Süleyman I and the Conquest of Hungary: Ottoman Manifest Destiny or a Delayed Reaction to Charles V's Universalist Vision

It has commonly (and rather persistently) been assumed that Ottoman relations with Christian Europe in the early sixteenth century were governed by fixed and immutable religio-political imperatives, whose ultimate aim was the establishment of Muslim dominance over Europe. The present study examines the interplay between three dimensions- the domestic, the regional and the international- that affected imperial planning and policy formulation in the period 1520 to 1540 to test the validity of this assumption of Ottoman immutability. Seen within the wider context of an inherent Ottoman need to balance conflicting priorities in an era of imperial growth, the study concludes that the early part of Suleyman's reign represents an era not of immutability, but of exploration, consolidation, and evolving imperatives formulated in response to pressures (both domestic and international) whose character changed and whose intensity fluctuated over time.