Mehmed V
Mehmed V was a constitutional sultan with no power who declared a holy war that nobody joined and presided over the destruction of his empire. He was sixty-four and had spent most of his life confined when the Young Turk officers deposed his brother in 1909 and put him on the throne precisely because he was harmless. He was permitted to open parliament, sign what was put in front of him and receive ambassadors. Real authority passed after 1913 to a triumvirate of officers who had taken the government at gunpoint, and the sultan's function was to legitimise their decisions. The decisions were disastrous. The empire lost Libya to Italy in 1911, and then in the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 it lost almost all of its remaining European territory in a matter of weeks to states it had ruled for five centuries, along with hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees who arrived in Anatolia and hardened everything that followed. In 1914 the government secretly allied with Germany, admitted two German warships into the straits, and used them to bombard Russian ports, bringing the empire into the world war without a parliamentary vote. Mehmed's contribution was to proclaim, as caliph, a holy war obliging Muslims everywhere to fight the Entente. Almost no Muslim under British, French or Russian rule acted on it, which demonstrated publicly that the caliphate's claim on the loyalty of Muslims outside the empire was not real. The war itself produced the successful defence of the Dardanelles, the destruction of an Ottoman army in the Caucasus, the Arab revolt, the loss of Jerusalem and Baghdad, and the deportation and murder of the Armenian population of Anatolia, carried out by the government in his name. He died in July 1918, four months before the armistice, and was the last sultan to die on the throne.
- Lived: 1844 CE – 1918 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
