How far can the Ottoman Empire realistically expand at the highest?

If there's no POD limit, you might be able to get the House of Osman to convert to Orthodox Christianity and get a personal union over Muscovy, but this might go down in history as Roman/Byzantine expansion under the house of Osmanos.
 
Italy is pretty much off limits, as that would directly cause a broad alliance of Christian Europe to take it back and then just keep matching forward.

Perhaps Sicily is in the cards, but certainly not mainland Italy.

Popular response, but I've never seen very good evidence. Christian Europe was out of that game by the period. There was no such response when Germans sacked Rome in a caricature of brutality. There was no such response over the loss of The City in 1453, the invasion of Hungary, even the sieges of Vienna at the gates of Central Europe failed to bring in more than the immediate neighbors. For that matter, precedent from the period suggests that the Ottomans might easily have a major Christian ally in such an invasion.
 
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I'm convinced by my readings of the letters from the various Pashas of Buda to the Habsburgs in the centuries between the two sieges of Vienna that the Ottoman Empire had reached it's maximum logistical extent in Eastern and Central Europe.
 
Hungary was a mistake, though holding Vienna would have mitigated the overstretch somewhat.

It was a Mediterranean empire legitimized on Islam with a Turkish-speaking elite. The low-hanging fruit for expansion would be at the edges of its coastal expansion IOTL. The way to make it significantly bigger is to have it dominate the northern Caucasus and Don Basin statelets, and hold on while a Russian state expands eastward on their northern borders; if the Ottomans focus on preserving those states against Russian expansion, they could potentially succeed at least in part, and the Russian threat should be enough to make Ottoman hegemony tolerable for much of Central Asia.

Above all, though, you need to keep the empire from overstretching itself and expending its resources in Hungary, which was much more difficult and expensive to hold.
 
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I think Italy is doable, but not the whole Mediterranean for Roman Empire II; Rome had the advantage of being in the center of the Mediterranean, so transport costs to either end of the empire weren't too extreme, but Constantinople to Barcelona would make sustaining large forces on the other end of the sea very difficult.

Sustaining forces by sea is easier than far inland. The Ottomans had difficulties reaching Vienna but no difficulty on reaching Algiers. Which is a base if they were to prepare a campaign.
 
Sustaining forces by sea is easier than far inland. The Ottomans had difficulties reaching Vienna but no difficulty on reaching Algiers. Which is a base if they were to prepare a campaign.
It's easier than over land, but Roman historians have developed computational models to calculate transportation costs, and it's very difficult to keep them below prohibitive levels for supporting armies once you're talking opposite ends of the Mediterranean. Rome's central position was a fairly crucial advantage, and the Ottomans wouldn't really share in it. Algiers could be the base of a major galley campaign like Hayreddin's 1544 campaign of devastation along Italy, but I don't think it would be possible to subjugate mainland Spain. Such an effort would require a massive siege train and a full time army able to conquer Spain's major port cities, hold them against a massive counteroffensive, and winter on the opposite end of the sea from their base in Constantinople. The Ottomans historical amphibious offensives against the Spanish usually focused on territories they could isolate and strike with overwhelming force, like Malta or the North African garrisons. They didn't really mount campaigns of conquest and subjugation against i.e. Sicily; there were a few landings around Otranto, but nothing major really seemed to come of them.
 
Imagine a world where Greeks and Italians are squabbling to be the preeminent Christian ethnicity in the Ottoman Empire.
 
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