By the early 1500s, Mehmed\u2019s predecessors ruled not only as emperors, but as caliphs of the world\u2019s Muslims. For hundreds of years, clerics throughout the Islamic world offered prayers for the Ottoman caliph during each and every Friday sermon.<\/p>\n
In the autumn of 1922, however, the final sultan\/caliph, Mehmed VI, was unseated. Of the 140 parliamentarians who assembled to vote the Ottoman monarchy out of existence on 1 November that year, only two rejected the motion to declare the sultan\u2019s empire dissolved and dead. After years of insurrection and nationalist dissent, few appeared to lament its departing. In its decision to eject Mehmed, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey condemned the Ottoman royal family for presiding over a \u201csystem of autocracy\u201d, one rooted in \u201cignorance and debauchery\u201d.<\/p>\n
What had gone wrong? How had an empire that exerted so much power \u2013 and for so long \u2013 been brought to its knees? When chronicling the causes of its collapse, many historians have focused on the empire\u2019s long decline, its metamorphosis into the \u201csick man of Europe\u201d, a period of decay that culminated in the catastrophe of defeat in the First World War<\/a>. The calamity of 1918, some have argued, was the event that delivered the final blow.<\/p>\n Yet there\u2019s more to the story than that. It\u2019s undeniable that the empire\u2019s final decades set the conditions for its collapse, but they didn\u2019t render its demise inevitable. It was what happened between 1918 and 1922 \u2013 interventions by Greek, British and French forces, and, above all, soaring tensions between the region\u2019s Muslim and non-Muslim population \u2013 that truly condemned the empire to its fate.<\/p>\n When Mehmed VI was born in 1861, there was little denying the difficulties confronting the Ottoman empire. Most of its citizens would have hardly known a decade of peace. In the late 1870s, the Ottomans were defeated in war by their great imperial rival, Russia. Worse still, in 1912 the states of Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece attacked the Ottoman empire, sparking the First Balkan War. Defeat in this conflict led to the loss of most of its remaining Balkan territory.<\/p>\n The damage inflicted by these crises was staggering. Modern studies suggest war and insurrection left up to 5 million refugees displaced in the Ottoman lands between the end of the 18th century and the First World War. For those who lived at a safer distance from the empire\u2019s borders, high taxes, conscription, economic upheaval and crime exacted no less a terrible cost.<\/p>\n By the time Mehmed became sultan in the summer of 1918, the empire had abandoned all of north Africa. The years leading up to his accession had witnessed immense political turbulence and after decades of autocratic rule by his brother, Abd\u00fclhamid II, officers in the imperial army rose up in the summer of 1908 demanding the restoration of the constitution and its elected assembly. This Young Turk Revolution saw rule shift into the hands of a political party known as the Committee of Union and Progress (or CUP). The \u201cYoung Turks\u201d of the CUP advanced the belief that Muslims alone embodied the true spirit at the heart of the Ottoman nation.<\/p>\nPerpetual conflict<\/h3>\n
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