Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (; 10 December 1790 – 26 April 1861) was a German Tyrolean traveller, journalist, politician and historian, best known for his discontinuity theory concerning the racial origins of the Greeks, and for his travel writings.Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece, Stathis Gourgouris p.142-143Sociolinguistic Variation and Change, Peter Trudgill, p.131The Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity: An Athenian Anthropography, Neni Panourgia - Social Science - 1995, p. 28
Biography
Education Fallmerayer was born the seventh of ten children in Pairdorf (), a village in Tschötsch () near Brixen in Tyrol. At the time of Fallmerayer's birth, the region was incorporated in the Habsburg monarchy, in 1805 it became a part of Bavaria, and it belongs today to Italy. His parents were small farmers. From the age of seven Fallmerayer attended the local school in Tschötsch and worked as a shepherd.
In 1801 the family moved to Brixen, where Fallmerayer's father found employment as a day-laborer. Fallmerayer was enrolled in the Volksschule, where he impressed the priests with his talents. In 1803 he entered the cathedral school as a Gymnasiast, whence he was graduated in 1809 with a diploma in metaphysics, mathematics, and the philosophy of religion. (The Gymnasium in Brixen today bears Fallmerayer's name). He then left Tyrol, at the time in the midst of a freedom struggle against Bavaria, for Salzburg.
In Salzburg, Fallmerayer found employment as a private tutor, and enrolled in a Benedictine seminary, where he studied classical, modern, and oriental philology, literature, history, and philosophy. After a year's study he sought to assure to himself the peace and quiet necessary for a student's life by entering the abbey of Kremsmünster, but difficulties put in his way by the Bavarian officials prevented the accomplishment of this intention.
At the University of Landshut (today LMU Munich), to which he removed in 1812, he first applied himself to jurisprudence, but soon devoted his attention exclusively to history and classical and oriental philology. His immediate necessities were provided for by a stipendium from the Bavarian crown.
Early career
In the fall of 1813, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Fallmerayer decided to seek his fame in military service and joined the Bavarian infantry as a subaltern. He fought with distinction at Hanau on 30 October 1813 and served throughout the campaign in France. He remained in the army of occupation on the banks of the Rhine until the battle of Waterloo, when he spent six months at Orléans as adjutant to General von Spreti. Two years of garrison life at Lindau on Lake Constance convinced him that his desire for military glory could not be fulfilled, and he devoted himself instead to the study of modern Greek, Persian and Turkish.
Resigning his commission in 1818, he was engaged as a teacher of Latin and Greek in the gymnasium at Augsburg, where his students included the young Napoleon III. In Augsburg his liberal, anti-clerical, tendencies, which had already begun to develop during his student years, expressed themselves in opposition to the growing ultramontanism of the Bavarian state.
In 1821 Fallmerayer accepted another position at the Progymnasium in Landshut, where he continued to teach classical languages, in addition to religion, German, history, and geography. Landshut was at the time still a great university city, and Fallmerayer took advantage of its resources to continue his study of history and languages.
In February 1823 Fallmerayer learned of a prize offered by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters to encourage research into the history of the Empire of Trebizond. This late medieval kingdom, located on the south coast of the Black Sea, was at the time known only through scattered references in Byzantine and Turkish chronicles. Fallmerayer began to collect additional sources in a number of languages, including Arabic and Persian, from libraries across Europe, and corresponded with various scholars, including Silvestre de Sacy and Carl Benedict Hase. In December of the same year Fallmerayer submitted the resulting manuscript to the Danish Academy, and in 1824 he was awarded the prize. Fallmerayer's study, the Geschichte des Kaisertums von Trapezunt, was however not published until 1827.
Fallmerayer attempted to convert his success into professional advancement in the Bavarian educational system. In the fall of 1824 he was named Professor at the Landshut Gymnasium, but in a series of letters to the kings of Bavaria, first to Maximilian I and then, following his death, to Ludwig I, Fallmerayer requested further funding for his research and a position as a professor at the University of Landshut. These requests were however denied, perhaps on account of Fallmerayer's liberal political views.
In 1826, the University of Landshut was moved to Munich, the capital of the Bavarian state, while the Munich Lyceum was moved to Landshut. Fallmerayer was named Professor of History at the latter institution. In the academic year 1826–27, he offered a lecture course on universal history. His inaugural lecture was marked, once again, by his anti-clericalism and reformist-liberal political views. He returned to these themes in his final lecture, in which he presented a vision of a unified Europe under "the rule of public virtues and of laws."Er präsantiert dort seine Vision eines liberalen, geeinten Europas, das sich durch "Gerechtigkeit in der Staatsverwaltung nach unterdrückender Willkür, und die Herrschaft der öffentlichen Tugenden und der Gesetze" auszeichne: Leeb, Fallmerayer, 45. These lectures, together with his distinctly "unpatriotic" lectures on Bavarian history, began to draw criticism from the more conservative elements of the academic establishment.
In 1827 the Geschichte des Kaisertums von Trapezunt was finally published, and met with universal praise from its reviewers, including Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Carl Hase. The reaction of the Bavarian establishment was somewhat cooler, in part due to the book's preface. Here Fallmerayer had stated as a "law of nature" that the attainment of earthly power by priests leads to the "deepest degradation of the human race."Folglich sei die "tiefste Erniedrigung des menschlichen Geschlechtes jedes Mal der Höhepunkt geistlicher Allmacht": Leeb, Fallmerayer, 49.
The Greek theory Following the publication of his Trebizond study, Fallmerayer devoted his scholarly activities to another Greek region of the late Middle Ages, namely, the Morea. In particular, he developed his theory that the ancient, "Hellenic", population of the south Balkans had been replaced during the Migration Period by Byzantine, Arvanitic, Aromanian, and Slavic peoples, a theory which he advocated with characteristic zeal. The arguments he used were historical rather than genetic; at the time, cultural and racial aspects were conflated and Fallmerayer used the evidence of the former to support the latter.
The first volume of Fallmerayer's Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters appeared in 1830, and he expressed his central theory in the foreword as follows:
The race of the Hellenes has been wiped out in Europe. Physical beauty, intellectual brilliance, innate harmony and simplicity, art, competition, city, village, the splendour of column and temple — indeed, even the name has disappeared from the surface of the Greek continent.... Not the slightest drop of undiluted Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece.Das Geschlecht der Hellenen ist in Europa ausgerottet. Schönheit der Körper, Sonnenflug des Geistes, Ebenmaß und Einfalt der Sitte, Kunst, Rennbahn, Stadt, Dorf, Säulenpracht und Tempel, ja sogar der Name ist von der Oberfläche des griechischen Kontinents verschwunden.... auch nicht ein Tropfen echten und ungemischten Hellenenblutes in den Adern der christlichen Bevölkerung des heutigen Griechenlands fließet: Leeb, Fallmerayer, 55.
This phenomenon was further interpreted by Fallmerayer as an indication of the potential of the "Slavic" nations to overwhelm the "Latin" and the "German", a line of thought which he would later develop in his political writings. He further argued that the Great Powers who had supported the Greek War of Independence, which according to him was led by Arvanites and Aromanians, had been led by a "classical intoxication" to misjudge the character of the modern Greek state.
The Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea set Fallmerayer at loggerheads with the European Philhellenes in general, and with the Bavarian King Ludwig I in particular, a convinced Philhellene who already in 1829 had begun to advance the candidacy of his son, Otto, for the Greek throne (Otto became King of Greece in 1832). Ludwig's philhellenism was in fact grounded in the conviction that the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule represented the return of antique Hellenic virtue.Leeb, Fallmerayer, 58. Ludwig's displeasure with Fallmerayer also cost him his post in Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Reception The earliest scholarly reviews of Fallmerayer's work were overwhelmingly negative. He was accused of philological errors by the Slovenian linguist Jernej Kopitar, and of misreading the historical sources by the historians Johann Zinkeisen and Karl Hopf. Charles Alan Fyffe wrote as early as 1892 that "More recent inquiries have discredited both Fallerayer and his authorities". Fallmerayer's ideas caused fierce reaction from various scholars of the newly established Greek state and triggered a search for continuity within Greek historiography, in an attempt to prove the existence of links between modern Greeks and the ancient Greek civilization."Veloudis, Giorgos, 1982. Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer and the birth of the Greek historicism, Athens: Mnimon. These strong criticisms which he received from his fellow professors and historians irreparably scarred Fallmerayer's public image.Spiliopoulou, Ioanna. Το ταξίδι του Ειρηναίου Θειρσίου στην Ελλάδα (1831-1832) μέσα από την αλληλογραφία του με τη γυναίκα του ως πηγή μαρτυρίας για τις ιδεολογικές διενέξεις αναφορικά με τις ρίζες του ελληνικού πολιτισμού. In: Dimadis, Konstantinos. (2015). Continuities, Discontinuities, Ruptures in the Greek World (1204-2014): Economy, Society, History, Literature : 5th European Congress of Modern Greek Studies of the European Society of Modern Greek Studies. p. 377-396 Later scholarly reviews have also been unfavorable. Edward Kennard Rand wrote in 1926 that Fallmerayer's ideas were "long discredited". Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld (2020) notes that "Whether judged by contemporary or present-day standards, Fallmerayer's scholarship is uneven at best and makes extensive use of special pleading and blank assertion".
In Greece, Constantine Paparrigopoulos (1815 – 14 April 1891), a Greek historian, who is considered the founder of modern Greek historiography and the founder of the concept of historical continuity of Greece from antiquity to the present, establishing the tripartite division of Greek history in ancient, medieval and modern is known for vigorously countering the theories of Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer regarding the racial origins of the Greeks. He was the first historian who managed to demonstrate that Fallmerayer's theory was false.
Modern genetic studies