Cyril Toumanoff

Cyril Leo Toumanoff (Georgian: კირილ თუმანოვი; Russian: Кирилл Львович Туманов; 10 October 1913 – 4 February 1997) was a Georgian-American historian, and academic genealogist who mostly specialized in the history and genealogies of medieval Georgia, Armenia, Iran, and the Byzantine Empire. Born in the Russian Empire into a princely family, Toumanoff escaped to the United States after the Russian Revolution. His works have significantly influenced the Western scholarship of the medieval Caucasus.

Cyril Toumanoff was born on 10 October 1913 in Saint Petersburg, the son of Prince Leo Tumanov, a military officer of the Russian Imperial army. His father, who was born in Yerevan, was descended from the Armeno-Georgian princely family of Tumanishvili (Russified to Tumanov) whose ancestors had emigrated from their original homeland in Cilician Armenia in the 15th century. This family is on the list of the Georgian princes that was attached to the Treaty of Georgievsk concluded between the Georgian king Erekle II and the Russian empress Catherine II in 1783. On December 6, 1850, the Tumanishvili were officially enrolled on the Russian Empire's list of Georgian princely families as knyaz Tumanov. Toumanoff's mother, Yelizaveta Zhdanova, was a descendant of a number of Russian noble families, with genealogical ties with Western European nobility.

Toumanoff's parents fled the October Revolution in Saint Petersburg in 1917. His father joined the White Russian forces during the Russian Civil War, while his mother was executed by the Bolsheviks. Cyril Toumanoff was initially sheltered by his maternal grandparents in Astrakhan before the family fled to Serbia. In 1925, he and his father escaped to the United States. He graduated from the Lenox School in 1931 and went to Harvard University. He then studied Armenology in Brussels under Nicholas Adontz and Georgian in Berlin under Michael Tsereteli. During these years, Toumanoff converted to Roman Catholicism. A breach with his Orthodox Christian father ensued which ended when they reconciled at the latter's deathbed in 1943.

Toumanoff earned a doctorate from the Georgetown University in 1943 and soon accepted a position there which he held until his retirement as a professor emeritus of history in 1970. Thereafter he moved to Rome. An authority on nobiliary and dynastic questions, Toumanoff was also a Professed Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, High Historical Consultant, Grand Magistry, and the Grand Prior of Bohemia. Having taken religious orders he became known as Fra Cyril.

Toumanoff died in 1997 in Rome at the age of 83. He is buried at the chapel of the Knights of Malta at Campo Verano, Rome.