Ferdinand Gregorovius


Ferdinand Gregorovius was a Masurian historian who specialized in the medieval history of Rome.

Biography

Gregorovius was the son of Neidenburg district justice council Ferdinand Timotheus Gregorovius and his wife Wilhelmine Charlotte Dorothea Kausch. An earlier ancestor named Grzegorzewski had come to Prussia from Poland. Members of the Gregorovius family lived in Prussia for over 300 years, and produced many jurists, preachers and artists. One famous ancestor of Ferdinand's was Johann Adam Gregorovius, born 1681 in Johannisburg, district of Gumbinnen.
Gregorovius was born in Neidenburg, East Prussia in the Kingdom of Prussia, and studied theology and philosophy at the University of Königsberg. In 1838, he joined the student association, the Corps Masovia. After teaching for many years, Gregorovius took up residence in Italy in 1852, where he remained for over twenty years. In 1876, he was made an honorary citizen of Rome, the first German to be awarded this honor. A street and a square are named after him. He eventually retired to the Kingdom of Bavaria, where he died in Munich.
He is best known for Wanderjahre in Italien, his account of the travels on foot that he took through Italy in the 1850s, and the monumental Die Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, a classic for Medieval and early Renaissance history. He also wrote biographies of Pope Alexander VI and Lucrezia Borgia, as well as works on Byzantine history and medieval Athens, and translated Italian authors into German, among them Giovanni Melis.

Reputation

According to Father John Hardon, Gregorovius was "a bitter enemy of the popes", while quoting him reflecting in wonder at the late medieval reform of the Church following the tenth century's Saeculum obscurum. An earlier Catholic writer, the historian Charles George Herbermann, described Gregorovius as
"a historian of undoubted authority, a Protestant, and by no means an admirer of the Papacy. On the civil history of the popes during the middle ages there is, perhaps, no greater authority, for whilst completely at home among modern writers who have dealt with his subject, he has, wherever he could, had recourse to the original sources."

Works

  • Der Ghetto und die Juden in Rom, Mit Einem Geleitwort von Leo Baeck, Im Schocken Verlag/Berlin, 1935
  • Der Tod des Tiberius
  • Geschichte des römischen Kaisers Hadrian und seiner Zeit
  • *
  • Siciliana
  • Corsica ;
  • Göthe’s Wilhelm Meister in seinen socialistischen Elementen entwickelt. Schwäbisch Hall: E. Fischhaber, 1855.
  • Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter Translated into English 'The History of Rome in the Middle Ages'. ;
  • *
  • Die Insel Capri ;
  • Lucrezia Borgia: Nach Urkunden und Correspondenzen ihrer eigenen Zeit
  • *
  • Die Grabmäler der Römischen Päpste, first edition 1857 in German, later in 1881 as Die Grabdenkmäler der Päpste and in English as The Tombs of the Popes Victoria Press, Rome 1904
  • Die Insel Capri. Idylle vom Mittelmeer
  • *