**SYBEL**, HEINRICH von. - German historian, born on 2 Dec. 1817 in Düsseldorf, died on 10 Aug. 1895 in Marburg. He was professor at Bonn in 1844, at Marburg in 1846, at Munich in 1856, again at Bonn in 1861, and director of the Prussian State Archives in 1875.
His works on the First Crusade (*Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzugs*, 1841) and on the genesis of the German Kingdom in the Middle Ages (*Die Entstehung des deutschen Königtums*, 1844) rank among the finest critical productions of the Rankean school. After 1848, Sybel distanced himself from Ranke and became the leader of the Small German school of historiography, subordinating impartial research and understanding of the past to the interpretive canon of the validity of the national state in history. The first document of this tendency is *Geschichte der Revolutionszeit* (5 vols., 1853–58). Subsequently, he polemicized against Ficker, condemning the Italian policy of the medieval emperors as detrimental to German interests in the lands east of the Elbe. From 1889 to 1894, he wrote, drawing on Prussian archives, *Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs durch Wilhelm I* (7 vols.). In 1856, he founded the *Historische Zeitschrift*, the most authoritative German historical journal.
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