Mehmed VI
Mehmed VI was the last Ottoman sultan, and he spent his reign trying to save the dynasty by cooperating with the powers dismembering the empire. He succeeded in July 1918 with the war already lost, and signed an armistice in October that surrendered the straits and allowed the Allies to occupy any territory they judged necessary. His calculation was that the dynasty's survival depended on being useful to the occupiers and on disowning the officers who had brought the empire into the war, and he pursued it consistently: he dissolved parliament, ruled by decree, put the wartime leadership on trial in his own courts, and signed the treaty of Sevres in 1920, which partitioned Anatolia itself and left a Turkish rump under foreign financial control. The calculation failed because it was answered by a rival government. The officer he had sent to Anatolia to supervise demobilisation instead organised the resistance there, and a national assembly meeting in Ankara from 1920 refused Sevres, fought the Greek army occupying the west, and won. The sultan's government issued a religious ruling condemning the nationalists to death and raised troops against them; the nationalists convicted the sultan's ministers in absentia. By the autumn of 1922 the Greeks were gone, the Allies were negotiating with Ankara, and the government in the capital had no army, no revenue and no foreign recognition. The assembly abolished the sultanate on 1 November 1922 and left the caliphate standing, briefly, as a religious office. Mehmed asked the British for protection and left the capital on 17 November aboard a warship, which is how a dynasty of six hundred and twenty-three years ended. His cousin held the caliphate for sixteen months until it too was abolished, and Mehmed died in exile near Genoa in 1926, his creditors impounding the coffin until the debts were settled.
- Lived: 1861 CE – 1926 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
