Leopold von Ranke (21 December 1795 – 23 May 1886) was a German historian and a founder of modern source-based history.Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History, Vintage, 1973, p. 54: "Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) is the father as well as the master of modern historical scholarship."Green and Troup (eds.), The Houses of History, p. 2: "Leopold von Ranke was instrumental in establishing professional standards for historical training at the University of Berlin between 1824 and 1871." He was able to implement the seminar teaching method in his classroom and focused on archival research and the analysis of historical documents. Building on the methods of the Göttingen school of history, he was the first to establish a historical seminar. Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources (empiricism), an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics (Außenpolitik). He was ennobled in 1865, with the addition of a "von" to his name.
Ranke also had a great influence on Western historiography and is considered a symbol of the quality of 19th century German historical studies. Ranke, influenced by Barthold Georg Niebuhr, was very talented in constructing narratives without exceeding the limits of historical evidence. His critics have noted the influence of Lutheranism in guiding his work, especially his belief that God's actions were manifest in the lives of men and history, a viewpoint that shaped his ideas that the German Empire was a manifestation of God's intent.
Early life Ranke was born in Wiehe, in the Electorate of Saxony. Wiehe was then a part of the Electorate of Saxony. He came from a family of Lutheran pastors and lawyers. He was educated partly at home and partly in the gymnasium at Schulpforta. His early years engendered a lifelong love of Ancient Greek, Latin and Lutheranism. In 1814, Ranke entered Leipzig University, where his subjects were classics and Lutheran theology. At Leipzig, Ranke became an expert in philology and translation of the ancient authors into German. His teachers included Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann. When he was a student, Ranke's favorite authors were Thucydides, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel. Ranke showed little interest in the work of modern history because of his dissatisfaction with what he regarded as history books that were merely a collection of facts lumped together by modern historians.
Between 1817 and 1825, Ranke worked as a schoolmaster teaching classics at the Friedrichs Gymnasium in Frankfurt an der Oder. During this time, he became interested in history in part because of his desire to be involved in the developing field of a more professionalized history and in part because of his desire to find the hand of God in the workings of history.Andreas D. Boldt, The Life and Work of the German Historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886): An Assessment of His Achievements (2015)
Career In 1824, Ranke launched his career with the book Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (Histories of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514) in which he used an unusually wide variety of sources for a historian of the age, including "memoirs, diaries, personal and formal missives, government documents, diplomatic dispatches and first-hand accounts of eye-witnesses". In that sense, he leaned on the traditions of philology but emphasized mundane documents instead of old and exotic literature.Ranke, "Preface to the First Edition of Histories of the Latin and German Nations" in "The Modern Historiography Reader, Western Sources", pp172
After the minister of education was impressed with the work of a historian who did not have access to the nation's great public libraries, Ranke was given a position in the University of Berlin, where he was a professor for nearly fifty years, starting in 1825. At the university, he used the seminar system and taught how to check the value of sources. Ranke became deeply involved in the dispute between the followers of the legal professor Friedrich Carl von Savigny, who emphasized the varieties of different periods of history, and the followers of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who saw history as the unfolding of a universal story. Ranke supported Savigny and criticized the Hegelian view of history as being a one-size-fits-all approach. Also during his time in Berlin, Ranke became the first historian to use the forty-seven volumes that comprised the diplomatic archives of Venice from the 16th and 17th centuries. Since many archives opened up during this time, he sent out his students to these places to recruit information. In his classrooms, he would discuss the sources that his students would find and would emphasize that history should be told "as it really happened" (wie es eigentlich gewesen). Therefore, he is often seen as "the pioneer of a critical historical science".Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Third Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).233. Meanwhile, Ranke came to prefer dealing with primary sources as opposed to secondary sources.
It was in Vienna where the friendship of Friedrich von Gentz and the protection of Klemens von Metternich opened to him the Venetian Archives, a fresh source, the value of which he first discovered; it is still not exhausted. He found time to write a short book entitled Die Serbische Revolution (1829) from material supplied to him by Vuk Karadžić, a Serb who had himself been witness to the scenes he related during the First Serbian Uprising in 1804. This was afterwards expanded into Serbien und die Turkei im 19 Jahrhundert (1879).
At the behest of the Prussian government, Ranke founded and edited the Historische-Politische Zeitschrift journal from 1832 to 1836. Ranke, who was a conservative, used the journal to attack the ideas of liberalism. In his 1833 article "The Great Powers" and his 1836 article "Dialogue on Politics", Ranke claimed that every state is given a special moral character from God and individuals should strive best to fulfill the "idea" of their state. Thus, in this way, Ranke urged his readers to stay loyal to the Prussian state and to reject the ideas of the French Revolution, which Ranke claimed were meant for France only.Schevill, 1952.
From 1834 to 1836, Ranke published Die römischen Päpste, ihre Kirche und ihr Staat im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (The Popes of Rome, Their Church and State in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) (3 vols.). As a Protestant, Ranke was barred from viewing the Vatican Secret Archive in Rome, but based on private papers in Rome and Venice, he was able to explain the history of the papacy in the 16th century.Matthew A. Fitzsimons, "Ranke: History as worship." Review of Politics 42.4 (1980): 533–555. In this book, Ranke coined the term "Counter-Reformation" and offered colorful portrayals of Pope Paul IV, Ignatius of Loyola and Pope Pius V. He promoted research into primary sources: "I see the time approaching when we shall base modern history, no longer on the reports even of contemporary historians, except insofar as they had personal and immediate knowledge of facts; and still less on work yet more remote from the source; but rather on the narratives of eyewitnesses, and on genuine and original documents".
The papacy denounced Ranke's book as anti-Catholic. In contrast, many Protestants denounced it as not anti-Catholic enough. Still, historians have generally praised him for placing the situation of the Catholic Church in the context of the 16th century and for his fair treatment of the complex interaction of the political and religious issues in that century. The British Catholic historian Lord Acton defended Ranke's book as the most fair-minded, balanced and objective study ever written on the papacy of the 16th century.Boldt, The Life and Work of the German Historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) (2015)
In 1841, his fame in its ascendancy, Ranke was appointed Historiographer Royal to the Prussian court. In 1845, he became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In Paris, Ranke met the Irish woman Clarissa Helena Graves (born 1808) from Dublin in July 1843. She had been educated in England and the Continent. They were engaged on 1 October and married in Bowness, England in a ceremony officiated by her brother Robert Perceval Graves, an Anglican priest.Andreas Boldt, "Life and Work of Clarissa von Ranke, nee Graves, and her role in the shadow of the German historian Leopold von Ranke" (2004). They had three sons (one of whom died in infancy), and one daughter.
From 1847 to 1848, Ranke published Neun Bücher preußischer Geschichte (translated as Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Prussia, during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) in which he examined the fortunes of the Hohenzollern family and state from the Middle Ages to the reign of Frederick the Great. Many Prussian nationalists were offended by Ranke's portrayal of Prussia as a typical medium-sized German state rather than as a great power.
From 1852 to 1861, Ranke published French History Mainly in the 16th and 17th Centuries (5 vols.), covering Francis I to Louis XIV and gaining him more praise for his impartiality despite being German.
In a series of lectures given before future King Maximilian II of Bavaria in 1854, Ranke argued that "every age is next to God", by which he meant that every period of history is unique and must be understood in its own context. He argued that God gazes over history in its totality and finds all periods equal. Ranke rejected the teleological approach to history, by which each period is considered inferior to the following period. Thus, the Middle Ages were not inferior to the Renaissance, simply different. In Ranke's view, historians had to understand a period and its terms and seek to find only the general ideas that animated every period of history. For Ranke, history was not to be an account of man's "progress" because "[a]fter Plato, there can be no more Plato". Ultimately, "[h]istory is no criminal court".
For Ranke, Christianity was morally most superior and could not be improved upon. When he wrote Zur orientalischen Frage. Gutachten at the behest of the Kaiser he framed the conflict with the Ottoman Empire as primarily religious; the civil rights of Christians against Muslims in the Ottoman Empire could only be secured by the intervention of the Christian European nations.
From 1854 to 1857, Ranke published History of the Reformation in Germany (Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation), using the ninety-six volumes of correspondence from ambassadors to the Imperial Diet he found in Frankfurt to explain the Reformation in Germany as the result of both politics and religion.
From 1859 to 1867, Ranke published the six-volume History of England Principally in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Englische Geschichte vornehmlich im XVI und XVII Jahrhundert), followed by an expanded nine-volume edition from 1870 to 1884, which extended his huge reach even further. At this point, he was eighty years old, and devoted the rest of his career to shorter treatises on German history that supplement his earlier writings.
Later life