ABSTRACT
The crisis that erupted in the summer of 1911 from Franco-German disagreements over remote regions of Morocco and Central Africa was to prove the start of a truly awesome chain reaction. In the following three years of almost continuous crisis, first the Ottoman possessions in North Africa and then the Ottoman Empire in Europe, were overwhelmed, until finally a direct threat was posed to the vital interests of the great powers in Europe that plunged them into the first general war for over a century. The Second Moroccan crisis, like the First in 1905, was precipitated by France. In the spring of 1911 a ginger group of officials in the Quai dOrsay decided to take advantage of disturbances in Morocco to occupy the capital, Fez. Clearly this implied a threat to the independence of the sultanate enshrined in the Act of Algeiras. The Second Moroccan crisis was an important landmark in relations between Germany and the two Western Powers.
