|
A new ruler, Muhammad VI, the last of the twenty-five successive degenerate sultans, had meanwhile succeeded his wretched brother. The edifice of the empire was now quaking and tottering to its fall. Mustafa Kamal dealt it the final blows. Turkey, that had already shrunk to a small Asiatic state, became a republic. The sultan was deposed, the Ottoman Sultanate was ended, a rulership that had remained unbroken for six and a half centuries was extinguished. An empire which had stretched from the center of Hungary to the Persian Gulf and the Sudan, and from the Caspian Sea to Oran in Africa, had now dwindled to a small Asiatic republic. Constantinople itself, which, after the fall of Byzantium, had been honored as the splendid metropolis of the Roman Empire, and had been made the capital of the Ottoman government, was abandoned by its conquerors, and stripped of its pomp and glory - a mute reminder of the base tyranny that had for so long stained its throne.
(66:1)
|