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Shaping the Constitutional Sultanate: The Reign of Mehmed Reşad (1909-1918)

supported by the Israeli Scientific Foundation (grant 592/15)

This project concentrates on the reign of sultan Mehmed Reşad to discuss the last phase of the Ottoman sultanate. The Young Turk revolution (July 1908) restored the parliament and the abrogated constitution of 1876. After the failed counter-revolution (April 1909), the Young Turk government deposed the sultan Abdülhamid II and replaced him with his younger brother (then in his mid-sixties), Prince Reşad, who took the name of Mehmed Reşad. His reign (1909-1918), therefore, was established by and coincided with the Young Turk rule, known in Ottoman historiography as the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1918). This was a significant decade in late Ottoman history, characterized by the incessant wars that engulfed the Ottoman Empire, but also a period of important administrative, social, economic and cultural changes and upheavals.

Notwithstanding the significance of the Second Constitutional Period for our understanding of the late Ottoman period and the shaping of the early Turkish Republic, Mehmet Reşad’s reign itself is often mentioned merely as representing the twilight of the Ottoman sultanate, when it became devoid of political and financial powers. While it is true that Mehmed Reşad’s ascendance was represented by the Young Turk government as a moment of victory for the constitutionalist cause in its bitter political struggle against the previous absolutist rule, Mehmed Reşad himself is regarded as a puppet-ruler who was used by the Young Turk governments to gain legitimacy for their rule and decisions. The lion’s share of the existing literature on Mehmed Reşad’s reign is, therefore, confined to an analysis that underscores his deeds as a marginal and repressed part of Young Turk rule.

This study aims to explore the reign of Mehmed Reşad from a different and new angle. While it is not my intention to challenge the well-sustained assumption of Mehmed Reşad’s marginal role in running the state’s affairs, I would nevertheless argue that his nine-year reign represented a significant attempt, by both the Young Turk governments and the sultan, to reconstruct the sultanate by providing the sultan and the sultanate with new roles and instruments, safeguarding their relevance under the new constitutional regime in a society that put ever more trust in the value of popular opinion. By using a variety of primary sources, archival, printed and visual documents, this project focuses on the rule of Mehmed Reşad as representing an attempt, though a brief one, to shape a new stage of the Ottoman sultanate: the promotion of a constitutional sultanate. It will analyze the use of Ottoman history at that time, the shaping of patronage networks and the diffusion of imperial representations to different Ottoman audiences to evoke the grandeur of past sultans and its links to the reign of Mehmed Reşad. By promoting his image as a benevolent ruler and the supreme icon of a timeless imagined Ottoman past, Mehmed Reşad endeavored to safeguard his status as a sultan and the future of the sultanate under the new constitutional regime. Though relegated to becoming merely a symbolic sovereign, he could still remain the empire’s preeminent emblem of patriarchal authority.