Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (10 December 1790 - 26 April 1861) was an Austrian traveller and historical investigator, best known for his opinions in regard to the ethnology of the modern Greeks.
He was born, the son of a poor peasant, at Tschotsch , 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 students 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 , 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 MSS. 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 Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1830-1836, 2 pts.).
The three years from 1831 to 1234 he spent in travel with the Russian count 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. Constantinople, Trebizond, Athos, Macedonia, Thessaly and Greece were visited by him 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.
The authorities continued to regard him with suspicion, and university students were forbidden to attend the lectures he delivered at Munich. He entered, however, into friendly relations with the crown prince Maximilian, but this intimacy was destroyed by the events following on 1848. At that period he was appointed professor of history in the Munich University, and made a member of the 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 professorate. During the winter of 1849-1850 he was an exile in Switzerland, but the amnesty of April 1850 enabled him to return to Munich. He died in 1861.
His contributions to the medieval history of Greece are of great value, and though his theory that the Greeks of the present day are of Albanian and Slav descent, with hardly a drop of true Greek blood in their veins, has not been accepted in its entirety by other investigators, it has served to modify the opinions of even his greatest opponents. A criticism of his views will be found in Hopfs Geschichte Griechenlands (reprinted from Ersch and Grubers Encykl.) and in Finlays History of Greece in the Middle Ages. Another theory which he propounded and defended with great vigour was that the 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. These views he expressed in a series of brilliant articles in German journals. 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 Alexus Comnenus and his successors from 1204 to 1426, the history of this medieval empire was practically unknown.
His works are Geschichte des Kaiserthums Trapezunt (Munich, 1827-1848); Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1830-1836); Über die Entstehung der Neugriechen (Stuttgart, I835); Originalfragmente, Chroniken, u.s.w., zur Geschichte des K. Trapezunts (Munich, 1843), in Abhandl. der Hist. Classe der K. Bayerisch. Akad. v. Wiss.; Fragments aus dem Orient (Stuttgart, 1845); Denkschrift über Golgotha and das heilige Grab (Munich, 1852), and Das Todte Meer (1853) both of which had appeared in the Abhandlungen of the Academy; Das albanesische Element in Griechenland, iii. parts, in the Abhandl. 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).
Criticism of Fallerayer's Theories
Fallmerayer's theory attracted criticism from many sides since its original publication. The inability of academics to ascertain the precise extent of Slav influence in Greece has contributed to much polemic. Vacalopoulos describes it as the "fundamental problem of modern Greek history" (Vacalopoulos, Origin of the Greek Nation).
In the 1830s, philehellenes who had just recently supported the creation of the modern Greek state saw political motivations in his writings; namely an Austrian desire for expansion southwards into the Balkans, and Austrian antagonism of Russian interests in the area. 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 seen as very suspicious by the philhellenes in the West.
Fallmerayer's theories again became a hot topic during the flare up of the Macedonian Question during the and of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, as Greece and Bulgaria both claimed the inhabitants of Macedonia as their own.
After the German invasion of Greece in 1941, his theory was adopted and promoted by the Nazis, as there was a need to rationalize the discrepancy between the Nazi's admiration of the Ancient Greeks and their brutal treatment of their modern counterparts. Finally in the 1990s, after a long lull, interest in Fallmerayer's theories was renewed when the Macedonian question re-emerged in the news.
Beyond political interests and nationalistic sentiments, scientific 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).
The most recent studies of populations genetics, however, have helped to clarify our understanding of Greek ethnology. Studies of autosomal DNA have shown 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). Studies of Y chromosome variation in Europe by Semino et al have shown that the Slavic influence in Greece is not the majority predicted by Fallmerayer; less than 8%.
