彼得·弗兰科潘

彼得·弗兰科潘（英语：Peter Frankopan，1971年3月22日—）是一位英国历史学家、作家和酒店经营者，主要作品有《第一次十字军东征》（The First Crusade: The Call from the East）、《丝绸之路：一部全新的世界史》（The Silk Roads: A New History of the World）等。

Peter Frankopan (born 22 March 1971) is a British historian, writer, and hotelier. He is a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford, and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is also professor of Silk Roads studies at the University of Cambridge, a bye-fellow of King's College and associate director of the UNESCO Silk Roads programme. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and President of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs. He is best known for his 2015 book The Silk Roads.

Early life, ancestry and education

Frankopan is the second of five children born to Croatian Louis Doimi de Lupis (later added Frankopan Šubić) (1939–2018) and a Swedish-born barrister and professor of international law Ingrid Detter. His elder sister is Lady Nicholas Windsor. By birth, Peter is a member of an ancient, untitled Croatian nobility of Italian origin who can trace their noble lineage back to 1200, with Domnius Doymi, nobilis traguriensis as their earlist known ancestor. His father, Louis Doimi de Lupis, has faced allegations that he is not a member of the extinct Italian aristocratic Frankopan family.

The Doimi family was granted nobility of the Island of Brazza in 1390 by King Tvrtko I of Bosnia and nobility of Spalato in 1413 by Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor as the King of Hungary. Their status was later elevated with a grant of Venetian nobility in 1753. The compound surname Doimi de Lupis originated around 1765 through the marriage between the noble Doimi and the comital de Lupis families, officially merging the two lineages. Members of the family were granted Austrian nobility in 1855 and the hereditary title of Ritter in 1865. The family also owned an ancestral Vukašinović-Dojmi palace in the town of Vis, built in the turn of the 18th century, on the Adriatic coast. They welcomed and hosted Franz Joseph I of Austria during his official visit to Vis island on 12 May 1875.

Peter attended Eton College and then received a degree in Byzantine history from Jesus College, Cambridge, before getting his D.Phil. at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is a senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. His areas of focus are the history of the Byzantine Empire, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Russia, as well as the interdependence of Islam and Christianity. He has also studied Greek literature of the Middle Ages.

Writing career

Frankopan's first book of history, The First Crusade: The Call from the East, was published in 2012. The book received a five-star review in the Daily Telegraph from Nicholas Shakespeare, who called it a "persuasive and bracing work" and said: "Peter Frankopan is not yet well known, but he deserves to be." Michael Dirda, in The Washington Post, praised this "carefully researched book." Thomas F. Madden, specialist on the Crusades, seems more critical: There are today so many histories of the First Crusade jostling for shelf space that new authors are forced to find ways to differentiate theirs from all of the others. In some cases this has led to genuinely innovative approaches; in others, rather awkward attempts at novelty have resulted. This is one of the latter.

In 2015, Frankopan's book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World was published. Writing in the Telegraph, Bettany Hughes praised it as a "charismatic and essential book", while Anthony Sattin, writing in The Guardian, called it "ambitious" and "full of insight but let down by factual errors". Frankopan's follow-up book, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (Bloomsbury Publishing), was published in 2018.

In March 2023, Bloomsbury published Frankopan's The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, described as a history of the world, written from a fundamentally environmental perspective. It was reviewed in The New York Review of Books by Christopher de Bellaigue.

Frankopan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.