90 A Short History of the Middle East
volume of trade, and her political influence had been negligible.
But the War of 1870 naturally increased her prestige greatly with
the Turks, ever respectful of military power and success. The in-
fluence of France in the Ottoman Empire was correspondingly
reduced. The steps Britain had recently taken to render her in-
fluence in the Persian Gulf exclusive were resented by the Turks as
an encroachment on their nebulous territorial sovereignty over the
coasts of Arabia, which they were at this time attempting to make
more real; and Britain's occupation of Cyprus in 1878 and Egypt in
1882 prejudiced her further in the eyes of the Turks. Consequently,
when in 1872 the Ottoman government was seeking an adviser for
the construction of the Balkan railway-system, it was a German
engineer whom they called in; and in 1883 the German Ambassa-
dor had little difficulty in persuading Sultan Abdul Hamid II to
invite the Kaiser to send a German military mission to Turkey.
By 1886 the Balkan railways were approaching completion, and
the forward-looking Sultan was already contemplating their ex-
tension to his Asiatic provinces in order to strengthen his ad-
ministrative control and assist their economic development. After
overtures to British and American financiers had met with no
response, a German syndicate undertook in 1888 the extension of
the railway to Ankara, under the name of the Anatolian Railway
Co. The new company was not exclusively German: more than a
quarter of its first loan was subscribed in Britain, and the British
chairman of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration became one
of its directors. In 1889 Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had succeeded his
father in the previous year at the age of twenty-nine, visited
Istanbul, and the Deutsche Levant Linie was formed for steamship
services between the North Sea and the Levant. This was followed
by a German-Turkish trade agreement in 1890, and from this time
onwards German consuls in the Ottoman Empire were assiduous
in the help they gave to German commercial interests. The Kaiser's
visit to Istanbul and this forward commercial policy were not
favoured by the veteran Bismarck, who was primarily concerned
in keeping France weak and isolated, and in avoiding any other
foreign disagreements: he thus disliked the idea of commercial ex-
pansion in Asia Minor as likely to arouse the hostility of Russia,
whom he had continually sought to draw into friendly association
with Germany and Austria. But in 1890 the young Kaiser dis-
missed the old Chancellor and became himself the pilot of foreign