This article addresses conversion and its consequences for a Bactrian family known as the Mir family during the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. It explains the social, legal, and economic ties that bound this Bactrian family, and the problems created within the family after a member of it converted to Islam. Based on a systematic analysis of a group of Bactrian and Arabic documents issued for the members of this family by the local Bactrian and Muslim authorities, this article will show the centrality of the ‘household’ in the Bactrian society and the changes that occurred in it after the arrival of Islam. It argues that conversion to Islam seriously affected this family and eventually dismantled it. Although conversion did not remove the kinship within the household, it ended cohabitation and joint ownership, which were central social elements in the Bactrian law that kept the household together.

Although the Ottoman conquest is traditionally interpreted as a violent break with the past, this chapter demonstrates that it was enabled by diplomacy as much as warfare. The chapter discusses the early modern Serb society, which formed in the imperial borderlands and was shaped by migrations and wars fought between Christian coalitions led by Hungary and Austria and the Ottoman Empire. Other main topics discussed include the restoration of the Serbian church in the sixteenth century, conversion to Islam of the local population, and migrations to the north of the Danube, following which a Serb plurality was established in southern Hungary. Orthodox Serbs also settled, alongside Catholic Croats, in the Habsburg Military Border, while others were recruited by Ottoman and Venetian armies. During this period, Serbian Orthodox patriarchs became de facto proto-ethnic leaders. A rich oral tradition preserved, and invented, a collective memory of medieval Serbia, while in the eighteenth century educated Serbs embraced the Enlightenment ideas and began to think of Serbs as a modern nation.