On August 26th, 2026 Hans Georg Majer has passed away. Hans Georg Majer was the retired holder of the Chair of Turcology and longtime director of the Institute for the History and Culture of the Near East and Turcology at the University of Munich. He was 89 years old.
Hans Georg Majer worked primarily on the history of the early modern Ottoman Empire, with a special focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though his articles addressed subjects relating to the time from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. Particularly important were his studies of Ottoman legal scholars, Habsburg–Ottoman relations, and portraits of Ottoman sultans.
He pursued this last topic in the framework of an international, interdisciplinary research network that he had co-initiated. Bringing colleagues together, building connections, and cooperating with them in the development of new lines of research was one of his strengths. He vigorously promoted Ottoman history as also being the history of Southeastern Europe; accordingly, he was active in the Southeast Europe Association, whose academic advisory board he chaired for many years. His attention to the Italian sources and connections of the Ottoman Empire—a small Munich tradition—was as important to him as links to Iran, whose history he competently covered in his courses. He coordinated the first edition of a register of complaints addressed to the Imperial Council, published in 1984, when Ottoman State Archives had not yet opened its door to researchers.
At his tiny institute, Hans Georg Majer succeeded in transforming Ottoman studies from a subject oriented philology (Sachphilologie) concerned with the past into a historical discipline connected to international scholarship and its methodologies. When he served as dean at LMU Munich, faculty reform was underway; it was especially thanks to him that cultural ad regional studies—mostly “small disciplines”—retained their own faculty. Later, he founded the Munich Centre for Islamic Studies (MZIS, now 4MZ), which brought together, and continues to do so, Munich’s experts on the Middle East across disciplines and institutions.
Hans Georg Majer was an exceptionally meticulous scholar who polished every sentence he wrote. For this reason, many of his works, including a major monograph on Mustafa II, were never completed. Everything he did publish, however, is worth reading and a pleasure to read.
When I began my studies at LMU Munich in the winter semester of 1980–81, Hans Georg Majer just became chair of what was then called Turkology. I was to remain until I had completed my doctorate. I benefited from outstanding scholars such as Klaus Kreiser, Michael Ursinus, Johann Strauss, and Suraiya Faroqhi, who worked at the institute during these years. There are no limits to what I have learned from Hans Georg himself in these years. For more than a decade he was a measure and mentor, and afterward, for decades, a friend and role model. He was reserved but attentive, dependable in both disagreement and agreement, and, with his dry but warm humour, always recognizable as the good man whom I miss.
Prof. Dr. Christoph K. Neumann