Roger Bigelow Merriman

Roger Bigelow Merriman (1876–1945) was an American historian of early modern Europe and a Harvard professor for four decades. Born in Boston and educated at Harvard, Oxford and Berlin, he published his first book, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (1902), from his doctoral research, the first scholarly biography of Henry VIII's minister and the first edition of his correspondence. His major work was The Rise of the Spanish Empire in the Old World and in the New, in four volumes (1918–1934), followed by Suleiman the Magnificent (1944) and a study of the revolutions of the seventeenth century. He was the first master of Eliot House at Harvard.