ABSTRACT
Of the European countries conquered by the Ottoman Empire only Albania and Bosnia became Islamized. The other ones, present day Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania remained Christian. They belonged to the Orthodox church, the existence of which was never questioned but on the contrary acknowledged as a millet1 and consequently so to speak integrated into the Empire. There is hardly any exaggeration in claiming that the Ottoman Empire protected the Orthodox believers from Catholic ambitions of penetration. Albania and Bosnia, however, were Catholic and could be suspected of nursing links with both the Vatican and the Emperor in Vienna. Albania “seems to have been Islamized as a matter of deliberate Ottoman policy to help suppress resistance after the Turkish-Venetian war in the seventeenth century”.2 On the other hand “the process by which Bosnia gained a majority population of Muslims…took the best part of 150 years”.3 This does not indicate a single-minded policy but nevertheless it can safely be argued that the Sublime Porte preferred to see the border areas towards the Catholic Roman Empire to be settled by Muslims or Orthodox peoples. The way in which the peaceful conversion of Bosnia took place is still a topic for discussion.
