Lajos Thallóczy

Lajos Thallóczy (born Ludwig Strommer, also known as Ludwig von Thallóczy; 8 December 1857 – 1 December 1916) was a Hungarian historian, a politician and diplomat, the head of the joint finance department of the Dual Monarchy, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the president of the Hungarian Historical Society from 1913 to 1916 and a renowned albanologist. As a diplomat in Austria-Hungary he played a very significant role in the Balkans as he was considered an expert on the history of the region. He was one of the most important advisers to Gyula Andrássy and Béni Kállay in questions of Balkan policy and even to the emperor Franz Joseph and to the minister of the government. His academic work has produced respected results in the study of south Slavic countries and he is regarded as the founder of modern Hungarian researches of the Balkans.

Biography Ludwig Strommer was born into a German-speaking family in the Hungarian city of Kaschau or Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia) on 8 December 1856. He came from a family of officials and teachers, his father Benedek Strommer was an imperial official who did not speak Hungarian. The Strommer family moved from Kassa to Buda where Ludwig went to Hungarian school. in 1877 he changed his name from Ludwig Strommer to Lajos (= Ludwig) Thallóczy for career reasons. Thallóczy took the Croatian-Hungarian aristocratic name Talovac / Thallóczy after completing his history studies in Budapest. He also graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy. Partly because of this interest Thallóczy was employed within Austria-Hungary administration with title of court counselor to create one work on popular history of Albanians and one textbook. According to Fan Noli Thallóczy proclaimed that opinions about Skanderbeg's Serbian descent are legends.

Bosnia In 1884 Thallóczy was commissioned by Reich Finance Minister Benjámin Kállay to research the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the aim of promoting the development of a Bosnian national identity. After ten years of research, this resulted in a comprehensive collection of documents on the history of Bosnia. Thallóczy was transferred to Vienna at the request of Béni Kállay. He was put in charge of cultural and educational issues in Bosnia and Herzegovina and responsible for Bosnian affairs in the joint finance ministry.

Thallóczy became interested in heraldry in a period when scientific circles became interested to select the "right" coat of arms for Bosnia and Herzegovina. His main interests were Bosnian history, especially genealogy, heraldry and biographies of prominent individuals from its medieval period. Supported by Thallóczy's selective use of tendentiously interpreted sources aimed to satisfy the political aspirations of the empire by representing a historically connected fate of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary the government imposed his proposal for the official coat of arms of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1889. He introduced ethnically neutral yellow and red combination of colors to confront "misuse of Serbian and Croatian colors". He published numerous Cyrillic and Latin charters, and also works about the duke Hrvoje Vukčić, history of Jajce and numerous other, Bosnia-related, subjects, with the main findings published in the book Studien zur Geschichte Bosniens und Serbiens im Mittelalter, published in Munich and Leipzig in the year 1914.

Serbia During the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Serbia of World War I, Thallóczy served as civilian commissioner of the Military General Governorate of Serbia. Thallóczy died in a train accident near Budapest while returning from the funeral of the emperor Franz Joseph I.

Assessment Thallóczy was the student and successor of Hungarian politician and historian Béni Kállay. These two historians and Istvan Burian comprised the group of Hungarian Balkanists. Lajos Thallóczy was dubbed by his contemporary researchers of the Balkans as a "mobile Balkans institute". Since 1914, he was a member of the Balkans Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is regarded as the academic who started modern Hungarian research of the Balkans in the assessment of his work in the period between WWI and WWII. Thallóczy's work produced important results in the studies of the south Slavic countries (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia).

Selected works

Studien zur Geschichte Bosniens und Serbiens im Mittelalter, 1914 – coauthored with Konstantin Jireček; Milan Šufflay; Theodro Anton Max Ippen; Ernst C Sedlmayr; Josef Ivanič; Imre Karácson; Béla Péch; Karl Thopia