In 1876, a recently dethroned sultan, Abdülaziz, was found dead in his cham- bers, the veins in his 
arm slashed. Five years later, a group of Ottoman senior officials stood a criminal trial and were 
found guilty for complicity in his murder. Among the defendants was the world-famous 
statesman former Grand Vizier and reformer Ahmed Midhat Pasa, a political foe of the autocratic 
sultan Abdülhamit II, who succeeded Abdülaziz and ruled the empire for thirty-three years.
The alleged murder of the former sultan and the trial that ensued were political dramas that 
captivated audiences both domestically and internationally. The high-profile personalities 
involved, the international politics at stake, and the intense newspaper coverage all rendered 
 the trial an historic event, but the question of whether the sultan was murdered or committed 
suicide re- mains a mystery that continues to be relevant in Turkey today. Drawing upon a wide 
range of narrative and archival sources, Rubin explores the famous yet understudied trial and its 
representations in contemporary public discourse and subsequent historiography. Through the 
reconstruction and analysis of various aspects of the trial, Rubin identifies the emergence of a 
new culture of legalism that sustained the first modern political trial in the history of the Middle East.
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