Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources (empiricism), an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics (Außenpolitik).

Ranke also had a great influence on Western historiography and is considered a symbol of the quality of 19th century German historical studies.

[8] In 1824, Ranke launched his career with the book Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514[7] (Histories of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514) in which he used an unusually wide variety of sources for a historian of the age, including "memoirs, diaries, personal and formal missives, government documents, diplomatic dispatches and first-hand accounts of eye-witnesses".

[9] After the minister of education was impressed with the work of a historian who did not have access to the nation's great public libraries, Ranke was given a position in the University of Berlin, where he was a professor for nearly fifty years, starting in 1825.

[7] He found time to write a short book entitled Die Serbische Revolution (1829)[7] from material supplied to him by Vuk Karadžić, a Serb who had himself been witness to the scenes he related during the First Serbian Uprising in 1804.

[12] In this book, Ranke coined the term "Counter-Reformation" and offered colorful portrayals of Pope Paul IV, Ignatius of Loyola and Pope Pius V. He promoted research into primary sources: "I see the time approaching when we shall base modern history, no longer on the reports even of contemporary historians, except insofar as they had personal and immediate knowledge of facts; and still less on work yet more remote from the source; but rather on the narratives of eyewitnesses, and on genuine and original documents".

The British Catholic historian Lord Acton defended Ranke's book as the most fair-minded, balanced and objective study ever written on the papacy of the 16th century.

They were engaged on 1 October and married in Bowness, England in a ceremony officiated by her brother Robert Perceval Graves, an Anglican priest.

[17] From 1847 to 1848, Ranke published Neun Bücher preußischer Geschichte (translated as Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Prussia, during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)[7] in which he examined the fortunes of the Hohenzollern family and state from the Middle Ages to the reign of Frederick the Great.

Many Prussian nationalists were offended by Ranke's portrayal of Prussia as a typical medium-sized German state rather than as a great power.

In a series of lectures[18] given before future King Maximilian II of Bavaria in 1854, Ranke argued that "every age is next to God", by which he meant that every period of history is unique and must be understood in its own context.

[citation needed] From 1859 to 1867, Ranke published the six-volume History of England Principally in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Englische Geschichte vornehmlich im XVI and XVII Jahrhundert), followed by an expanded nine-volume edition from 1870 to 1884, which extended his huge reach even farther.

At this point, he was eighty years old, and devoted the rest of his career to shorter treatises on German history that supplement his earlier writings.

But a historian must be old, not only because of the immeasurable extent of his field of study, but because of the insight into the historical process which a long life confers, especially under changing conditions.

For his personal development requires that great events complete their course before his eyes, that others collapse, that new forms be attempted.After Ranke's death, Syracuse University purchased his collection.

[citation needed] In the 19th century, Ranke's work was very popular and his ideas about historical practice gradually became dominant in western historiography.

Despite his opening statement, Ranke largely treated all of the nations under examination separately until the outbreak of the wars for the control of Italy starting in 1494.

However, the book is best remembered for Ranke's comment: "To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages.

Following Georg Iggers, Peter Novick has argued that Ranke, who was more of a romantic and idealist than his American contemporaries understood, meant instead that the historian should discover the facts and find the essences behind them.

[27] Ranke went on to write that the historian must seek the "Holy hieroglyph" that is God's hand in history, keeping an "eye for the universal" whilst taking "pleasure in the particular".

[28] While Ranke's methods remain influential in the practice of history, his broader ideas of historiography and empiricism are now regarded by some as outdated and no longer credible.