My project will represent a case study of the nature and interplay of processes of demographic, ethno-religious, and socio-cultural change that led to the formation of one of the most sizable Muslim communities in the Balkans in the lands of today's Northeastern Bulgaria under Ottoman rule by the early eighteenth century. My motivation to undertake this project has been twofold. On the more mundane side, the subject has been inadequately studied, while it is of considerable importance to the understanding of major issues in Ottoman Balkan history and the Ottoman legacy in the Balkans. Secondly, my intention to approach the subject in its complexity, whereby I will address a matrix of component processes emphasizing the interplay between them on the basis of a correspondingly wide variety of Ottoman (as well as Slavic) administrative, legal, and literary sources, whereby I will allow for a dialogue between these sources, is a response to a number of methodological deficiencies in the modern state of scholarship in the field.