Mehmed V

Mehmed V Resad was the penultimate sultan of the Ottoman Empire, reigning from 1909 to 1918 as a constitutional monarch with little real influence over government affairs. A son of Sultan Abdulmejid I, he succeeded his half brother Abdul Hamid II after the 31 March Incident, and his nine year reign saw three coups, four wars and numerous uprisings, including the loss of the empire's North African territories and the Dodecanese Islands in the Italo-Turkish War and the loss of nearly all its European territory west of Constantinople in the First Balkan War, partly reversed in the Second Balkan War. After the Ottomans entered World War I in 1914 Mehmed declared a jihad against the Allies; Ottoman forces repelled an Allied invasion at Gallipoli and captured a British garrison at Kut in 1915, the same year the Committee of Union and Progress carried out the Armenian genocide against the sultan's wishes, and by his death in 1918 the empire faced defeat on the Palestinian and Macedonian fronts.