The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans was one of the most influential long-term processes with far-reaching effects in European history that transformed a substantial European region fundamentally as a result of warfare and slave trading, which triggered population and refugee movements, immigration, and religious conversion. From a broader Euro-Asian perspective, it should be studied in a larger geopolitical context of power interplay between Islamic, Catholic, and Orthodox political entities. This case study proposes a paradigm shift in assessing the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans that aims at moving the focus from the institutionally-based analysis toward an agency-based one, combining two major constituent dimensions – actors and space. It is now clear that the early Ottomans constituted a polycentric and composite model of power, in which regional dynasties usually acted on an equal footing with the sultan, and not infrequently independently of him. The worlds of these Muslim and Christian regional actors were closely intertwined in a dynamic frontier society, forming a community of violence with, on a case-by-case basis, rapidly shifting loyalties. The study will build upon analytical approaches utilized by Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) by creating and curating a prosopographic database, centred on political actors down to a local level. Utilizing traditional and automated methods to approach historical sources, data will be extracted from Ottoman, Latin, Church Slavonic, and vernacular texts in addition to readily available data from Greek sources. The actor-centred approach to the entangled process of Ottoman conquest of the Balkans will offer a way more nuanced and comprehensive picture of the forms of resistance, resilience, and adaptation of regional societies in the face of a profound violence-induced transformation.