Ludwig von Pastor

Ludwig Pastor, later Ludwig von Pastor, Freiherr von Campersfelden (31 January 1854 – 30 September 1928), was a German historian and a diplomat for Austria. He became one of the most important Roman Catholic historians of his time and is most notable for his History of the Popes. He was raised to the nobility by the Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1908.

Born in Aachen, Pastor attended a Frankfurt gymnasium, where his teacher was Johannes Janssen. Born to a Lutheran father and a Catholic mother, Pastor was converted to Catholicism at ten, after his father's death.

Pastor studied in 1875 at Leuven, in 1875/76 at Bonn, where he became a member of the student corporation Armininia, and in 1877/78 at Vienna. Pastor taught at the University of Innsbruck, first as a lecturer (1881–87), then as professor of modern history (1887). His dissertation was titled "Die kirchlichen Reunionsbestrebungen während der Regierung Karls V" (The Church's Attempts at Reunion During the Reign of Charles V). Pastor edited his mentor Janssen's eight-volume Geschichte des deutschen Volkes (History of the German People) and published it from 1893 to 1926.

Janssen had made him aware of Leopold von Ranke's History of the Popes. This determined the field he would take for his own, becoming in a sense a Catholic anti-Ranke. His approach was that the apparent shortcomings of the Papacy have reflected flaws of their times. Pastor consulted archives throughout Catholic Europe and, during his first trip to Italy in 1881, his seriousness ensured the patronage of Pope Leo XIII, who opened to him the contents of the Vatican Library, which had previously been held unavailable to scholars.

The result of his research was his Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters in sixteen volumes. The opus magnum was subsequently translated into English and published as History of the Popes From the Close of the Middle Ages.

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