Franz Babinger

Franz Babinger (January 15, 1891 – June 23, 1967) was a well-known German orientalist and historian of the Ottoman Empire, best known for his biography of the great Ottoman emperor Mehmed II known as the Conqueror, originally published as Mehmed der Eroberer und seine Zeit. An English translation by Ralph Manheim is available from Princeton University Press under the title Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time.

Babinger was born in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, Bavaria and was already an accomplished academic and linguist by the time he had completed his secondary school studies. Prior to starting University, he had already learned both Persian and Hebrew.

Babinger completed his doctoral studies at the University of Munich on the eve of World War I; after the war started, he joined the German Army. Because of his language skills and abilities, Babinger served in the Middle East, thus avoiding the deadly trench warfare that cut short the lives of many promising scholars of his generation.

After the war, Babinger continued his studies at Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Berlin where he completed his Habilitationsschrift in 1921 and became a Professor at the same institution. During this period, he published Geschichtsschreiber der Osmanen und ihre Werke ("Historians of the Ottoman Empire"), which became the standard bibliographical review of Ottoman historiography and confirmed the reputation of Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität as a leading center for Near East studies. The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 forced him to resign his position. However, the Romanian statesman, academic and polymath Nicolae Iorga, himself a widely respected historian of the Ottoman Empire, invited Babinger to take up a position in Bucharest, which he held until he was ordered out of the country in 1943.

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