583 book reviews Journal of early modern history 23 (2019) 567-585 The fifteen authors demonstrate ways to produce history about Christians, Jews and Muslims in Spain and Portugal. I commend the Iberian Encounters and Exchange Series from the Pennsylvania State University Press for publish- ing this second book in the series and hope to see more monographs and col- lected essays appear. James B. Tueller Brigham Young University—Hawaii jim.tueller@byuh.edu doi:10.1163/15700658-12342019-25 Nikolay Antov, The Ottoman ‘Wild West’: The Balkan Frontier in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 342 pp., ISBN 9781107182639. $105.00. The Ottoman presence in the Balkans that lasted at the latest until the end of the nineteenth century, with all its regional variations, was the main topic of the local national historiographies that produced what Hobsbawm called “historical mythology.” However, the use of Ottoman sources in the last decades contributed to the more sober view of the Ottoman legacy in the Balkans, and totally negated or questioned deep-rooted beliefs such as the perennial resis- tance of the Balkan Christians against Ottoman rule and the consequent flight of Christian inhabitants to mountainous regions to avoid Ottoman authority, as well as forced conversions to Islam. Especially the latter was a dominant topos in Bulgarian historiography, which in this way endeavored to explain the existence of a Muslim minority in the country. Nikolay Antov’s book on the Ottoman Balkan frontier in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries examines significant topics of early modern Ottoman and Balkan history such as the colonization process, religious conversion, state centralization and accommodationist policies, all on the basis of Ottoman sources and by focusing on two areas of contemporary Bulgaria, Deliorman and Gerlovo. The author uses a variety of sources—from tax registers to Islamic hagiographic accounts (velayetname) and other Ottoman narrative sources, fetva collections, Ottoman administrative documents as well as non- Ottoman accounts—which enables him to fully investigate the “indigenization of Islam” in the eastern Balkans as well as the imperial policy to institutional- ize the Ottoman state’s authority in the area. Antov follows the development of these two initially underpopulated areas through their full integration in