At a glance
Era 8- Dates
- 1842-1918 CE; ruled 1876-1909 CE
- Who
- Ottoman sultan who ruled alone for thirty years and called Muslims to unite around the caliphate
- Era
- The Ottomans
ProfileAbdulhamid II
Abdulhamid was born in Istanbul in 1842, a son of Sultan Abdulmejid. He came to the throne in 1876, a year of crisis: the treasury had defaulted on its debts, the Balkans were in revolt, and two sultans had been removed within three months. He agreed to the empire's first constitution and parliament. Then, during the disastrous war with Russia of 1877-78, he suspended the parliament and ruled alone for the next thirty years.
He governed from the small Yildiz Palace and trusted few people. Newspapers were censored, opponents were watched by informers or sent into exile, and in the mid-1890s his reign saw terrible massacres of Armenians in the eastern provinces. Yet he was also a builder. He opened schools across the empire, colleges for law, medicine and administration, and the university that became Istanbul University, and he carried railways and telegraph lines to distant provinces.
He made much of his role as caliph. With so much Christian land lost in Europe, most of his subjects were now Muslims, and he sought the loyalty of Muslims far beyond his borders, from India to Africa. His best-known project was the Hejaz Railway from Damascus to Madinah, built with the help of donations from Muslims around the world and opened in 1908. He also turned down the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, who offered help with the empire's debts in return for a charter to settle Palestine.
In 1908 the Young Turks forced him to restore the constitution, and in 1909 he was deposed. He spent his last years under guard, first in Salonica and then in Istanbul, where he died in 1918.
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