In the early 1790s Ottoman officials along the Danubian frontier between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires increasingly began to mention a certain Kara Feyzi in their correspondence to ?stanbul. Emerging from among numerous bands of unruly soldiers that coalesced along this frontier, Kara Feyzi came to establish an amorphous, trans-regional network of bellicose men who wreaked havoc throughout Rumeli (i.e., Ottoman Europe) in between Ottoman wars with the Habsburgs and Russians from the early 1790s until 1807. Importantly, Kara Feyzi recruited anyone from Muslim and Christian peasants to high-ranking pashas and vezirs into his successful enterprise. When Sultan Selim III finally co-opted Kara Feyzi in 1807 as an Ottoman official and provincial notable, he charged Kara Feyzi with defending yet another new frontier forged between an increasingly autonomous Serbia and Ottoman Bulgaria. It was along these new "national" borders that Kara Feyzi was able to create a frontier dynasty (continued by his son Es-Seyyid Kara Feyzi-zâde 'Ali Be?) in which his campaigns of violence into Serbia were sanctioned by the state. However, the nature of Kara Feyzi-zâde 'Ali Be?'s violence by the 1830's was very different from his father's—while Kara Feyzi targeted both Muslim and Christian communities indiscriminately during his rebellious years, his son developed a penchant for exclusively Christian communities and religious shrines. This paper will look at the role Kara Feyzi and his son's movements played in the profound transformation of inter-confessional dynamics in the Ottoman Balkans during the transition from an imperial to a national framework from the 1790's until 1839. By exploring through both Muslim and Christian contemporary sources how religious loyalties, sites, institutions, and figures influenced the practices of networks of violence and those who opposed them over time, this paper will postulate that between the 1790s and 1830s rebellion and banditry in the Ottoman Balkans became the politicized site of contestation in which the religious, socio-economic, and political concerns of various groups in Ottoman Rumeli converged to highlight new tensions and redefine new relations.