Friedrich Wilhelm von Giesebrecht (5 March 1814 – 17 December 1889) was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

.

Biography

He was born in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

, the son of Karl Giesebrecht (died 1832), and a nephew of the poet Ludwig Giesebrecht (1792–1873).

He studied under Leopold von Ranke

Leopold von Ranke

Leopold von Ranke was a German historian, considered one of the founders of modern source-based history. Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources , an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics .-...

, and his first important work, Geschichte Ottos II., was contributed to Ranke's Jahrbücher des deutschen Reichs unter dem sächsischen Hause (Berlin, 1837–1840). In 1841 he published his Jahrbücher des Klosters Altaich, a reconstruction of the lost Annales Altahenses, a medieval source of which fragments only were known to be extant, and these were obscured in other chronicles. The brilliance of this performance was shown in 1867, when a copy of the original chronicle was found, and it was seen that Giesebrecht's text was substantially correct.

In the meantime he had been appointed Oberlehrer in the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium in Berlin; had paid a visit to Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, and as a result of his researches there had published De litterarum studiis apud halos primis mediiaevi seculis (Berlin, 1845), a study upon the survival of culture in Italian cities during the Middle Ages, and also several critical essays upon the sources for the early history of the popes. In 1851 appeared his translation of the Historiae of Gregory of Tours, which is the standard German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 translation.

Four years later appeared the first volume of his great work, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, the fifth volume of which was published in 1888. This work was the first in which the results of the scientific methods of research were thrown open to the world at large. Largeness of style and brilliance of portrayal were joined to an absolute mastery of the sources in a way hitherto unachieved by any German historian. Yet later German historians have severely criticized his glorification of the imperial era with its Italian entanglements, in which the interests of Germany were sacrificed for idle glory.

Giesebrecht's history, however, appeared when the new German empire was in the making, and became popular owing both to its patriotic tone and its intrinsic merits. In 1857 he went to Königsberg

University of Königsberg

The University of Königsberg was the university of Königsberg in East Prussia. It was founded in 1544 as second Protestant academy by Duke Albert of Prussia, and was commonly known as the Albertina....

 as professor ordinarius, and in 1862 succeeded Heinrich von Sybel

Heinrich von Sybel

Heinrich Karl Ludolf von Sybel , German historian, came from a Protestant family which had long been established at Soest, in Westphalia....

 as professor of history in the University of Munich. The Bavarian government

Kingdom of Bavaria

The Kingdom of Bavaria was a German state that existed from 1806 to 1918. The Bavarian Elector Maximilian IV Joseph of the House of Wittelsbach became the first King of Bavaria in 1806 as Maximilian I Joseph. The monarchy would remain held by the Wittelsbachs until the kingdom's dissolution in 1918...

 honoured him in various ways, and he died at Munich on 17 December 1889.

In addition to the works already mentioned, Giesebrecht published a good monograph on Arnold of Brescia

Arnold of Brescia

Arnold of Brescia , also known as Arnaldus , was an Italian monk from Lombardy who called on the Church to renounce ownership of property and participated in the failed Commune of Rome. Eventually arrested, he was hanged by the Church, burned posthumously, and then had his ashes thrown into the...

 (Munich, 1873), a collection of essays under the title Deutsche Reden (Munich, 1881), and was an active member of the group of scholars who took over the direction of the Monumenta Germaniae historica

Monumenta Germaniae Historica

The Monumenta Germaniae Historica is a comprehensive series of carefully edited and published sources for the study of German history from the end of the Roman Empire to 1500.The society sponsoring the series was established by the Prussian reformer Heinrich Friedrich Karl Freiherr vom...

in 1875. In 1895 Bernhard von Simson added a sixth volume to the Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, thus bringing the work down to the death of Emperor Frederick I

Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor

Frederick I Barbarossa was a German Holy Roman Emperor. He was elected King of Germany at Frankfurt on 4 March 1152 and crowned in Aachen on 9 March, crowned King of Italy in Pavia in 1155, and finally crowned Roman Emperor by Pope Adrian IV, on 18 June 1155, and two years later in 1157 the term...

in 1190.