Death of Mehmed V

On 3 July 1918 Sultan Mehmed V, ruler of the Ottoman Empire and also caliph, died in the Yıldız Palace in Constantinople. He was 73, and Turkish sources give heart failure as the cause of death. He had reigned since April 1909. In the Ottoman calendar, which since 1917 had counted days and months in the same way as the Gregorian calendar, it was 3 July 1334. He was succeeded by his younger half-brother, the 57-year-old heir to the throne Mehmed Vahdettin, who took the name Mehmed VI.

A sultan without power

Mehmed Reşad, son of Sultan Abdülmecid I, had lived for more than thirty years under surveillance in palaces on the Bosphorus, because his half-brother Abdülhamid II feared a rival. He was raised to the throne in 1909 by the army linked to the Young Turks, which deposed Abdülhamid after a failed counter-coup. The new sultan, mild and without experience in affairs of state, was a constitutional monarch, and from 1913 real power was exercised by the Committee of Union and Progress, headed by the war minister Enver Pasha and, from 1917, by Grand Vizier Talat Pasha.

It was his signature that stood beneath the acts that drew the empire into the war, and on 11 November 1914, as caliph, he called on Muslims to wage holy war following the fatwas of the Sheikh ul-Islam. The call, however, did not stir the Muslims in the Entente’s colonies as Germany and Enver had hoped. During the war the sultan performed mainly ceremonial functions: he received allies, was given the honorary rank of Prussian field marshal, and in October 1917 he hosted Kaiser Wilhelm II in the capital. According to some historians he privately condemned the persecution of the Armenians, but had no influence on government policy. Abdülhamid, whom he had replaced on the throne, had died only a few months earlier, in February 1918.

The new sultan

The heir had become heir to the throne only in 1916, after the mysterious death of Prince Yusuf İzzeddin. At the turn of 1917 and 1918 he visited Germany, accompanied as aide-de-camp by General Mustafa Kemal. According to accounts, he received the news of his brother’s death, conveyed to him by Talat, with hesitation. After talks with the Committee’s leaders he agreed to ascend the throne. Mehmed V’s funeral took place on 4 July at Eyüp, where he was laid to rest in a tomb above the Golden Horn built during his lifetime. On the same day the ceremony of the new ruler’s accession was held in the Topkapı Palace, and he swore an oath on the constitution. The traditional girding with the Sword of Osman in the mosque at Eyüp, the Ottoman equivalent of a coronation, was postponed, according to Turkish historians, until 31 August.

Vahdettin was not a figurehead like his brother. He did not trust the Committee’s leaders and from the outset wanted to recover some of the power the sultans had lost. In the summer, in a proclamation to the army and navy, he stressed that he as sultan was assuming supreme command, but Enver remained his deputy and the real commander, and Talat’s government carried on. The change on the throne did not change the war policy of the empire, whose troops were fighting at that time in Palestine, Mesopotamia and the Caucasus, where they were approaching Baku.

Mehmed VI turned out to be the last Ottoman sultan. A few months after his accession the empire capitulated, and on 1 November 1922 the parliament in Ankara abolished the sultanate. Vahdettin left Constantinople aboard a British warship and died in exile in San Remo in 1926.