The German Genius

people were using the archives at the same time as, or even before, Ranke, but here too it was his use of the materials that caught the eye. In Berlin he encountered several volumes of the reports of the Venetian ambassadors from the second quarter of the sixteenth century—the very zenith of Venetian power. His crucial insight was to see that these reports told a very different story from that revealed in the memoirs of the day, written by the leading players themselves or by observers of one kind or another, all of whom had their own axes to grind and therefore gave but a partial view of affairs.
    These “objective” ambassadorial reports had a profound influence on Ranke and determined the kind of history he wrote. Sources were crucial but, for Ranke, his most important task was the “great, comprehensive narrative.” He agreed with Humboldt that the historian “proceeds like a poet, who after having grasped the material has to create it anew, drawing on his own powers.” 18 This is still the modern approach.
    Ottomans and the Spanish Monarchy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries was the first to use this approach and the first volume of the series Fürsten und Völker von Süd-Europa (Princes and Peoples of Southern Europe). Ranke’s first aim was to make the behavior of the main players explicable in terms of contemporary diplomacy, trade, finance, and administration. Again, we take this approach so much for granted now that we forget it started with Ranke. Other books reinforced this approach. Because he was a Protestant, the Vatican archives were off limits but he discovered in the archives of some of the great papal families (notably the Barberini) sufficient material for his magisterial Die römischen Päpste ( History of the Popes ; volume one, 1834). These archives enabled him to treat the Papacy like any other institution in the development of Europe, but the fulcrum of the book is the Counter-Reformation, of which Ranke was the first authoritative interpreter. The attempt to revive spiritual life and the foundation of the great orders are brilliantly evoked. He had a further coup with Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation ( German History in the Time of the Reformation , 1839–47). After his work on the popes, Ranke felt he should write the history of Protestantism to put alongside his account of Catholicism and here too he discovered a mass of correspondence, this time in connection with Charles V in Brussels. 19
    Ranke’s most typical project was Neun Bücher preussischer Geschichte ( Nine Books of Prussian History ), appearing in 1847–48. A study of Friedrich the Great based on the archives in Berlin, this book was essentially an examination of the rise of a great power, depicting Frederick as the foundational figure in the Prussian administrative machine. Ranke employed the same method as he did with his history of the popes, allowing no bias to taint his judgment and, in order to obtain a better grasp of the king’s motives, he betrayed no hostility toward Austria. This is Ranke as “the father of value-free history,” doing his best, as he famously put it, to tell history “as it really was” ( wie es eigentlich gewesen ), avoiding imposing modern ways of thinking on historical personages. This approach he employed with his subsequent works on Machiavelli, the history of France, and the history of England. He wrote “as a European” (his wife was English), his conviction being that European history was essentially about the rise and rivalry of the great powers, what would come to be called Realpolitik .
    The sheer number of masterpieces set Ranke apart from other historians. (Perhaps no one has ever had as much historical knowledge.) Though his books deal with the great tendencies of whatever age he was writing about, he also acknowledged the importance of the individual actor: “General tendencies do not alone decide; great personalities are always necessary to make them effective.” 20 He assumed “a divine order of things” that “cannot be proved but felt.” This order manifests itself in the “sequence of periods.” So Ranke’s first achievement was to divorce the study of the past from the passions of the present. Before Ranke, historians assumed memoirs and chronicles to be the best authorities. After him, all scholars accepted that nothing less than the papers and correspondence of the actors in immediate contact with the events they describe was