Upset by the critical reaction to his Morea study, Fallmerayer resolved to travel abroad to collect material for the projected second volume. An opportunity presented itself when the Russian Count
Alexander Ivanovich Ostermann-Tolstoy arrived in Munich, seeking a learned companion for an eastward journey. Fallmerayer applied for and received a year-long leave from his teaching duties, and in August of 1831 departed from Munich with Ostermann-Tolstoy.
The two sailed first from
Trieste to
Alexandria, planning to arrive in
Jerusalem by Christmas. Instead they remained in Egypt for nearly a year, leaving for Palestine in the summer of 1832. Early in 1833 they sailed for
Istanbul by way of
Cyprus and
Rhodes. In November of 1833 Fallmerayer finally set foot in the Morea, where the party remained for a month before travelling north to
Attica. There Fallmerayer was struck by the preponderance of
Arvanitika, a language closely related to modern
Albanian. The party arrived in Italy in February of 1834, and returned to Munich in August of the same year.
Upon his return Fallmerayer discovered that the Landshut Lyceum had in the meantime been moved to
Freising, and that his position had been eliminated. Behind this early "retirement" lay Fallmerayer's "known convictions, which, particularly in religious matters, are incompatible with the teaching profession." He was instead offered an
Ordinarius position as a member of the Bavarian Academy, where his first lecture concerned the "Albanization" of the population of Attica. His lecture was answered with an attack on his theories by
Friedrich Wilhelm Thiersch, and the two opposing lectures led to a controversy in Munich academic circles, as well as in the popular press.
The controversy had a pointedly political dimension, with Thiersch representing the "Idealpolitik" position, according to which Bavaria should support the Greek state, and Fallmerayer advocating a hands-off "Realpolitik." This political polemic was further provoked by the preface to the second volume of Fallmerayer's
Geschichte, published in 1836, in which he wrote that the Greek War of Independence was a "purely Shkypitarian [Albanian], not a Hellenic Revolution." He advocated furthermore the replacement of the German monarchy in Greece by a native regime.
1839 marked the beginning of Fallmerayer's career as a correspondent for the
Allgemeine Zeitung, where he would continue to publish until his death. Fallmerayer's contributions to the
AZ included travel essays, book reviews, political columns, and
Feuilletons.
Fallmerayer soon after left the country again on account of political troubles, and spent the greater part of the next four years in travel, spending the winter of 1839–1840 with Count Tolstoy at
Geneva. Between July of 1840 and June of 1842 Fallmerayer embarked on his second major journey, setting out from
Regensburg and travelling along the
Danube and across the
Black Sea to
Trebizond. After long stays in Trebizond, Istanbul,
Athos-Chalkidiki and the rest of
Macedonia, and Athens, he returned to Munich via Trieste and Venice.
Fallmerayer published numerous reports from this journey in the
AZ, in which he offered a mix of political observations, restatements and further developments of the Greek theory, and "charming descriptions of Anatolian and Turkish landscapes [that] bear comparison with the best examples of 19th-century
Reisebilder (travel images)." During his year-long stay in Istanbul (October 10, 1841 through October 24, 1841), Fallmerayer began to advocate European support of the
Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against the growing influence of the
Russian Empire in the Balkans. These articles were collected and published in 1845 as the
Fragmente aus dem Orient, the work on which Fallmerayer's fame as a
littérateur largely rests.
Fallmerayer's anti-Russian sentiments were not yet fully developed, and upon his return to Munich in 1842, he was befriended by the Russian poet and diplomat
Fyodor Tyutchev. This latter had been entrusted by
Karl Nesselrode and
Alexander von Benckendorff to find a new spokesperson for Russian interests in Germany. Fallmerayer's Greek thesis had aroused interest in Russian circles, and it was perhaps for this reason that Tyutchev approached Fallmerayer and proposed that he should serve as a journalistic mouthpiece for Czarist policy. Fallmerayer declined, and it has indeed been suggested that his growing opposition to Russian expansionism was provoked by this encounter.
By 1845, when the
Fragmente were published, Fallmerayer's distrust of the Tsars had led him to a view of world-historical development that was opposed to the idealistic accounts of
Hegel and of Fallmerayer's most vocal opponent, Thiersch. Instead of steady progress toward freedom, Fallmerayer perceived a fundamental polarity between "East" and "West":
For nearly eighteen aeons [Äonen], all history has been the result of the struggle between two basic elements, split apart by a divine power from the very beginning: a flexible life-process on the one side, and a formless, undeveloped stasis on the other. The symbol of the former is eternal Rome, with the entire Occident lying behind her; the symbol of the latter is Constantinople, with the ossified Orient.... That the Slavs might be one of the two world-factors, or if one prefers, the shadow of the shining image of European humanity, and therefore that the constitution of the earth might not admit philosophical reconstruction without their assent, is the great scholarly heresy of our time.
Thiersch once more replied to these polemics in an article, also published in the
AZ, arguing that the placement of western-European rulers on the thrones of the new Slavic states in the Balkans would be sufficient to prevent the rise of a "new Byzantine-Hellenic world empire."
Fallmerayer's essays in the
AZ drew the attention of the Bavarian Crown Prince
Maximilian, whose political views were significantly more liberal than those of his father. Between 1844 and 1847 Fallmerayer served Maximilian as a mentor, and occasionally as a private tutor, on historical and political questions. His analysis of Balkan politics, commissioned by Maximilian in 1844, is preserved.
In May of 1847 Fallmerayer set out on his third and final eastern journey, leaving from Munich for Trieste, whence he sailed to Athens, where he had an audience with
King Otto. By June he had arrived in
Büyükdere, the summer residence of the Istanbul elite, where he remained for four months before travelling south to the Holy Land via
Bursa and
İzmir. In January of 1848 he sailed from Beirut back to İzmir, where he stayed until his return to Munich. Fallmerayer's contributions to the
AZ from this period emphasized the strength of Ottoman rule and reformist tendencies in the Turkish government, which he contrasted to the "desolate" condition of the
Kingdom of Greece.