History of the Popes, Vol. 1: Their Church and State (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from History of the Popes, Vol. 1: Their Church and State

One advantage at least results from his lack of enthusiasm, that he does not, like Macaulay, write under the perpetual bias of political sentiment. We can always follow him without the slightest fear of being misled by the prejudices of the writer.

If Ranke had begun his historical investigations at a somewhat later period, his tone might have been different. The fall of the great Napoleon took place when he was barely twenty years of age, and he was nearly seventy-five when the second Napoleon proclaimed war upon Prussia and gave occasion for the foundation of the new German Empire. The greater part of his historical work was accomplished in the interval between these two events.

Ranke was born December 21, 1795, at Wiehe, a small town of Thuringia, about twenty-seven miles from Merseburg, capital of the government of the same name in Prussian Saxony. He studied at the Gymnasium of Schulpforta, and subsequently at the University of Leipzig under the eminent Greek scholar Hermann, by whom he was guided to the study of the historians of antiquity. On leaving the university in 1818, he was made professor of history at the Gymnasium of Frankforton-the-Oder, a position in which he was enabled to give the greater part of his thoughts to the study of history, especially to the latter part of the fifteenth century and to the sixteenth. As a result of these studies, he published, in 1824, his first contributions to history, namely, a "History of the Latin and Germanic Nations" ("Geschichte der romanischen and germanischen Volker") and "Contributions to the Critical Study of some Modern Historians"("Kritik neurer Geschichtsckreiber").In the latter work he laid down the true principles of historical composition, the scientific methods which he was henceforth to inculcate by precept and example.