The fields of slavery and conversion in the Ottoman empire have undergone renewed scholarly interest recently, but the intersections between these two areas of research remain to be fully explored. The underlying assumptions on which our understanding of early modern man's motives for religious conversion were based have been called into question in the works of scholars such as Marc Baer, Nabil Matar, Tijana Krstic and Claire Norton. At the same time, recent research has unearthed much information on the central role of slavery and captivity to early modern society, particularly in the central industries of the Ottoman capital in the sixteenth century. However, the findings of Ottoman scholars working on conversion have yet to be applied to the new findings on the prevalence of slaves and ex-slaves at the grassroots level of Ottoman urban society in the early modern period. My paper will examine this phenomenon, namely, the crossroads of slavery and religious conversion in mid-to late Ottoman Istanbul, by analysing statistical data on conversion and manumission among the slave population of Galata, according to the Ottoman court registers. The conversion and manumission rates of the slaves of Galata will be assessed according to the slaves' origins and gender, to ascertain in what ways these elements would have affected the enslaved persons' religious conversion and manumission from slavery, and hence, the trajectory of his or her life. In addition to attempting to find patterns of conversion among a large sample of early modern slaves, and possible explanations for their existence, this paper will also investigate individual case studies of religious conversion (typically, from Christianity, to Islam) among the slave population of Galata, while attempting to explain how the influence of the local convert communities and desire for belonging and communal worship might have affected the slave's process of conversion and manumission. Relying on travel accounts and historical chronicles, in addition to court records, the role that local religious and convert communities, as well as politically or socially prominent converts, would have played in the assimilation of ex-slaves into Galata will be elucidated. The ways in which slavery, manumission, and conversion affected each other, and the methods by which slaves of different origins manipulated (or did not manipulate) these legal and social constructs to their advantage will also be examined, as will the possible ambiguities in slave and ex-slave convert religious identities.