returned to these themes in his final lecture, in which he presented a vision of a unified Europe under "the rule of public virtues and of laws." These lectures, together with his distinctly "unpatriotic" lectures on Bavarian history, began to draw criticism from the more conservative elements of the academic establishment. In 1827 the Geschichte des Kaisertums von Trapezunt was finally published, and met with universal praise from its reviewers, including Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Carl Hase. The reaction of the Bavarian establishment was somewhat cooler, in part due to the book's preface. Here Fallmerayer had stated as a "law of nature" that the attainment of earthly power by priests leads to the "deepest degradation of the human race." The Greek theory Following the publication of his Trebizond study, Fallmerayer devoted his scholarly activities to another Greek region of the late Middle Ages, namely, the Morea. In particular, he developed his theory that the ancient, "Hellenic", population of the south Balkans had been replaced during the Migration Period by Arvanitic, Aromanian, Slavic and Turkic peoples, a theory which he advocated with characteristic zeal. The first volume of Fallmerayer's Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters appeared in 1830, and he expressed his central theory in the foreword as follows: The race of the Hellenes has been wiped out in Europe. Physical beauty, intellectual brilliance, innate harmony and simplicity, art, competition, city, village, the splendour of column and temple — indeed, even the name has disappeared from the surface of the Greek continent.... Not the slightest drop of undiluted Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece. This phenomenon was further interpreted by Fallmerayer as an indication of the potential of the "Slavic" nations to overwhelm the "Latin" and the "German", a line of thought which he would later develop in his political writings. He further argued that the Great Powers who had supported the Greek War of Independence which was led by Arvanites and Aromanians had been led by a "classical intoxication" to misjudge the character of the modern Greek state. The Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea set Fallmerayer at loggerheads with the European Philhellenes in general, and with the Bavarian King Ludwig I in particular, a convinced Philhellene who already in 1829 had begun to advance the candidacy of his son, Otto, for the Greek throne (Otto became King of Greece in 1832). Ludwig's philhellenism