List of campaigns of Suleiman the Magnificent
The imperial campaigns (, "sefer-i humāyūn") of Suleiman the Magnificent were a series of campaigns led by Suleiman, who was the tenth and longest-reigning Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He is known in the Western world as "Suleiman the Magnificent", and in the East as "the Lawgiver" (), for his complete reconstruction of the Ottoman legal system. During his reign from 1520 to his death in 1566, the Ottoman Empire became the most powerful state in the world. At its height, the Empire stretched from Hungary to Yemen.
Selim I
Selim's conquest of the Middle Eastern heartlands of the Muslim world, and particularly his assumption of the role of guardian of the pilgrimage routes to Mecca and Medina, established the Ottoman Empire as the most prestigious of all Sunni Muslim states. His conquests dramatically shifted the empire's geographical and cultural center of gravity away from the Balkans and toward the Middle East. By the eighteenth century, Selim's conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate had come to be romanticized as the moment when the Ottomans seized leadership over the rest of the Muslim world, and consequently Selim is popularly remembered as the first legitimate Ottoman Caliph, although stories of an official transfer of the caliphal office from the Abbasids to the Ottomans were a later invention.