This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Ottoman conquest of the Tsardom of Vidin in 1396, the last independent Bulgarian state, began nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule across Bulgaria. Under that rule Islam took root through settlement and voluntary conversion rather than through mass forced conversion, as Tatar and Turkoman families were resettled into the region from the late fourteenth century into the sixteenth.
Dervish missionary activity, together with the tax and economic advantages conversion offered under Ottoman administration, drew a large Bulgarian speaking Muslim population, known as the Pomaks, alongside separately settled ethnic Turkish communities. The Muslim share of the population grew steadily across these centuries, from roughly one hundred fifty thousand people in the 1450s to six hundred thousand by the 1580s, and by 1875 Muslims made up close to two fifths of the principality's population.
What this changed for Islam's spread was the establishment of a substantial, religiously and ethnically mixed Muslim population inside Bulgaria through peaceful mechanisms, resettlement, missionary work and material incentive, rather than through conquest alone. The Pomak community's Bulgarian speaking Muslim identity and the separate ethnic Turkish settlement together stood as the lasting result of nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule that began at Vidin in 1396.