Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer: Encyclopedia II - Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer - Contributions

Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer - 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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Contributions", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki