Scholarship on early Ottoman Sarajevo, largely focusing on the conversion of the higher nobility and the peasantry to Islam, has tended to do neglect the continuing existence of a local Christian gentry. This gentry, named in early Ottoman sources as voynuks (soldiers), made up roughly 10 percent of the population and appeared to have retained their own rights to own arms, horses, special land holdings, and exercise personal mobility and religious autonomy in return for acknowledging in the new rulers. By examining the greater Sarajevo district's income registers (tahrir defters), law codes (kanunnames), pious foundation registers (vakifnames), and local court records (sicils), this presentation will analyze the role of voynuks in the region's conversion to Islam as well as their eventual integration into Sarajevo's burgeoning urban economy. My findings first qualify the dominant notion that the voynuks only faced cultural pressure to convert as Islam was the dominant religion of the Ottoman military/administrative elite. The voynuks indeed faced significant local political socio-economic pressures to convert as the Ottomans soon created a new, entirely Muslim gentry named as ak?nc?s (raiders). This new order, a superior category to the vojnuks in the tahrirs, encouraged conversion in order for the local gentry to maintain or improve social status. Nevertheless, this pressure pales in comparison to either the displacement of the earlier Bosnian upper nobility by new Ottoman janissary fortress garrisons and the Muslim forces of local Ottoman warlords or the Ottoman's use of inheritance rights to induce Bosnian peasants to convert. Thus one sees a gradual pattern of conversion that took roughly 150 years to complete. Moreover, the voynuks role in Sarajevo's rapid growth over the sixteenth century has almost been entirely ignored by prior scholars. By retaining their lands (çiftliks) at a fixed lump sum annual tax payment (mukataa), the voynuks could produce grain for the nearby city largely unregulated by the central authorities. The voynuks, using their powers of patronage, often allowed new partners-many of whom were peasants-to join their farm-enterprises, increasing the region's grain production and crop-tax revenue. As the voynuks and their partners were free to move to the city, the çiftliks were also important to Sarajevo's rapid population growth.