Walter Ullmann

Walter Ullmann ( born November 29, 1910 in Pulkau, Lower Austria, † 18 January 1983 in Cambridge ) was a British historian of Austrian origin.

The son of a doctor visited the classical language school in horn and started after high school to study law in Vienna and Innsbruck. In 1934 he received his doctorate in Innsbruck. He then spent several years at the court in Korneuburg active. The "Anschluss" of Austria in 1938 prevented the Habilitation entitled The essence of criminal guilt. As a grandfather Ullmann was non-Aryans, the situation was dangerous as well for Ullmann. He went to England in 1939 and got a job as a teacher at the Catholic boarding school in Leicestershire. In 1940 he signed up as a volunteer. Ullmann was used in the engineering corps, where he was, however, scrapped three years later for health reasons. After the war he became a lecturer in Leeds and the University of Cambridge in 1949 Lecturer and since 1959 a Fellow of Trinity College. He became professor of medieval history in 1972 in Cambridge. Ullmann students were Antony J. Black, Alan B. Cobban, Charles Duggan, John Gilchrist, Peter Lineham, Janet L. Nelson, Brian Tierney and Michael Wilks.

Ullmann mainly dealt with the medieval history of ideas and the history of the Papacy in the Middle Ages. His most successful book was The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, which deals with the relationship between secular and religious violence in the Middle Ages. The University of Innsbruck awarded him an honorary doctorate in political science.