Fallmerayer was born the seventh of ten children in Pairdorf (Italian: 

Parara), a village in Tschötsch

(Italian: Scezze) near Brixen in Tyrol. At the time of Fallmerayer's birth, the region was incorporated in
the Habsburg Monarchy, in 1805 it became a part of Bavaria, and it belongs today to Italy. His parents
were small farmers. From the age of seven Fallmerayer attended the local school in Tschötsch and
worked as a shepherd.
In 1801 the family moved to Brixen, where Fallmerayer's father found employment as a day-laborer.
Fallmerayer was enrolled in the Volksschule, where he impressed the priests with his talents. In 1803
he entered the cathedral school as a Gymnasiast, whence he was graduated in 1809 with a diploma in
metaphysics, mathematics, and the philosophy of religion. (The Gymnasium in Brixen today bears
Fallmerayer's name).[4] He then left Tyrol, at the time in the midst of a freedom struggle against Bavaria,
for Salzburg.
In Salzburg, Fallmerayer found employment as a private tutor, and enrolled in a Benedictine seminary,
where he studied classical, modern, and oriental philology, literature, history, and philosophy. After a
year's study he sought to assure to himself the peace and quiet necessary for a student's life by
entering the abbey of Kremsmünster, but difficulties put in his way by the Bavarian officials prevented
the accomplishment of this intention.
At the University of Landshut (today the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich), to which he removed
in 1812, he first applied himself to jurisprudence, but soon devoted his attention exclusively to history
and classical and oriental philology. His immediate necessities were provided for by a stipendium from
the Bavarian crown.

Early career[edit]
In the fall of 1813, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Fallmerayer decided to seek his fame in military
service and joined the Bavarian infantry as a subaltern. He fought with distinction at Hanau on October
30, 1813, and served throughout the campaign in France. He remained in the army of occupation on
the banks of the Rhine until the battle of Waterloo, when he spent six months at Orléans as adjutant to
General von Spreti. Two years of garrison life at Lindau on Lake Constance convinced him that his
desire for military glory could not be fulfilled, and he devoted himself instead to the study of modern
Greek, Persian and Turkish.
Resigning his commission in 1818, he was engaged as a teacher of Latin and Greek in the gymnasium
at Augsburg, where his students included the young Napoleon III. In Augsburg his liberal, anti-clerical,
tendencies, which had already begun to develop during his student years, expressed themselves in
opposition to the growing ultramontanism of the Bavarian state.
In 1821 Fallmerayer accepted another position at the Progymnasium in Landshut, where he continued
to teach classical languages, in addition to religion, German, history, and geography. Landshut was at
the time still a great university city, and Fallmerayer took advantage of its resources to continue his
study of history and languages.
In February 1823 Fallmerayer learned of a prize offered by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and
Letters to encourage research into the history of the Empire of Trebizond. This late medieval kingdom,
located on the south coast of the Black Sea, was at the time known only through scattered references
in Byzantine and Turkish chronicles. Fallmerayer began to collect additional sources in a number of
languages, including Arabic and Persian, from libraries across Europe, and corresponded with various
scholars, including Silvestre de Sacy and Carl Benedict Hase. In December of the same year
Fallmerayer submitted the resulting manuscript to the Danish Academy, and in 1824 he was awarded
the prize. Fallmerayer's study, the Geschichte des Kaisertums von Trapezunt, was however not
published until 1827.
Fallmerayer attempted to convert his success into professional advancement in the Bavarian
educational system. In the fall of 1824 he was named Professor at the Landshut Gymnasium, but in a
series of letters to the kings of Bavaria, first to Maximilian I and then, following his death, to Ludwig I,
Fallmerayer requested further funding for his research and a position as a professor at the University of
Landshut. These requests were however denied, perhaps on account of Fallmerayer's liberal political
views.
In 1826 the University of Landshut was moved to Munich, the capital of the Bavarian state, while the
Munich Lyceum was moved to Landshut. Fallmerayer was named Professor of History at the latter
institution. In the academic year 1826-27, he offered a lecture course on universal history. His inaugural
lecture was marked, once again, by his anti-clericalism and reformist-liberal political views. He returned
to these themes in his final lecture, in which he presented a vision of a unified Europe under "the rule of
public virtues and of laws."[5] These lectures, together with his distinctly "unpatriotic" lectures on
Bavarian history, began to draw criticism from the more conservative elements of the academic
establishment.
In 1827 the Geschichte des Kaisertums von Trapezunt was finally published, and met with universal
praise from its reviewers, including Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Carl Hase. The reaction of the
Bavarian establishment was somewhat cooler, in part due to the book's preface. Here Fallmerayer had
stated as a "law of nature" that the attainment of earthly power by priests leads to the "deepest
degradation of the human race."[6]

The Greek theory[edit]

Following the publication of his Trebizond study, Fallmerayer devoted his scholarly activities to another
Greek region of the late Middle Ages, namely, the Morea. In particular, he developed his theory that the
ancient, "Hellenic", population of the south Balkans had been replaced during the Migration
Period by Arvanitic, Aromanian, Slavic and Turkic peoples, a theory which he advocated with
characteristic zeal.
The first volume of Fallmerayer's Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters appeared in
1830, and he expressed his central theory in the foreword as follows:
The race of the Hellenes has been wiped out in Europe. Physical beauty, intellectual brilliance, innate
harmony and simplicity, art, competition, city, village, the splendour of column and temple — indeed,
even the name has disappeared from the surface of the Greek continent.... Not the slightest drop of
undiluted Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece. [7]
This phenomenon was further interpreted by Fallmerayer as an indication of the potential of the "Slavic"
nations to overwhelm the "Latin" and the "German", a line of thought which he would later develop in
his political writings. He further argued that the Great Powers who had supported the Greek War of
Independence which was led by Arvanites and Aromanians had been led by a "classical intoxication" to
misjudge the character of the modern Greek state.
The Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea set Fallmerayer at loggerheads with the European Philhellenes in
general, and with the Bavarian King Ludwig I in particular, a convinced Philhellene who already in 1829
had begun to advance the candidacy of his son, Otto, for the Greek throne (Otto became King of
Greece in 1832). Ludwig's philhellenism was in fact grounded in the conviction that the Greek revolt
against Ottoman rule represented the return of antique Hellenic virtue. [8] Ludwig's displeasure with
Fallmerayer led to a long delay in the confirmation of Fallmerayer's election to the Bavarian Academy of
Sciences and Humanities.
The earliest scholarly reviews of Fallmerayer's work were likewise negative. He was accused of
philological errors by the Slovenian linguist Jernej Kopitar, and of misreading the historical sources by
the historians Johann Zinkeisen and Karl Hopf. Fallmerayer's ideas caused fierce reaction from various
scholars of the newly established Greek state and triggered a search for continuity within Greek
historiography, in an attempt to prove the existence of links between modern Greeks and the ancient
Greek civilization."[9]
On March 8, 2017, an international scientific research was published in the European Journal of
Human Genetics, which proposed that, despite their genetical variations, the Greeks of Peloponnese
are genetically connected with Sicilians and Italians of Southern Italy and have almost no connection
with modern North Slavic DNA.[10]