was the first of the Safavid dynasty, a family that later came to be the rulers of Iran.)
Kurdish emirates and tribes continued to have military power. Both the Mongols' Ilkhanate in Iran and the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt tried to use Kurds as allies, because many Kurds lived in the mountains on the border between the Mongol Ilkhanate and the Mamluk Sultanate. The Ilkhanate government gave authority to some Kurdish rulers among the tribes. The Sultanate gave authority to an officer with the title "Generalissimo of the Kurds" (). Kurdistan became part of the Timurid Empire in the time of Timur, but after Timur died in 1404, the Timurid dynasty started to lose control of the country. The Qara Qoyunlu took control of the Kurdish emirates around Bitlis, Siirt, and Hasankeyf before 1450. By that time, the Kurds around Diyarbakır were controlled by the Aq Qoyunlu. In 1460 the Aq Qoyunlu attacked and took control of Siirt and Hasankeyf. Then they took control of Cizre (the emirate of Bohtan), Bitlis, and Hakkari.
Kurds were common in the hills near Gaziantep and Kilis. Near Antakya, the hills of the Jabal al-Akrad and the Kurd Dagh both had Kurdish populations. Qusayr, by the Jabal al-Akrad was the same. By the 11th century, Kurds had migrated to Jabal al-Ansariyya ("the Alawite mountains") and parts of Greater Lebanon (the lands of modern Lebanon). Most of these Kurds joined the Arabs in these lands and became "Arabized", but others became warlords in the time of the Ottoman Empire. Kurds that came from Diyarbakır in the early 16th century were the ancestors of the Druze Ma'an dynasty. They controlled Mount Lebanon in the 17th century. Some Arab families of the area have Kurdish ancestors.
At the end of the 15th century, the Safavids overcame the Aq Qoyunlu and started the Safavid Empire. The leader of the Safavid order became shah as Shah Ismail I in 1501. He controlled the lands from Kurdistan to Afghanistan. By the 15th century, the Safavid order had become Shia Muslims, and they had military power with help from Turkmen tribes. Shah Ismail made the Twelvers' Shia Islam the state religion. Many of the Kurds, who were mostly Sunni Muslims, became enemies of the Safavid government. Although some Kurdish emirs joined the Shiites, Shah Ismail took away the authority of many Kurdish emirs. The shah gave the lands of these emirs to the Qizilbash, men who supported the shah's religious ideas.
The rulers of the Ottoman Empire were also Sunni Muslims, and they became the enemies of the Safavid Empire. At that time, the Ottoman Empire gave better treatment to Sunni Muslim Kurds than did the Safavid Empire. Kurdistan was part of the Safavid Empire. The Ottoman sultan, Selim I, started an invasion of Kurdistan. The armies of Sultan Selim overcame the armies of Shah Ismail at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514. The Ottoman Empire took control of the western part of Kurdistan. The majority of Kurdistan became part of the Ottoman Empire, but the eastern part continued to be a part of the Safavid Empire.
The Ottoman government gave Idris Bitlisi authority to get help from the Kurdish emirs. The Kurdish emirs sent their soldiers to help the Ottomans. In the first half of the 16th century, many important Kurdish soldiers fought against the Safavids' allies in Kurdistan. The Ottoman government made variable allowances for the autonomy of Kurdish emirs and tribes in their own lands. There was also an Ottoman governor in each province. The emirs of Bitlis, Hakkari, and the emirate of Bohtan (Cizre) did not have to pay tax to the Ottoman government. Other tribes did pay tax, but the Ottoman government gave their "Kurdish counties" () as fiefs () to Kurdish tribes' own leaders, who inherited their position. For the Ottoman Empire at this time, the Kurds were useful as allies on the border with the Safavid Empire. The Ottomans had success in getting Kurdish allies, and the Safavids gave the Kurds better treatment in order to get the same result. Some parts of Iranian Kurdistan became parts of the provinces of the Safavid Empire, but others had Kurdish governors who inherited their positions. The Ardalan clan of Sanandaj and the Mukriyani tribes of west Azerbaijan both had Kurdish governors of this kind. The sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, took away the authority of the Kurdish emir of Bitlis, so he and his clan went to the Safavid Empire, where the shah gave them good treatment and gave the emir's grandson education at the royal court. The Safavid government gave the emir's grandson, Sharaf Khan Bidlisi, authority for the Kurds at the royal court, and gave him a title: "the high emir of the Kurds" (). However, Sharaf Khan Bidlisi later returned to his grandfather's emirate in Bitlis, defecting from the Safavid Empire to the Ottoman Empire.
Some Safavid shahs forced Kurdish tribes to migrate to Khorasan to the east of the Safavids' lands. There they set up Kurdish emirates which defended the border against attacks from the Turkmen and Uzbek tribes. The government moved many Kurds there in the 16th century, in order to make the Kurds fight against the Uzbek people who were then attacking Iran. Abbas the Great, the shah, moved tens of thousands of Kurds from Iranian Kurdistan to the borders of Afghanistan and the land that is now Turkmenistan. Shah Abbas's government did this between 1598 and 1610. The Safavid government continued to threaten the Ottoman government's control in Kurdistan.
It was most common for the Ottomans to use the Turkoman people to control the population, but they also used Kurds. Ali Janbulad was a Kurdish warlord from Kilis. He fought in the Ottoman armies, and controlled the Ottoman army in Palestine. The Ottomans tried to settle the nomadic people and tried to make them become farmers. The Kurds, however, started to have firearms in the 1580s and 1590s. Kurdish lords became more powerful and started to control the trade routes between Mosul, Baghdad, Aleppo, and Adana. Kurdish lords controlled the mountain lands between the inland cities of Syria (Aleppo, Damascus, Hama and Homs) and the ports of the Mediterranean Sea (Payas, Iskenderun, Antioch, Latakia, Tripoli). Kurdish traders carried the imports and exports, and Kurdish tribes sometimes attacked the trade routes. Kurdish soldiers attacked the river trade route of the Tigris, and the Yazidis on the way between Mosul and Aleppo always gave resistance to the Ottoman government. The mountain roads were sometimes impossible to pass through for months or years because of the Kurdish lords. Travellers would bribe the Kurds, and take hostages. The Ottoman government did not have success in trying to control the roads with the army and with fortifications. The Ottoman government sometimes gave Kurdish warlords government authority, so that they might do as the government wanted. After 1600, the power of the Ottoman governors in Aleppo and Mosul was weak, so each governor had an army. The cavalry in these armies were mostly Kurds from the area of Kilis. However, when governors went away after their term of office, their armies' veterans became unemployed and many became bandits in rural areas. Banditry from Kurds and Bedouins was so common in the early 18th century that the population of farmers around Homs and Hama became smaller and there was not enough food in Damascus as a result.