Contributions
Fallmerayer is considered one of the great 19th-century intellectuals in the German-speaking world. He is remembered as "a co-founder of Byzantine studies, as discoverer of the divisive Greek theory, as a prophet of the world-historical opposition between Occident and Orient, and finally as a brilliant essayist." Fallmerayer has been described as "one of the greatest German stylists," and the Fragmente aus dem Orient is a classic of German travel literature.
Fallmerayer was one of three scholars (together with Gottlieb Lukas Friedrich Tafel and Georg Martin Thomas) who laid the foundation for Byzantinistik (Byzantine studies) as a self-sufficient academic discipline in Germany. Their achievements were crowned in the following generation by the establishment of the first German Lehrstuhl for Byzantinstik at Munich, whose first occupant was Karl Krumbacher.
Among Fallmerayer's scholarly contributions to Byzantine studies, only the History of the Empire of Trebizond is still cited as an authority. His general characterization of Byzantine society has also on occasion been revived, most notably by Romilly Jenkins. His Greek theory was already widely disputed in his lifetime, and is not accepted today. Its primary significance was as a "strong impetus for research in Byzantine as well as in modern Greek studies." Early criticisms were published by the Austrian scholar Bartholomaeus Kopitar, Friedrich Thiersch, Johann Wilhelm Zinkeisen, and by George Finlay.
Fallmerayer's work played a decisive role in the development of Byzantine history as a discipline in Greece, where a number of late 19th- and early 20th-century scholars sought to disprove the thesis of Greek racial discontinuity (notable examples include Kyriakos Pittakis and Constantine Paparrigopoulos; Paparrigopoulos demonstrated in 1843 that Fallmerayer's theory had many pitfalls). On account of his insistence on the Slavic origin of the modern Greeks, Fallmerayer was considered a pan-Slavist by many in Greece, a characterization which in any case stood in opposition to his actual writings on contemporary politics. Fallmerayer's name eventually became "a symbol for hatred of the Greeks", and Nikos Dimou wrote (only partly in jest) that he had been raised to imagine Fallmerayer as a "blood-dripping Greek-eater" (αιμοσταγή ελληνοφάγο). In the twentieth century the charge of "neo-Fallmerayerism" was occasionally used by Greek scholars in an attempt to discredit the work of certain Western European scholars, including Cyril Mango, whose work bore no actual relation to Fallmerayer's. (The charge was also heard outside of Greece, for example, in the course of a debate between Kenneth Setton and Peter Charanis.) The first modern Greek translation of Fallmerayer's work appeared in 1984.
Fallmerayer's account of the split between "Occident" and "Orient" hinged on his interpretation of the Russian Empire, which he perceived as a powerful blend of Slavic ethnic characteristics, Byzantine political philosophy, and Orthodox theology. Although he initially perceived this constellation with admiration, and viewed Russia as the potential savior of Europe from Napoleon, his view changed in the mid 1840s, perhaps as a result of his encounter with Fyodor Tyutchev, and he soon came to see Russia as the major threat to Western Europe. By the late 1840s he was convinced that Russia would conquer Constantinople and the Balkans, and perhaps further the Slavic lands of the Habsburg and Prussian Empires. In the mid-1850s he was overjoyed by the success of the European/Ottoman coalition in the Crimean War. Fallmerayer's account of East and West represented a crucial break from Hegel's idealistic philosophy of history, and has been characterized as a precursor to Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis.
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