Territorial evolution of the Ottoman Empire
Suleiman I ( "Süleymān", ; almost always "Kanuni Sultan Süleyman") (6 November 1494  – 5/6/7 September 1566), was the tenth and longest-reigning Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, from 1520 to his death in 1566. Suleiman became a prominent monarch of 16th century Europe. Suleiman personally led Ottoman armies to conquer the Christian strongholds of Belgrade, Rhodes, and most of Hungary. In 1541 he annexed central Hungary while Transylvania became an Ottoman vassal. However rest of the Kingdom of Hungary including western and northern (Upper) Hungary and Croatia still were Habsburgs possessions. Suleiman also conquered Iraq in his conflict with the Safavid dynasty. Under his rule, the Ottoman fleet dominated the seas from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.
Ottoman decline thesis
Other tropes of political decline, such as the notion that the sultans ruling after the time of Suleiman I were less competent rulers, have also been challenged. The reigns of such figures as Ahmed I, Osman II, and Mehmed IV (among others) have been re-examined in the context of the conditions of their own respective eras, rather than by inappropriately comparing them with a mythical Suleimanic ideal. Indeed, the very notion of whether Suleiman's reign constituted a golden age in the first place has come into question. The fact that sultans no longer personally accompanied the army on military campaigns is no longer criticized, but seen as a positive and necessary change resulting from the empire's transformation into a sedentary imperial polity. Leslie Peirce's research on the political role of women in the Ottoman dynasty has demonstrated the inaccuracy of the assumption that the so-called Sultanate of Women, in which female members of the dynasty exercised an unusually high degree of power, was in some way either a cause or a symptom of imperial weakness. On the contrary, Ottoman Valide Sultans, princesses, and concubines were successfully able to fortify dynastic rule during periods of instability, and played an important role in dynastic legitimization. Furthermore, the importance of the rapidly expanding bureaucracy is now particularly emphasized as a source of stability and strength for the empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing particularly upon the work of Linda Darling. Based largely on the work of Ariel Salzmann, the empowerment of regional notables in the eighteenth century has been reinterpreted as an effective form of government, rather than a sign of decline.