In command of the German military mission despatched to Turkey in response to this invitation was General von der Goltz. This brilliant officer—who, appropriately enough, was to die in the Caucasus campaign of 1916—remained in Turkey twelve years, reorganizing the Turkish army, forming a competent general staff, establishing a military academy for young officers, and formulating plans for an adequate system of reserves. So great was his success that he won the lasting respect of Turkish military and civil officials; time and time again he was invited to return to Turkey as military adviser extraordinary; in 1909 he answered the call of the Young Turks and lent his ripened judgment to the solution of their distracting problems; he was granted the coveted title of Pasha. The personal prestige of von der Goltz was of no small importance in brightening Germany’s rising star in the Near East.[18] Another event of first rate importance in the history of German ventures in the Ottoman Empire was the accession, in 1888, of Emperor William II. During the three decades of his reign the economic foundations of German imperialism were strengthened and broadened; the superstructure of German imperialism was both reared and destroyed. During his régime the German industrial revolution reached its height, and the empire, it seemed, became one enormous factory consuming great quantities of raw materials and producing a prodigious volume of manufactured commodities for the home and foreign markets. Simultaneously there was developed a German merchant marine which carried the imperial flag to the seven seas. A normal concomitant of this industrial and commercial progress was the expansion of political and economic interests abroad—renewed activity in the acquisition of a colonial empire; marked success in the further conquest of foreign markets; the creation of a great navy; the phenomenal increase of German investments in Turkey. It is no insignificant coincidence that German financiers received their first Ottoman railway concession in the year of the accession of William II and that the capture of Aleppo—ending once and for all the plan for a German-controlled railway from Berlin to Bagdad—occurred just a few days before his abdication.