As the Ottomans expanded they gave up the nomadic existence that had given them such an advantage and began to suffer the ill effects of the plague like the rest of the population; this may be why they never replaced the Balkan population in the way they did in Anatolia.[47] Some communities—most notably the Albanians and Bosnians—converted to Islam in large numbers, but the majority remained Christian. The consequences of this partial conversion of the region 500 years ago played out in the Yugoslavian Wars of the 1990s, when nationalist politicians attempted to carve the remnants of the
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