By the end of the Second Balkan War, the once mighty, all-conquering Ottoman Empire had become less than a shadow of itself—so diminished it could hardly be called a nation anymore.
The empire that had once made European monarchs flinch now staggered through constant turmoil and corruption, punctuated by political assassinations and purges that never seemed to end. Its army was a hollow thing. Its treasury was not truly its own. Finances were effectively chained to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration—an institution dominated by Britain and France, and now, quietly, partially steered by the United States as well. On paper, the empire remained sovereign. In practice, its bloodstream—taxes, loans, customs, "reforms"—was controlled by foreign hands that never had to march an army through the gates to conquer anything.
And those same hands claimed "patronage" over the empire's minorities. Protection, they called it—another word that sounded noble until you looked closely at what it meant in practice. Certain groups gained foreign backing, foreign money, foreign access. Nowhere did that matter more than in Palestine, where the Jewish population—fed by migration and the steady purchase of land by men with deep pockets and deeper plans—was shifting the demographic balance. Quietly. Legally. Patiently. Constantinople watched it happening the way a man watches his house being sold while he still lives inside it.
The Second Balkan War had not only taken Ottoman finances, navy, army, and much of its population. It had taken their last meaningful foothold in Europe. What remained of Ottoman Europe amounted to nothing more than a moat of land around Constantinople—barely wide enough to serve as a fortified approach to the capital, too small to be called a province, too exposed to be called secure.
But the losses did not stop at borders.
The empire was disintegrating. It teetered between colonization and fragmentation—either to be swallowed by a foreign power or to crack into smaller nations that would tear at each other until nothing recognizable remained. The Committee of Union and Progress—the triumvirate of the Young Turks—held it together by force and bargain alike, "saving" the empire the way a man saves a sinking ship by throwing cargo overboard. They sold pieces of sovereignty in secret, always with the same desperate hope, we will take it back later. Sultan Mehmet V had become a ceremonial shadow, a gold-framed spectator in his own palace, forced to watch the empire unravel in slow motion.
But most devastating of all was the exhaustion and the loss of people.
If the Italian-Turkish War and the First Balkan War had already bled nearly half a million Ottoman men through battle and atrocity, the Second Balkan War greatly intensified what those conflicts had cost. Battlefield death, disease, famine, refugees, shortages—losses beyond counting. Whole farms were abandoned because there weren't enough hands left to work them. Neighborhoods went quiet. Mosques still filled, but the rows were thinner every week—especially in Constantinople, where the wounded returned with invisible enemies in their lungs and blood. Quarantine banners appeared. Streets emptied. Entire districts became sick rooms. The plague of war spread outward into the countryside, carried by men who survived shells only to die coughing weeks later.
And in that emptiness, foreign influence did what foreign influence always does: it moved in.
Vacant land became opportunity. A weakened state became a market. Wealthy buyers—shielded by legal protections, foreign pressure, and the simple fact that the Ottoman government no longer had the strength to resist—began buying in Palestine faster than the empire could even track. Over mere months after the war the shift became unmistakable: a minority swelling toward majority, an entire province quietly changing hands not by conquest, but by contracts. Local people—unsupported by their own government, abandoned by a capital drowning in its own crises—were left helpless, watching the future being built around them while they were told it was merely "business."
Meanwhile the empire was forced to watch its populations move like the tide after a storm: Christians allowed to flee west into Europe, Muslims fleeing east into what remained of Ottoman land. The border became a drainpipe for a dying body, bleeding people out in both directions.
And always, beyond all of it, Russia waited.
Across the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains, the Russian Empire stared south with hunger that barely needed to be disguised. Constantinople was the prize it had always wanted. The Ottomans held it not because they could defend it, but because other powers permitted them to—for now. The Entente restrained Russia with one hand while squeezing the Ottomans with the other, allowing the city to remain Ottoman only so long as the Ottomans continued to accept what was demanded of them. In the end, Constantinople belonged to Istanbul only by lease, not by right.
In Germany, there was no celebration in any of this.
The closure of the Bulgarian–Ottoman border and the collapse of Ottoman–German relations killed what remained of the old vision. The famous Berlin and Baghdad railway—the artery that once promised German influence deep into the East—now stopped in Bulgaria like a sentence cut off mid-word. It was an economic loss for both sides, but far worse for the Ottomans: Germany no longer needed them, no longer relied on them, no longer pretended partnership where none could truly exist.
And Oskar refused to play that game.
He refused to pretend friendship with states whose ideology was not merely different, but opposed—fundamentally, spiritually, irreconcilably. He would not make friends of convenience, friends who smiled while sharpening knives behind their backs. He would only make allies who shared enough of his world to be trusted—men who, if they meant betrayal, would at least stab him in the front like a gentleman… and not in the back like a bandit.
Not long before the turn of the century—before the fractures widened and the old certainties began to rot—Wilhelm II had stood beneath foreign skies and believed, earnestly, that history could still be bent by gestures.
He had traveled east in splendor, through Constantinople and onward to Jerusalem, and then to Damascus, where marble and faith and empire intertwined in ways that stirred something deeply romantic in him. There, beneath arches darkened by centuries of prayer, he proclaimed friendship—not merely to the Sultan, not merely to the Caliph, but to the Muslims of the world. Three hundred million souls, he had said, and meant it. He spoke of respect, of shared destiny, of a future in which Germany would be a trusted friend rather than a distant power with grasping hands.
In private letters, he went even further.
To Nicholas II, he once wrote—half in jest, half in wonder—that had he not been born a Christian emperor, he might well have converted and became a Muslim himself. Damascus had taken him. The beauty of what the Ottomans had built, the endurance of their civilization, the way faith and power and memory were woven together—it had all impressed him deeply. He spoke like a man encountering something ancient and real, something not yet hollowed out by modernity.
The West had mocked him for it, of course. Newspapers sneered. Politicians whispered about naivety and Oriental fantasies. But in the Muslim world, the reaction had been very different. Some clerics quoted old passages—half-forgotten lines from holy texts—and wondered aloud whether the Kaiser of Germany might have been chosen by Allah as a protector, perhaps even a deliverer, against the encroaching infidels.
For a brief moment, it had seemed possible that Germany might step into the East not as a conqueror, but as a partner.
That moment was long gone now.
After the Second Balkan War—and the undeniable proof of so-called "German mercenaries" moving through the chaos—it became painfully clear that the Ottoman Empire would not, and could not, join the Central Powers. Besides now the empire was too broken, too indebted, too tangled in the quiet chains of the Entente. And so Wilhelm's eastern ambitions didn't just falter; they evaporated. Invitations went unanswered. New promises were met with polite silence. Projects slowed, then froze, then died on paper.
Fortunately, trade with the Ottoman Empire was negligible, accounting for less than one percent of Germany's total trade revenue. But the Berlin–Baghdad Railway was never about trade alone. It was supposed to be a lifeline: strategic, economic, imperial. In wartime it would have been a steel artery—moving men, guns, coal, and influence eastward with speed and certainty, securing German interests far from Europe's killing fields.
Now that artery ended in Bulgaria.
No trains crossed into Ottoman land. No soldiers followed. The "East," once imagined as Germany's depth and escape, became an empty space on the map—unreachable, unreliable, irrelevant.
And once that reality settled in, a crisis emerged that no one had bothered to plan for.
Because if Germany could not reach east in war—if it could not reinforce, resupply, or defend its overseas holdings—then those holdings were no longer assets.
They were liabilities.
So, at the end of 1913, during a royal conference convened to address precisely these matters—trade, strategy, alliances, and the looming possibility of a general European war—Crown Prince Oskar did something no one expected.
He spoke plainly.
And what he proposed stunned the room.
Oskar argued that Germany should abandon not just a few indefensible islands, not just isolated ports or token concessions—but the East itself. All of it. The empire's scattered strongholds in Oceania. Its far-flung positions in Asia. Every holding that could not be decisively supplied, reinforced, and defended in a modern industrial war.
The room froze.
Wilhelm II stared at his son as if he had misheard him.
Abandon the East?
To men raised on maps colored in imperial reds and blues, to officers who still spoke of prestige and honor and destiny, the idea sounded like heresy. Germany had worked for decades to build influence beyond Europe. Colonies were symbols of power. To relinquish them—voluntarily—felt like surrender before the war had even begun.
But Oskar did not argue like a dreamer.
He argued like a man who had already accepted what the future would demand.
He spoke of shipping lanes that could be cut in days. Of colonies that would become traps rather than bases. Of armies bleeding themselves dry to defend territory that would never decide the outcome of a European war. He spoke of concentration. Of focus. Of refusing to fight everywhere so that Germany could fight where it mattered.
And he said something that unsettled even those who hated his proposal:
"An empire that tries to be everywhere," Oskar told them, "will discover too late that it can defend nowhere."
Silence followed.
Not because the men in that room agreed with him.
But because, in their bones, they feared he might be right.