Abdul Hamid II

The last Ottoman sultan to hold real personal power, Abdul Hamid II reigned from 1876 to 1909 over an empire losing territory in the Balkans and Africa and falling deeper into debt to European creditors. He granted the empire's first constitution, then shelved it and ruled for three decades as an autocrat, modernising schools, railways and the telegraph while relying on censorship and a secret police. His reign is also remembered for the Hamidian massacres of Armenians in the 1890s.

He was born in Constantinople on 21 September 1842, a son of Sultan Abdulmejid I and grandson of the reformer Mahmud II. As a prince he toured Paris, London and Vienna with his uncle Sultan Abdulaziz in 1867. He came to the throne on 31 August 1876, after his brother Murad was deposed, at a moment of crisis: the treasury had defaulted on its loans and revolts had broken out in Bosnia and Bulgaria. In December 1876 he proclaimed a constitution drafted by a commission under Midhat Pasha, and the first Ottoman elections followed in 1877.

Russia declared war in April 1877 and won quickly. The Russo-Turkish War ended in 1878, and the peace terms, revised at the Congress of Berlin, confirmed the independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania and created an autonomous Bulgaria. Britain took Cyprus in 1878 and occupied Egypt in 1882, and France took Tunisia in 1881. In 1878 Abdul Hamid suspended parliament and the constitution and concentrated power in the palace. From 1881 much of the state's revenue was handed to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration to pay foreign bondholders.

His government built many primary, secondary and military schools and founded the university in Istanbul in 1900. Railways and telegraph lines spread across the empire, and with German help work began on the Baghdad and Hejaz railways. He leaned increasingly on Germany, hosting Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1889 and 1898. Abroad and at home he stressed his title of caliph, promoting pan-Islamic loyalty as the glue of a diverse empire. At the same time, the press was censored, informers watched officials and students, and many opponents were exiled or arrested.

From 1890 Armenians pressed for reforms promised to them at Berlin. The sultan's government armed Kurdish and other irregular cavalry, the Hamidiye regiments, which attacked Armenian villages with impunity, while Armenian revolutionary parties organised resistance. Between 1894 and 1897 Armenians in the Ottoman interior and beyond were killed in what became known as the Hamidian massacres; estimates of the dead range from about 100,000 to 300,000, and in some places, such as Diyarbekir, other Christians, including Assyrians, were also killed. Historians disagree about his personal role: it is generally thought unlikely that he directly ordered the killings, but some point to evidence of tolerance or covert support for the perpetrators. He became known in the West as the "Red Sultan". In 1905 Armenian revolutionaries tried to kill him with a bomb in Istanbul; he escaped, but 26 people died.

Resentment in the army fed the Young Turk movement, and in July 1908 the Committee of Union and Progress forced him, in the Young Turk Revolution, to restore the constitution. After a failed counter-revolution in April 1909, during which tens of thousands of Armenians were killed in the Adana massacre, the constitutionalist Action Army took Istanbul and he was deposed on 27 April 1909. He was held in Salonica and, from 1912, at Beylerbeyi Palace, where he died on 10 February 1918. The political scientist Robert Melson distinguishes his policies from those of the later Young Turk government during the Armenian genocide.

Our 1878 and 1880 maps show the Ottoman Empire after the Berlin settlement, and our 1900 map shows it near the end of his reign, with Egypt and Cyprus under British control.