Leopold von Ranke

Leopold von Ranke (21 December 1795 – 23 May 1886) was a German historian and a founder of modern source-based history. 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was able to implement the seminar teaching method in his classroom and focused on archival research and the analysis of historical documents.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.

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.

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.

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". 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.

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. 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 honors poured in when Ranke was ennobled in 1865, appointed a Prussian Privy Councillor in 1882 and given an honorary citizenship of Berlin in 1885. In 1884, he was appointed the first honorary member of the American Historical Association. In 1885, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society. After his retirement in 1871, Ranke continued to write on a variety of subjects relating to German history such as the French Revolutionary Wars, Albrecht von Wallenstein, Karl August von Hardenberg, and King Frederick William IV of Prussia. In 1880, Ranke began a huge six-volume work on world history which began with ancient Egypt and the Israelites. By the time of his death in Berlin in 1886 at the age of 90, Ranke had reached only the 12th century, but his assistants later used his notes to take the series up to 1453.

After his wife died in 1871, Ranke became half-blind, depending on assistants to read to him. A diary entry from January 1877 contains his mature thoughts about being a historian:

The proverb tells us that poets are born. Not only in the arts, but even in some scholarly fields, young men develop into full bloom, or at least display their originality. Musicians and mathematicians have the expectation of attaining eminence in early years. But a historian must be old, not only because of the immeasurable extent of his field of study, but because of the insight into the historical process which a long life confers, especially under changing conditions. It would hardly be bearable for him to have only a short span of experience. For his personal development requires that great events complete their course before his eyes, that others collapse, that new forms be attempted.

After Ranke's death, Syracuse University purchased his collection. The Ranke Library of 25,000 books and other materials was ten times as large as the university's own.

Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 ("Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514", 1824)

Serbische Revolution ("Serbian Revolution", 1829)

Fürsten und Völker von Süd-Europa im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert ("Princes and Peoples of Southern Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries")

Die römischen Päpste in den letzten vier Jahrhunderten ("The Roman Popes in the Last Four Centuries", 1834–1836)

Neun Bücher preußischer Geschichte (Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Prussia, during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 1847–1848)

The Ottoman and the Spanish Empires, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Whittaker & Co., 1843.

Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Prussia During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, John Murray, 1849.

Civil Wars and Monarchy in France, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Richard Bentley, 1852.

The History of Servia and the Servian Revolution, Henry G. Bohn, 1853.

History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume Two, Volume Three, Volume Four, Volume Five, Volume Six, Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1875.