Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer
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Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (10 December 1790 – 26 April 1861) was an Austrian traveller, journalist and historical investigator, best known for his now discredited theory that the Greeks of the present day are predominantly of Albanian and Slav descent, a theory that was finally shown to be incorrect in the 1990s, using blood-type and genetic studies.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early years
Fallmerayer was born, the son of a poor peasant, at Pairdorf, near Brixen in Tirol. In 1809 he absconded from the cathedral choir school at Brixen and made his way to Salzburg, where he supported himself by private teaching while he studied theology, the Semitic languages, and history. 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.
[edit] Education
At the University of Landshut, to which he removed in 1812, he first applied himself to jurisprudence, but soon devoted his attention exclusively to history and philology. His immediate necessities were provided for by a rich patron. During the Napoleonic Wars he joined the Bavarian infantry as a subaltern in 1813, fought at Hanau (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 Orleans as adjutant to General von Spreti. Two years of garrison life at Lindau on Lake Constance after the peace were spent in the study of modern Greek, Persian and Turkish.
Resigning his commission in 1818, he was successively engaged as teacher in the gymnasium at Augsburg and in the progymnasium and lyceum at Landshut. In 1827 he won the gold medal offered by the University of Copenhagen with his Geschichte des Kaisertums von Trapezunt, based on patient investigation of Greek and oriental manuscripts at Venice and Vienna. The strictures on priestcraft contained in the preface to this book gave offence to the authorities, and his position was not improved by the liberal views expressed in his history of medieval Greece, Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1830–1836, 2 pts.) which expressed his theory that the Greek population had been unalterably diluted by Slavic invasions. He supported this theory largely with analysis of toponyms in the Peleponnese and the Chronicle of Monemvasia.
[edit] Travels
The three years from 1831 to 1834 he spent in travel with the Russian Count Alexander Ivanovich Ostermann-Tolstoy, visiting Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Cyprus, Rhodes, Constantinople, Greece and Naples. On his return he was elected in 1835 a member of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences, but he soon after left the country again on account of political troubles, and spent the greater part of the next four years in travel, spending the winter of 1839–1840 with Count Tolstoy at Geneva. He visited Constantinople, Trebizond, Athos, Macedonia, Thessaly and Greece during 1840–1841; and after some years residence in Munich he returned in 1847 to the East, and travelled in Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor.
[edit] Late years
The Bavarian authorities continued to regard him with suspicion, and university students were forbidden to attend the public lectures he delivered in Munich. His friendly relations with the crown prince Maximilian were dashed by the reaction following upon the Revolutions of 1848. At that period, he was appointed professor of history in the Munich University, and made a member of the Frankfurt Parliament, the liberal national congress at Frankfurt am Main. He there joined the left or opposition party, and in the following year he accompanied the rump-parliament to Stuttgart, a course of action which led to his expulsion from his Munish professorship. During the winter of 1849–1850 he was an exile in Switzerland, but the amnesty of April 1850 enabled him to return to Munich, where he died in 1861.
[edit] Contributions
The value of his contributions to the medieval history of Greece is now diminished by association with his discredited thesis that the Greeks of the present day are predominantly of Albanian and Slav descent, which prejudiced his work throughout. A criticism of his conclusions will be found in Karl Hopf's Geschichte Griechenlands (reprinted from Ersch and Grubers Encyclopädie), by the Austrian scholar Bartholomaeus Kopitar and in English in Finlay's History of Greece in the Middle Ages. In Greece he was demonized as a Slav apologist, though his works were not translated into Greek until the 1980s.
Another theory which he propounded and defended with great vigour was that the eventual capture of Constantinople by Russia was inevitable, and would lead to the absorption by the Russian empire of the whole of the Balkan and Grecian peninsula; and that this extended empire would constitute a standing menace to the western Germanic nations, misled by the political naïveté of the Philhellenes, as he saw it. These views he expressed in a series of articles in German journals in the lead-up to the Crimean War.
His most important contribution to learning remains his history of the Empire of Trebizond. Prior to his discovery of the chronicle of Michael Panaretos, covering the dominion of Alexius Comnenus and his successors from 1204 to 1426, the history of the Empire of Trebizond was practically unknown.
[edit] Works
- Geschichte des Kaiserthums Trapezunt (Munich, 1827–1848)
- Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1830–1836);
- Über die Entstehung der Neugriechen (Stuttgart, 1835)
- Originalfragmente, Chroniken, u.s.w., zur Geschichte des K. Trapezunts (Munich, 1843), in Abhandlungen der Historischen Classe der Kaiserliche Bayerisch. Akad. der Wissenschaft
- Fragmente aus dem Orient (Stuttgart, 1845)
- Denkschrift über Golgotha and das heilige Grab (Munich, 1852) and
- Das Todte Meer (1853); both appeared in the Abhandlungen of the Academy
- Das albanesische Element in Griechenland, (iii. parts) appeared in the Abhandlungen for 1860-1866
After his death there appeared at Leipzig in 1861, under the editorship of G. M. Thomas, three volumes of Gesammelte Werke, containing Neue Fragmente aus dem Orient, Kritische Versuche, and Studien und Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben.
A sketch of his life will also be found in L. Steub, Herbsttage in Tyrol (Munich, 1867).
[edit] Political impact of Fallmerayer's Ethnic Theories
[edit] Early critics
Fallmerayer's theory on ethnicity attracted criticism from many sides since its original publication. The inability of contemporary academics to ascertain the precise extent of Slav influence in Greece contributed to much polemic. Apostolos E. Vacalopoulos described the prejudices arrising from it as the “fundamental problem of modern Greek history” (Vacalopoulos, Origin of the Greek Nation).
[edit] Philhellenism
In the 1830s, philehellenes who had recently supported the creation of the modern Greek kingdom suspected political motivations in his writings; namely an Austrian desire for expansion southwards into the Balkans, and Austrian antagonism to Russian interests in the area reflected in his other writings. In this context, the calls by English and French intellectuals for a revival of “the glory that was Greece” were seen by Austrians in a very negative light, and any Austrian theory on the Greeks was looked on with suspicion by the philhellenes in the West.
[edit] Macedonia
Fallmerayer's theories again became a hot topic during the flare-up of the Macedonian Question during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, as Greece and Bulgaria both claimed the inhabitants of Macedonia as their own. They again appeared in the 1990s, after a long lull, when promotion of Fallmerayer's discredited theories was renewed by opponents of Greece's position during the re-emergence of the Macedonian issue.
[edit] Racism
His theories also influenced the development of Nordic racial views in Germany (and Austria) as part of the claim for genetic and spiritual affinity between Germany and ancient Greece, which culminated in the highly dubious theory that the ancient Greeks were blond descendants of an invading population, which was held both by academics and extreme nationalists. (E. A. Wallis Budge held that Egyptians were also descended from blond invaders.) In fact, lighter hair has always been rare and distinctive among the Greeks, as with Homer's xanthos Menelaos – and the hair need not be very light: xanthanein is browning, as in roasting meat.
[edit] World War II
In 1941, on the eve of the Nazi occupation of Greece, an eminent German linguist, Max Vasmer, published a book on Slavic place names arguing for an early and substantial presence of Slavs in Greece. During the German occupation, Fallmerayer's theories were promoted by the Nazis, as there was a need to rationalize the discrepancy between the Nazis' admiration of the Ancient Greeks and their brutal treatment of their modern counterparts. Fallmerayer's name was execrated by Greek patriots .
[edit] Gene Studies related to Fallmerayer's ethnic theories
Beyond political interests and nationalistic sentiments, criticism has focused on what is often described as his selective usage of a few Byzantine sources (ignoring key Greek and Latin documents of the same period), and on ethnographic research that shows many customs of the modern Greeks to have evolved from pre-Christian, ancient-Greek pagan rituals, while there is an absence of surviving Slavic rituals — particularly the Slava, which was a key and universal ritual of the Slavic tribes that invaded Greece.
These theories were discredited first with blood types studies, and once again with current autosomal DNA studies, within legitimate peer-reviewed genetics science which show the greater continuity of the ancient Greek genetic signature in mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and neighbouring countries which were colonised by Greek speakers in the first millennium BC and later (see Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, People, and Languages).
More specifically studies concentrated on the presence of specific Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a, or HG3, or Eu19. The haplogroup R1a, though not a specific marker for Slavs, reaches frequencies of higher than 50% among Poles and decreases significantly in non-Slavic populations. The “Macedonians” of Republic of Macedonia, the Slavic population immediately to the north of Greece, have frequencies of R1a of 15.2% (, ). A study of Y chromosome variation in Europe made by Ornella Semino, in a study in Science 290: 1155 showed that the haplotype (which she called “Eu19”) in Greece is not the majority and is about 11.6%, a figure in line with estimates given before World War I by Alexander A. Vasiliev in his history of the Byzantine Empire, which was based on demographic considerations.
[edit] References
- ↑ F.Curta, Fallmerayer and the “Slavic problem”, lecture notes
- ↑ Full paper "High-Resolution Phylogenetic Analysis of Southeastern Europe"
- ↑ Abstract "High-Resolution Phylogenetic Analysis of Southeastern Europe"
- ↑ The Fallmerayer Thesis in the Light of Genetic Evidence
- ↑ Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911: Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
