The all too trustful relationship that Wilhelm II developed in the wake of the Eulenburg scandal with Prince Max Egon zu Fürstenberg and other members of the Austrian high aristocracy around Archduke Franz Ferdinand was soon to lead to serious political consequences. In the course of the Young Turk revolution, which to the Kaiser’s indignation imposed a constitution along British lines on Sultan Abdulhamid II throughout the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Alois Freiherr Lexa von Aehrenthal, on 5 October 1908 announced the formal annexation of the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been administered from Vienna since 1878. This move by his ally was a severe setback to the Kaiser’s dizzying ambition to win over the entire Muslim world in order to counter the increasing isolation of the German Reich. Back in 1905 he had declared: ‘[I]n the present very tense circumstances, when we stand almost alone in the face of great coalitions which are being formed against us, our last trump card is Islam and the Mohammedan world.’ In the rebellion of the Young Turk officers, whom he at first considered ‘lackeys of England’, he saw his Turkish policy, ‘laboriously built up over 20 years, go up in smoke’. ‘We are now finally thrown out of the Near East and can pack up,’ he complained in October 1908.

Aehrenthal’s reckless plan to ensure the lasting supremacy of the Habsburg Empire in the Balkans at the expense of Russian interests by annexing the two Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina had received the express support of Chancellor Prince von Bülow and the Reich’s foreign secretary, Wilhelm von Schoen. The Kaiser, on the other hand, was completely surprised by the coup, which plunged him into a conflict of loyalties between Vienna and Constantinople. ‘I am personally most deeply hurt in my sentiments as an ally that H.M. [Emperor Franz Joseph] did not in the slightest take me into his confidence beforehand!’ he commented.