Abdul Hamid II

Abdülhamid II became the 34th sultan in 1876 amid coups and crisis: the empire had defaulted on its loans, Balkan Christians were in revolt, and war with Russia loomed. He promulgated the empire's first constitution, a nod to the Young Ottomans who'd helped elevate him, but suspended it two years later along with parliament, purging reformers and ruling as an autocrat for three decades. The borders kept shrinking - Egypt, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Tunisia, and Thessaly slipped away between 1877 and 1882, though he won a war against Greece in 1897. An Islamist who styled himself Caliph to the world's Muslims, he built railways with German help, expanded schools across the empire, and ran a paranoid surveillance state through secret police and censors. The schools he founded became his undoing: discontented intelligentsia coalesced into the Young Turks, ethnic minorities organized liberation movements, and Armenians suffered pogroms under the Hamidiye regiments he'd created. In 1908 the Committee of Union and Progress forced him to restore the constitution; a year later, after he tried to seize back absolute power, they deposed him.