LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 549 



Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," the first volume relating to 

 the Ottoman Turks and the Spanish monarchy. From 1827 until 

 1831 he was allowed a four years' leave of absence for the study of 

 foreign archives. He visited the libraries of Vienna, Rome, Florence, 

 and Venice, everywhere making valuable discoveries of fresh materials 

 for modern European history. Ranke's researches in Italy liave been 

 compared to Humboldt's observations in the New "World. Libraries 

 and archives are for the historian what laboratories and nature are to 

 students of natural science. Ranke's work in Italian, especially Vene- 

 tian archives, marks an epoch in the study of modern history. Be- 

 fore his time, historians had been content with printed books and 

 other men's opinions. Ranke went to the primal sources of political 

 information, to state papers, diplomatic correspondence, and original 

 documents. With regard to such rummaging in archives, Ranke once 

 said : " He needs no pity who busies himself with these apparently 

 dry studies, and renounces for their sake the pleasure of many joyful 

 days. These are dead papers, it is true ; but they are memorials of a 

 life which slowly rises again before the mind's eye." Ranke saw in 

 history the immortality of the past. 



The most notable result of Ranke's Italian studies is his famous 

 " History of the Popes of Rome in Church and State in the Sixteenth 

 and Seventeenth Centuries." This woik, which some critics resrard 

 as Ranke's masterpiece, and which was introduced to English readers 

 by Macaulay's famous essay, is a continuation, in the ecclesiastical field, 

 of the " Princes and Peoples of Southern Europe." It reviews, how- 

 ever, the entire history of the mediaeval Church, and is perhaps for the 

 general reader the most interesting of all his early works. 



While in Italy, Ranke met a Servian refugee named Wuk, and 

 drew from him a narrative of the Servian revolution, which is one of 

 his best minor writings. Niebuhr said it was the best book in litera- 

 ture upon a contemporary event, and one whereof Germany might well 

 be proud. In this connection, it may be said that, in general, Ranke 

 was strongly opposed to writing history with a political tendency. 

 His inaugural address, upon assuming the duties of a full Professor in 

 Berlin, in 1836, was upon the relation and difference between history 

 and politics. Therein Ranke states the true view when he says : 

 " A knowledge of the past is imperfect without an acquaintance with 

 the present ; there is no understanding of the present without a knowl- 

 edge of earlier times. The one gives to the other its hand ; neither 

 can exist or be perfect without the other." 



Ranke was by nature and associations a conservative in politics. 



