A glance at the islamisation of Gora and other Župas of the Šar mountain complex

It is a matter of record that, until the Ottoman invasion, Serb Slavs populated the Sar Mountain župas (roughly: districts) of Sirinic, Sredska, Gora, and Opolje, and the entire region between the Crni Drim and Vardar rivers, with the Gornji Polog and Donji Polog valleys (the Tetovo region). The area was home to two imperial capitals of the Mediaeval Serbian state Prizren and Skopje. With the Ottoman invasion of the Sar lands in the late 14 century (after the occupation of Skopje in 1392 and of Prizren in 1455), the until then ethnically purely Serbian and religiously purely Orthodox Christian environment experienced its first major ethnic, religious, and demographic changes. Colonies of Ottoman Turkish townspeople artisans and traders, as well as military personnel spahis, yannisaries and other services of the Turkish regular and ancillary armies began to be formed in the neighbouring Orthodox imperial cities of Prizren, Tetovo, and Skopje. Parallel with the invasion and settling of its people, mostly from Anatolia (Asia Minor), the Ottomans carried out Islamisation on a lesser or greater scale Turkicization of the indigenous Serbian population, and of a large section of the Arbanasi (Albanians) populating the area between the Crni Drim river and the Adriatic Sea. Turkish administrative, judicial, and agrarian institutions which were based on the Shari'ah law imposed a timar-spahi agrarian and legal system in their socio-economic dealings with the subjugated population (reaya, Turkish for flock). Since the Shari'a law, based on the religious precepts of the Koran, promised the subjugated Christian nations exemption from numerous taxes where harc (tribute) and kulluk (angaria, forced labour) were the worst obligations imposed by spahis on the reaya – on conversion to Islam, many from among the subjugated populations converted and thus became "true" Turkish citizens with full rights. Ottoman Turks lived only in towns, and the Islamised Christian population, only in villages. The Islamisation of the Sar Mountain župas for