The End of the Ottoman Empire — a six-century empire defeated, partitioned, and abolished

The Ottoman Empire — for six centuries one of the great powers of Europe, Asia, and Africa — was brought to an end by defeat in the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence that followed. Its sultanate was abolished by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey on 1 November 1922, and the last sultan, Mehmed VI, left Constantinople aboard a British warship on 17 November 1922. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed in its place on 29 October 1923, and the Ottoman caliphate, the empire’s last institution, was abolished on 3 March 1924. An empire founded around 1299 thus closed after 623 years.

By 1914 the empire was already called “the sick man of Europe,” a label fixed on it through a long nineteenth century of military defeat and territorial loss. It had been losing ground for generations — the Balkans, Egypt in practice, North Africa, much of its European hinterland — while the European powers competed to inherit or prop up its remains. Reform movements had tried to arrest the decline: the Tanzimat modernizations, then the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which restored a constitution and brought the Committee of Union and Progress to power. None reversed the underlying weakness; some accelerated the empire’s drift toward catastrophe.

The catastrophe was its entry into the First World War on the side of Germany and the Central Powers in late 1914. The war broke the empire militarily and shattered it morally. Under cover of the war, the ruling Committee of Union and Progress carried out the Armenian Genocide — the systematic deportation and mass killing of the empire’s Armenian population from 1915, in which an estimated 600,000 to more than a million Armenians were murdered or died, alongside contemporaneous mass killings of Assyrians and of Ottoman Greeks. This is a documented genocide, and it stands as the gravest crime of the empire’s final years.

Defeat came in 1918. The Armistice of Mudros on 30 October ended Ottoman participation in the war, the Allies occupied Constantinople, and the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 would have partitioned Anatolia itself. That partition provoked a nationalist movement under Mustafa Kemal, who organized resistance from Ankara, won the Turkish War of Independence, secured recognition of a Turkish national state in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, and swept away the sultanate and the empire it embodied.