Mihailo Gavrilović

Mihailo Gavrilović (Serbian Cyrillic: Михаило Гавриловић), (Aleksinac, May 8, 1868 - London, November 1, 1924) was a prominent Serbian historian and diplomat.

Mihailo Gavrilović was born at Aleksinac in central Serbia on May 8, 1868 (Old Style). After graduating at Belgrade and Paris universities, he entered at first upon an academic career. From 1902 to 1911 he was Director of the Serbian State Archives, and during this time won a high reputation as a historian.

Gavrilović researched nineteenth-century Serbian history and wrote extensively on the main political figures of the time (i.e. Miloš Obrenović), Franco-Serbian relations during the Napoleonic era and the Serbian revolution (1804–1813) and Serbo-British relations in the 1840s and 1850s, as well as on international relations concerning the Serbian question. His three-volume biography of Prince Miloš Obrenović is still the best in Serbian historiography. It will always remain a standard work upon that period, and is specially valuable for its treatment of the diplomatic relations of Serbia with the European Powers. It carries the story of Prince Miloš down to 1835, and a fourth volume was to have dealt with the close of his first reign, his exile and his triumphant return in 1858. But unhappily the material which Gavrilović had amassed during the years of study and which would have enabled him to complete the work without much further effort, was irretrievably lost in a trunk which accompanied him during the painful retreat of the Serbian Army through Albania in the First World War (1915–1916), now remembered as the epic ”Albanian Golgotha“.

Gavrilović studied history at the Velika škola, the institution that was later to become the University of Belgrade. He graduated in 1891, and defended his thesis on medieval history at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1899. During his years in Paris (1893–1900) Gavrilović prepared a huge volume of French documents concerning the First Serbian Uprising, under Karađorđe (1804–1813), that was published in the French language in a single volume in 1904 (Ispisi iz pariskih arhiva. Građa za istoriju srpskog ustanka), in Belgrade by the Serbian Royal Academy. After returning to Serbia from Paris, Gavrilović was appointed Director of the Archives of Serbia (1900–1903) and contributed greatly to its organization as a modern archival institution.

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