This paper traces the self-understanding and self-depiction of sixteenth-century Bosnians as gazis—march lords and holy warriors in the service of the expansion of Muslim territory—and the impact of this self-understanding on the integration of Bosnian elites into Ottoman society. It shows how sixteenth-century Bosnians, as the inhabitants of a frontier province in the Ottoman Empire, capitalized on the by then well-founded ethos that understood Ottoman expansionism in terms of gaza or holy war, and explains how this ethos played an important role in defining both their identity and their relationship with the imperial centre. By the late fifteenth century, when Bosnia was incorporated into the Ottoman realm, Ottomans had a rather established view of their ancestors as gazis who attacked and raided the frontier regions of the Byzantine Empire in the name of Islam. By this time, the Ottoman sultanate was no longer a frontier principality but a large empire, and its rulers were not frontier warriors but sedentary sultans. The inhabitants of Bosnia, as the Empire’s westernmost frontier, however, have embraced and came to embody the gazi ethos. The paper shows how the interplay between the Ottomans’ perceived past and Bosnian contemporary reality shaped, at least in part, the place of local Bosnian elites within the imperial system. The suggested analysis also sheds light on the more general question of the significance of the concept of gaza in Ottoman history. Contributing to the debate between scholars from Paul Wittek to Cemal Kafadar, it highlights the political significance of the concept in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman internal politics. Although the representation of thirteenth-century Ottomans as gazis is most likely a later overlay rather than an authentic expression of their identity, it is revealing that the same vocabulary was used by sixteenth-century chroniclers for the depiction of the early Ottomans and contemporary Bosnian frontier warriors. The paper examines the implications of this characterization not only in contemporary Ottoman ideology but also in shaping the relations between different segments of the ruling Ottoman elite of the time.