[katana]

Somebody should note that the Janissaries were all originally Christians enslaved as young boys and put through a regime of brain washing and military discipline to the point of absolute fanaticism. In fact, everyone in the Ottoman government besides the Sultan himself was just such a slave, taken from Christian villages every year (think "Hunger Games" in real life) under the Devshirme system.

[goldstategop]

Suleiman the Magnificient restored the boundaries of the Roman Empire by adding Egypt and Africa and the Balkans to the list of Ottoman conquests.

He did what Justinian couldn’t do with far more limited resources in the sixth century. In the fifteenth century, the the two most powerful empires in the world were Islamic: the Ottomans in the West and the Safavids in Persia.