In 1824, Ranke launched his career with the book
Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 After the minister of education was impressed with the work of a historian who did not have access to the nation's great public libraries, Ranke was given a position in the
University of Berlin, where he was a professor for nearly fifty years, starting in 1825. At the university, he used the seminar system and taught how to check the value of sources. Ranke became deeply involved in the dispute between the followers of the legal professor
Friedrich Carl von Savigny, who emphasized the varieties of different periods of history, and the followers of the philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who saw history as the unfolding of a universal story. Ranke supported Savigny and criticized the Hegelian view of history as being a one-size-fits-all approach. Also during his time in
Berlin, Ranke became the first historian to use the forty-seven volumes that comprised the diplomatic archives of
Venice from the 16th and 17th centuries. Since many archives opened up during this time, he sent out his students to these places to recruit information. In his classrooms, he would discuss the sources that his students would find and would emphasize that history should be told "as it really happened" (
wie es eigentlich gewesen). Therefore, he is often seen as "the pioneer of a critical historical science". Meanwhile, Ranke came to prefer dealing with primary sources as opposed to secondary sources. It was in Vienna where the friendship of
Friedrich von Gentz and the protection of
Klemens von Metternich opened to him the Venetian Archives, a fresh source, the value of which he first discovered; it is still not exhausted. From 1834 to 1836, Ranke published
Die römischen Päpste, ihre Kirche und ihr Staat im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert In this book, Ranke coined the term "
Counter-Reformation" and offered colorful portrayals of
Pope Paul IV,
Ignatius of Loyola and
Pope Pius V. He promoted research into primary sources: "I see the time approaching when we shall base modern history, no longer on the reports even of contemporary historians, except insofar as they had personal and immediate knowledge of facts; and still less on work yet more remote from the source; but rather on the narratives of eyewitnesses, and on genuine and original documents". The papacy denounced Ranke's book as anti-Catholic. In contrast, many Protestants denounced it as not anti-Catholic enough. Still, historians have generally praised him for placing the situation of the
Catholic Church in the context of the 16th century and for his fair treatment of the complex interaction of the political and religious issues in that century. The British Catholic historian
Lord Acton defended Ranke's book as the most fair-minded, balanced and objective study ever written on the papacy of the 16th century. In 1841, his fame in its ascendancy, Ranke was appointed
Historiographer Royal to the Prussian court. In 1845, he became a member of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In Paris, Ranke met the Irish woman
Clarissa Helena Graves (born 1808) from Dublin in July 1843. She had been educated in England and the Continent. They were engaged on 1 October and married in
Bowness, England in a ceremony officiated by her brother
Robert Perceval Graves, an Anglican priest. They had three sons (one of whom died in infancy), and one daughter. From 1847 to 1848, Ranke published
Neun Bücher preußischer Geschichte (translated as
Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Prussia, during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) given before future King
Maximilian II of Bavaria in 1854, Ranke argued that "every age is next to God", by which he meant that every period of history is unique and must be understood in its own context. He argued that God gazes over history in its totality and finds all periods equal. Ranke rejected the teleological approach to history, by which each period is considered inferior to the following period. Thus, the
Middle Ages were not inferior to the
Renaissance, simply different. In Ranke's view, historians had to understand a period and its terms and seek to find only the general ideas that animated every period of history. For Ranke, history was not to be an account of man's "progress" because "[a]fter Plato, there can be no more Plato". Ultimately, "[h]istory is no criminal court". For Ranke, Christianity was morally most superior and could not be improved upon. When he wrote
Zur orientalischen Frage. Gutachten at the behest of the Kaiser he framed the conflict with the
Ottoman Empire as primarily religious; the civil rights of Christians against Muslims in the Ottoman Empire could only be secured by the intervention of the Christian European nations. From 1854 to 1857, Ranke published
History of the Reformation in Germany (
Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation), using the ninety-six volumes of correspondence from ambassadors to the Imperial Diet he found in
Frankfurt to explain the
Reformation in
Germany as the result of both politics and religion. From 1859 to 1867, Ranke published the six-volume
History of England Principally in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (
Englische Geschichte vornehmlich im XVI und XVII Jahrhundert), followed by an expanded nine-volume edition from 1870 to 1884, which extended his huge reach even further. At this point, he was eighty years old, and devoted the rest of his career to shorter treatises on German history that supplement his earlier writings. == Later life ==