Truth and Prejudice, and Steven Runciman

I've read a lot of historians who have the best reputations, who've written over the course of the past 2,500 years, in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, French, German, English and some other languages, and the one who has impressed me the most, by far, is Steven Runciman, born 1903, died 2001. (The historians wrote in those languages. In the case of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and some other languages, I've read them in translation.) At the beginning of Chapter I of his first book, The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus & His Reign, published in 1929, Runciman lays out a lot of what his career is going to be about. He begins:

"In the battles between truth and prejudice, waged on the field of history books, it must be confessed that the latter usually wins."

So right away, he admits that he's fighting an uphill battle which he doesn't expect to win.

 

Also right at the beginning of his first book, he lays out the field of battle where he's going to struggle to put the facts across and defeat prejudice. It's a field my brother and I have often discussed recently: the image, in the West, of the Eastern Roman Empire (usually referred to in the West as Byzantium), after the Western Empire fell. Runciman describes how crude, warlike Westerners, the Crusaders, came into contact with Byzantium and found

 

"[...]a society where everyone read and wrote, ate food with forks and preferred diplomacy to war."

  

Runciman states flatly, here at the beginning of his first book, that up until shortly before his own time, prejudice had trounced truth even in the best history written in the West when it came to Byzantium. And then he spent a very long and brilliant career backing up this flat statement. Rather than admit that Byzantine society was more advanced in many ways than their own, Western historians made "byzantine" an adjective meaning decadent, flabby, lazy, cowardly, cunning, etc, etc. Runciman's mentor JB Bury (1861-1927), a pioneer in bucking this pervasive trend, went so far as to refuse to even use the term "Byzantium" to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire after the Western Empire had fallen. 

 

Bury, Runciman and some like-minded Western historians have made some headway in changing the attitudes of historians, and somewhat less, so far, in the consciousness of the general public. It's still quite common to encounter very well-educated Westerners who talk of the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476, who refer to the Catholic Church before the Reformation, and Catholicism plus Protestantism since then, as "the whole of Christendom," completely ignoring Greek Orthodoxy, not to mention the Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian and Nestorian churches who never acknowledged Catholic or orthodox supremacy.

It seems to me, now, simple enough to recognize that, for example, the Romans who were represented at Jerusalem by Pontius Pilate and a garrison of soldiers in the time of Christ did not go anywhere in AD 476, and to grasp why Christians who already had their own written languages were not inclined to accept either a Latin or a Greek spiritual overlordship. 

But did I see any of this before people like Runciman and Bury pointed it out to me? No, of course I didn't, any more than I saw how obviously Gothic cathedral towers, all built after the Crusades began, mimic Muslim minarets, before that was pointed out to me.

You have to see a truth first. Then it can become obvious. Not the other way around. Which usually means that someone else has to point it out to you. 

Some of the Primary Latin Sources for the Crusades from 1095 to 1187

Eyewitness and contemporary accounts of the Crusades in the period from Pope Urban II's speech at Clermont in 1095 which launched the First Crusade, to the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, were written in many languages including Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, Hebrew, Persian, Armenian, Georgian and Slavonic. The western European Crusaders themselves, and their compatriots, wrote in several languages besides Latin, most notably French, but also German and others.

In this essay I'm confining myself to a few items written in Latin, and there are many other significant Latin sources which could be named besides the ones I'll mention. To get a sense of the primary sources available for the study of the Crusades, one place to begin would be the bibliographies in the three volumes of Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades, and I repeat, that would be one place to begin. It has now been more than 65 years since Runciman published his account, and scholarship has by no means stood still in the meantime.

The Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum was written by an anonymous soldier serving under Bohemond of Taranto in the First Crusade. It begins with Pope Urban's speech in Clermont and concludes shortly after the Crusaders take Jerusalem in 1099. Some of the author's contemporaries derided him as a commoner and simpleton, which didn't stop them from using his account as a basis for their own, and seldom actually improving upon it factually.

Raymond of Aguilers became the Chaplain of Raymond of Toulouse during the First Crusade, and was also present at the taking of Jerusalem. His account, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Jerusalem, while filling out some details of the First Crusade, concentrates mostly on Raymond.

Fulcher of Chartres was the chaplain of Baldwin of Boulogne, who entered Jerusalem soon after it fell and became King Baldwin I of Jerusalem. Fulcher published the Gesta Francorum Iherusalem peregrinantium in three parts, in 1101, 1006 and 1127.

Three near-contemporary historians of the First Crusade, Ekkehard of Aura, Rudolph of Caen and Albert of Aix, did not participate in in it. Ekkehard and Rudolph arrived in the East years after Jerusalem was taken, and wrote accounts which did not add much to the record. Albert never was in the in the Holy Land. Around 1130 he published his account of the First Crusade and of the first years of the Kingdom Jerusalem, Liber Christianae expeditionis pro ereptione, emundatione, et restitutione sanctae Hierosolymitanae ecclesiae, which until the modern era was much admired for its prose style and considered authoritative. Modern scholars have found that Albert, although admirably energetic in bringing together numerous sources, was not particularly critical of them.

William of Tyre was born in the East shortly before 1130, and was Archbishop of Tyre from 1175 until his death in 1186. William relies heavily of Fulcher's account for events between 1095 and 1127; from there until it ends in 1184, his Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum is the most important Latin account of the events in the Holy Land, and -- by far -- the finest Latin work written by anyone who lived in the Crusader states. William has a breadth of vision, education and writing skill which rival those of any other Medieval Latin historian.

A brief anonymous account entitled Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum describes how Saladin conquered Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine.

The Middle Ages

To Catholic apologists, they were the good old days,



between a bloodthirsty and spiritually empty ancient Graeco-Roman world and a modern West which has "lost its way." I don't know how anyone who is not a Catholic who really believes that Jesus Christ is the salvation of the world and that the Pope is his represenative on Earth, that is to say: a particularly conservative Catholic, can have studied the Middle Ages and come to such a positive assessment of them. To these apologists, such as Thomas F Madden, the fact that ancient civilization was not yet Catholic means that it was "bloodthirsty and spiritually empty," and our world today has "lost its way" because it is no longer monolithically Catholic. And the Crusaders were knights in shining armor on white horses saving damsels from the clutches of the minions of Satan.

Perhaps the academic study of the Middle Ages has usually been dominated by such idiotic notions, and the work of Gibbon and Runciman,



with its attempt at a somewhat higher level of realism, is an anomaly amid the academic study of the Middle Ages as a whole. After all, Medieval Europe is Catholic Europe, and it shouldn't be surprising if scholars with strong pre-dispositions to regard Catholicism favorably dominate the field. It's actually hard to find people who have specialized in the study of Medieval Europe who haven't taken potshots at Gibbon and Runciman, although they generally begin by acknowledging that both of them wrote very well. If they didn't acknowledge at least that much, they'd seem even more ridiculous to even more people than they already do. If you interested in the reactions of medieval historians in general to Gibbon and Runciman, look at the indexes of volumes on subjects to do with medieval history for references to the two of them. I daresay that few of those references will completely lack some harsh criticism, but that they will almost all lack actual specific treatments of specific passages in Gibbon or Runciman; in other words, you will read that Gibbon and/or Runciman has distorted this or that aspect of the Medieval world in a way completely unfair to Catholic Christianity, but you will not be given examples of how either one of them distorted what is in the the primary texts or in other evidence. for instance, you will not be shown evidence to refute what Runciman says about Armenian and Syriac Christians saying they were better off being ruled by Muslims than by either Orthodox Greeks or Catholic Crusaders. Which is what the primary documents record them as saying. You will not be shown refutations of what Gibbon and Runciman wrote about the Crusaders often having been much less than heroes on white knights. Because the two of them wrote such things not because of anti-Catholic axes they were grinding, but because that's what the evidence shows.

As I mentioned in a previous Wrong Monkey blog post, alternative history is not history, but fiction. So when the apologists say that the Catholic Church gave us universities and science, implying that without the Church things would have been much worse, they're not writing history, but fiction. And we would also be writing fiction if we replied that if so and so had been different, then this and that would have resulted. That's all alternative-reality fiction. If we really want to discuss history, we must stick as closely as possible to what we know.

Yes, universities sprang up in Medieval Europe beginning in the 12th century. But ancient schools, from Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, down to the most modest of institutions, were all closed down by the Christian authorities by the 6th century. Because they were "heathen," dontcha know. So should we see the Church as an institution which promoted learning, or one which restricted literacy for six centuries almost exclusively to its clergy? Well, it did restrict literacy in exactly that way. Literacy rates went down when the Christians took over, and did not begin to rise again for hundreds of years. I think a sober and realistic study must conclude that scholarship survived in Western Europe despite Christianity, rather than flourishing with its help.

Take a specific sub-set of learning, my special favorite, the ancient Classics. Catholic apologists love to point out that almost all of the texts of the ancient Latin classics which we now possess have survived because they were copied out by Catholic monks. And they're right, we have very few manuscripts of those texts which are exception to that rule: a few very old manuscripts copied out by "pagans" before the Christians wiped out "paganism;" and then some manuscripts made by non-monks in the early Renaissance before printing replaced handwriting as the dominant means of preserving these old texts.

But in addition to the Classical texts which Catholic monks preserved, many works of Classical literature disappeared during the Middle Ages. For every Medieval Catholic clergyman who was an enthusiastic fan of the ancients, it's easy to identify several who were ignorant of the Classics or even condemned them as wicked. A very poignant and much more concrete demonstration of how Medieval Europe destroyed the ancient Classics instead of preserving them are the many palimpsests of Classical texts discovered since the 18th century: Classical texts which were scraped off of pieces of parchment and written over with Christian texts. Modern science has allowed us to recover some of these ancient texts by reading the indentations they left in the parchment. There are few leading Classical authors who didn't write works we know of only by mentions in surviving texts, which went missing in the Middle Ages. Very many of the surviving works have survived with large gaps. There are very many ancient Greek and Latin authors who were very well thought of by their contemporaries, whom we know only by the praise of those contemporaries. We have no idea how many works of classical antiquity are now lost because Church authorities ordered them to be destroyed, how many because they were scraped away to make room for other writing, or how many because worn out parchments were used as fuel in stoves or two stuff furniture or to make book bindings or for some other purpose other than preserving the ancient texts. And until and unless we learn much more about how those texts were lost, we should be reserved in our praise of the Medieval clergy for saving what they did.

But the largest reservation I have about praising the Medieval world for its promotion of culture and learning comes from how intolerant it was. In pre-Christian Europe, one could openly express skepticism of all religions. In the Medieval world one was compelled, as least as far as public statements were concerned, to reject all religions but one and to believe in that one. The ancient Greeks and Romans didn't kill people for philosophical speculations. It wasn't dangerous to assert that the Earth orbited the Sun and not vice-versa. Galileo was threatened with torture and confined to his house for the last years of his life, not for rejecting Christianity -- he didn't -- and not for questioning whether Jesus was the savior of the world -- he never did any such thing -- and not for questioning the authority of the Pope -- he didn't do that either. He was threatened with torture and confined to his house for the last years of his life for looking through a telescope and writing about what he saw. It never would have occurred to any pre-Christian Greek or Roman to punish anyone for something like that. That drastic restriction of freedom of expression is the biggest reason I have to be disinclined to think of the Medieval world as having been wonderful.

But yes, the cathedrals and the Byzantine mosaics and other Medieval artworks are very beautiful.

AD 1200

At some point in the mid or late 1970's I read the novel Marathon Manby William Goldman. I don't know whether I read the novel before or after the movieof the same name was released in 1976, starring Dustin Hoffman, Lawrence Olivier, Roy Scheider and William Devane. In any case, I read the book before I saw the movie. I'm pretty sure I read it before 1978. Let's say I read it in 1977. What else happened in 1977? The Shah still ruled in Iran. Jimmy Carter was inaguarated as President and began the diplomatic efforts which would lead to the Camp David peace accords, and a Nobel Peace Peize shared by Prseident Sadat and Prime Minister Begin, the following year. Annie Hall was released. Jackson Browne's album Running on Emptywas released, and Paul Simon's Greatest Hits, Etc.,and the debut albums by The Clashand Elvis Costello.

I'm brainstorming here, trying to think of all the events from 1977 that I can, in order to flesh out the date, make it something with more depth and richness than a mere number. The title character of Marathon Man did this with some date. He was an avid amateur runner, he idolized great marathoners of the past and wished to emulate them, although he himself had not yet run a marathon. He was insecure about his running ability. He was much more confident in his ability as an historian. He was working on a doctorate at Columbia. It was hard to tell how accurate his opinion of his own strengths and weaknesses were, as the story was told strictly from his point of view. It's hard for a person to know what he or she does well or poorly. Grades and races and prizes and reviews and other measures of success sometimes help us out with our estimations of ourselves. Sometimes they don't.

I have no idea whether Goldman had any accurate idea of how an historian went about his or her work. Still, I picked up the habit of brainstorming for events for a specific date from his fictional historian protagonist, and have found it very useful.

I also picked up the sarcastic sentence "Give the genius a box of fucking Mars bars" from the same fictional doctoral candidate, his bitter reply to someone trying to console hom over the recent and violent death of a loved one. Some phrases, like that one, just stick in my mind and I love them and quote them over and over. Not always with attribution. But if I've ever insulted you by saying "Give the genius a box of fucking Mars bars!" when you were trying to help me out with some insight or piece of information, now you know where I got it. And: sorry about that.

What was going on in AD 1200?

The Crusaders had lost Jerusalem to the Turks a few years previously, after holding it from 1099 to 1187; it would be a few more years before the Fourth Crusade would wrest Constantinople from the Byzantines, sack it savagely, and set up an entity based there known as the "Latin Empire," which was quite small as empires go, and would not outlast the 13th century. Francis of Assisi was a teenager, a Francophile quite enthusiastic about troubadours, and not yet a monk. Dominic of Osma had been a monk for a few years and had given away his posessions, but had not yet founded the Dominican order. The Fransican Roger Baconand the Dominican Thomas Aquinaswould not be born for a few years yet. The great Moslem scholar Averroes,whose writings were to have such a huge impact upon the philosophy of Bacon, Aquinas and so many other 13th century philosophers, Western and otherwise, had died in 1198. Albertus Magnus,Aquinas' mentor, may have been as old as 7, or he may not have been born for another 6 years, we aren't sure.

The troubadours were very popular in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, and the Minnesang, inspired by the troubadour phenomenon, was flourishing in Germany. Use of written French was already quite widespread; other vernacular languages were not not written very much, apart from troubadour songs, Minnesang and courtly romances. French was the only written vernacular which had began to challenge the dominance of Latin in Western Europe.

Marco Polo wouldn't be born for another half-century. Western European exploration of lands they considered exotic was still pretty much confined to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land.

Genghis Khan was 38 years old and had gone far in his efforts to unify the Mongol tribes in Central Asia, but had not yet begun upon his great wars of conquest of other nations. The Song dynasty ruled in China, the Sultanate of Khwarezm in Iran, the Ghurid Sultanate in northern India.

In the Americas the Mayans were centuries past their political and cultural height, the Incan empire and the forerunners of that of the Aztecs were just coming to be. Scholars debate whether there was already an Iroquois League. Most theorize that it would not come to be for over two centuries.

I don't really know squat about pre-Columbian societies. I know far less than squat about Africa.

I don't know a concise and convincing answer if someone were to read this essay and ask me why he or she should care about any of this. I think that about the best I could do would be to say that I had a lot of fun writing this, and that I hope it was of some interest to you. If not, I'm sorry, really I am. Ideally, you the reader are now stimulated to delve into research about all of these things brought together by their proximity to the date AD, 1200, as I am. That's the effect at which I aimed.

"Deus lo volt!"

On this day 914 years ago, 27 November 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II called for a holy war against the Muslims, who had been in control of Jesrusalem and much of area considered the Holy Land by Christians, Moslins and Jews alike, since the seventh century, and had recently been at war with the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor. More specifically, it was the Seldjuk Turks who were warring with the Byzantines in Asia Minor. Although the Christians of western Europe tended to view the Islamic world as one entity, in fact different states struggled with one another and rose and fell much as they did in the Christian West. The immediate impulse for Urban's call for holy war had been a request for military aid from emissaries of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius who spoke at an earlier Council, at Piacenza in March 1095. The war was going well for the Byzantines, there was little reason to doubt that the declining Seldjuk power would soon be beaten back from the environs of the Byzantine capitol at Constantinople, but Alexius felt it would go better still with more troops. Much of the Byzantine army army already consisted of foreign mercenaries. Besides the Seldjuks in Turkey, the Byzantine army had to check the advances of tribal people across the Danube, and of the Empire's always-restive Bulgarian subjects.

However, the Byzantines felt that their appeal for military aid might carry more weight if, instead of describing the Byzantine military situation in great detail, they couched it more in terms of a struggle of all Christendom, Catholic West and Byzantine, Orthodox East, against their common Muslim foe. The Emperor's emissaries were well-received in Piacenza, and Pope Urban took their message and expanded upon it in his famous address at Clermont, held outdoors because the crowds which came were too big for the town's cathedral to hold. Urban described the infidels' control of the Holy Lands as an outrage, mentioned -- and very probably greatly exaggerated -- the hardships of Christian pilgrims at the hands of Moslims and the desecrations of holy Christian sites.

Alexius definitely got more than he had asked for, and Urban, too, soon saw the movement he had called to life grow beyond his control. It is reported that as he spoke, a cry of "Deus lo volt!" ("God wills it!) spread through the huge crowd. Before the main army of the First Crusade, made up of nobles and their followers, got underway, a more spontaneous crowd of tens of thousands, few of them skilled soldiers, mostly peasants, including many women and children, led by charismatic monks, set off from France, pausing in some cities in Germany to rob and kill Jews over the protests of bishops and other authorities. At Constantinople, perhaps at their insistence, perhaps because he was alarmed at the sight of this hungry, angry, riotous mob, numbering perhaps tens of thousands, Alexius had them promptly ferried across the Bosporus and into the path of the Seldjuk army, who promptly massacred most of them. Of those who were not killed in battle many starved or were enslaved; few ever returned to their homes in Europe.

While this fiasco reached its conclusion, the main force of the First Crusade was setting out in a rather more orderly fashion. They were hardly less alarming to the Byzantines, however, than had been the earlier mob of peasants. Alexius had asked for a few mercenaries to fill out the ranks of his army, and instead whole armies arrived, independent units whose leaders clearly had no inclination to subordinate themselves to the normal Byzantine chain of command. Indeed, to many of the western Crusaders the Byzantines seemed scarcely less foreign than any non-Christian infidels. Alexius did his best to extract oaths of fealty from the leaders of these huge armies of knights, Bohemond of Taranto, his nephew Tancred, Godfrey of Bouilion, Raymond of Toulouse and others; but there was great distrust on all sides, and later, as these western armies, like the peasants' army, were sent by Alexius as quickly as possible out of his capitol and into the fighting against the Turks and other Moslims, there were accusations on all sides of treachery and broken promises.

In the first flush of their exuberant rush toward Jerusalem the Crusaders quickly won many victories, and set up principalities for themselves, one with its capitol in Antoch, another based in Edessa, and in July 1099 they took the city of Jerusalem, and in the aftermath of their victory, in a frenzy they massacred many inhabitants of the city, Moslims, Jews and Eastern Christians, men, woman and children. It's very hard to know the number of victims of this massacre -- people tended to be much less exact with numbers in the Middle Ages -- but some Western Christian historians of the time were horrified, along with the others of the time who wrote of it; they, too, wrote of blood running deep in the streets, of thousands of helpless victims.

So that was the First Crusade, and Moslims have tended to remember the massacre which was its climax much better than it has been remembered by Christians, and so when a Western politician uses the word "Crusade" they tend to think of things like that massacre, and of a few others perpetrated since by Westerners who have called themselves Crusaders. Warriors of the Cross, killing ruthlessly, because "God wills it."

Steven Runciman

James Cochran Stevenson Runciman, that is. 1903-2000, A Cambridge-educated historian who wrote mostly of medieval things, especially topics relating more or less closely to Byzantium, and best-known for his three-volume History of the Crusades,published in the 1950's and still pretty universally accepted as the standard work on the subject. I first came upon the name Runciman in William Gaddis' novel Carpenter's Gothic.If the protagonist McCandles had not so emphatically recommended Runciman to another character, I don't know when or if I ever would've read him. Now Runciman is one of my favorite authors and it's hard to imagine not having read him, not to mention not having read many of the authors Runciman mentions in his bibliographies. I first started reading medieval Latin because of Runciman's praise of Orderic Vitalisand William of Tyre

The most common criticism of Runciman is that he has a pro-Byzantine bias. The more I look into the matter, the more I think that what seems like a pro-Byzantine bias to a Western reader has above all to do with the distance between Runciman's version of events and the huge anti-Byzantine bias which has generally prevailed in the West for about as long as there has been a West -- somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred years, I'd say. For about that long it has been repeated like a mantra that Byzantine society was dreary and rigid -- but somehow, at the same time, decadent and luxurious. Which of course is a ridiculous contradiction in terms, it's like Americans calling Mexicans lazy and at the same time accusing them of stealing all their jobs. The simple fact is that the West is very ignorant of what went on the Greek world in the period which Westerners have called Byzantine. Few people in the West have read Greek, and most of those few have read only ancient Greek, and of the very few who read Byzantine Greek, by far the most prominent and influential has been Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,whom Runciman calls "our greatest historian," but who shared the prevailing anti-Greek bias, most of the time.

As I was saying, I don't generally agree with the accusation that Runciman was biased in favor of the Greeks, and against the West. Generally. Occasionally he gets carried away, as when he calls the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 the greatest crime in the history of humanity. It was bad, but it was not as bad as what the Europeans have done to the indigenous populations of the western hemisphere, what the Turks did to the Armenians during World War I or what the Germans did to the Jews before and during World War II. In fact, to judge from Runciman's own writings I'm hard-pressed to see how it was substantially worse than what happened when the knights of the First Crusade conquered Jerusalem. It seems clear that Runciman has a special fondness for the culture which was centered in Constantinople between the time when Constantine established the Roman capital there in the fourth century, and when it fell to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth, and so lets his emotion overrule his judgment when describing how the city was sacked and defiled in 1204. And there's no denying that the Fourth Crusade was a thoroughly despicable and savage affair.

Aside from that, I believe that Runciman -- following directly in the footsteps of his mentor, Professor John Bagnell Bury,1861-1927, who by the way strenuously objected to the term "Byzantine" and always referred to "the later Roman Empire" -- does a great job of correcting some deep errors in the conventional view of history which prevailed in the West before him, and which still prevail, although to a lesser degree, today. Such as the whole notion of the Rennaissance. The "rebirth." The name implies that Classical culture had died, and then waited about a thousand years for Western civilisation to re-discover and give it life again. Well, bullshit. They never stopped reading Plato and Aristotle and Homer et al in the Greek world -- or in the Arab world, either. And the barbarians who had conquered the former Western Roman Empire, and then claimed to have reconstituted it again starting with Charlemagne, had with very few exceptions never learned any Greek, and there was very little conception of the overall dimensions and profundity of the Classical world until the Westerners learned about it through contact with Byzantines and with Moslims, and then claimed that it had been "reborn" through their own efforts. Nothing against Charlemagne personally, he was truly extraordinary, but he was an extraordinary barbarian chieftan, which is not the same as a Roman Emperor. Charlemagne was semi-literate. Most Western rulers for centuries before and after Charlemagne were completely illiterate, as were most of their subjects, in stark contrast to the Roman Emperors, some of whom were also great authors, and the widespread literacy in all social classes which had existed in the part of the Empire which the barbarians conquered and the equally widespread literacy which persisted in the Eastern Empire.

The fall of the Roman Empire didn't occur in 410 when Rome was sacked by Goths, it didn't happen in 476 when the Western Emperor Romulus Augustulus surrendered, the last Western Emperor until the Pope crowned Charlemagne in Rome on Christmas Day in 800. The Empire fell in 1453 in Constantinople, long after the Western "Rennaissance" was under way. The Empire had lived continually up until then and had continually preserved and developed upon Classical culture.

Rennaissance my ass. Just because YOU personally didn't know about something doesn't mean that it had died.

Runciman called the Crusades "the last of the barbarian invasions." Now that's a bold statement, and one which has offended many people who cling to the Romantic image of the Crusaders as dashing good-guy knights on white horses. But Runciman backs up his sweeping statements with copius reference to sources, not only in Latin and Greek, but also in Arabic and Hebrew and Syriac and Armenian and many other languages. Dozens of other languages. I wonder if he himself kept track of the number of languages he could read. (PS, 8. June 2013: I've long wondered whether Runciman was the inspiration for the character Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow,who "speaks 33 languages including English with a strong Oxonian blither to it," although Runciman was a Cambridge man.) I know of no other scholar who has been in a position to examine the various factions of the Crusades in such detail by reading their accounts in their own untranslated words. I don't personally know of another scholar, in any field, who was such a polyglot. My impression is that he really does always try to be scrupulously fair to all sides, to all cultures and peoples and sects and individuals. He seems to me to have a slight pro-Greek bias. I'm not the only one who has said so. But how would I know, I can barely read any Greek. And I can't read any Arabic or Syriac or Armenian or Hebrew or soandandsoforth, so I can't check up on Runciman's accounts of Byzantium's dealings with the other peoples of the Middle East, or of how the Crusaders seemed to others in the Middle East. But as far as I know, no specialist has come forward and claimed that Runciman's expertise in this or that language was not in fact so great, no one has come forward and said: Clearly, thisandthat shows that Runciman misread the text of soandso and strongly suggests that he was not at all fluent in the language.

In spite of what seems to me and to others to have been a pro-Greek bias, the one historical figure for whom Runciman seems to have the most admiration and respect, at least within the confines of his three-volume History of the Crusades, is Saladin, the Moslim leader who in 1187 took Jerusalem from the Crusaders.

I should probably say something about the word "barbarian." When I use that word I mean no more or less than the tribal peoples, mostly Germanic, who conquered and ruled Western Europe after the Romans. I do not mean the word to imply anything, one way or another, about the degree of civilization of these people, or their manners, their cruelty or lack of it or anything else. If the term is not PC, well, good!

The word "barbarian" comes from the ancient Greek, and it originally referred to anyone who spoke a language other than Greek, because, to some ancient Greek person, the foreign language sounded like "ba-ba-ba," which strongly suggests to me that the Greek was not listening to it very closely. The ancient Greeks were sometimes a bit on the xenophobic side, in strong contrast to the Romans and the later, Byzantine Greeks.

So by all means, if you haven't already, I would urge you to read something by Runciman. I'd recommend starting either with the first volume of the history of the Crusades (first published in 1951), or with The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965).Either of those serves as a good introduction to Runciman's other works, which tend to be more specialized.

In his first book, The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and his Reign: A Study of Tenth-Century Byzantium,although it's an excellent book and well worth reading, Runciman, in his mid-20's, hasn't yet reached his fully mature writing style. (I haven't yet been able to find some other of Runciamn's earlier books, but by 1947 at the latest, when Runciman published The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy,that outstanding writing style is there in all its glory.)

Runciman's history of the Crusades comes in three volumes, entitled A History of the Crusades, Vol. I: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Vol. II: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100-1187, and Vol III: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades. The first volume has also appeared in an abridgement by the author, entitled simply The First Crusade.This abridgement, aimed "at a wider audience," as they say, has no footnotes or bibliography, and ends with the Crusaders taking Jerusalem in 1099, leaving out the two final chapters of the unabridged version. The material in the remaining chapters has also been condensed slightly.

The unabridged 3-volume history of the Crusades has appeared in many different editions. If you live in a large city and don't object to buying used books -- I know at least one person who refuses to buy used books or touch library books -- then if you shop around you might find a variety of editions available, available either as 3-volume sets or as separate volumes.

In addition to the paperback edition of the abridged account of the first Crusade, there is also at least one hardcover edition of the same text, but with many many brilliant illustrations, many in color.I have a copy of this one, just because of the pictures.

I personally can't really understand how anyone could prefer a book, any book, which has been abridged, and the thought of removing a book's footnotes and bibliography almost hurts me physically, but Runciman was really smart, and he abridged his account of the first Crusade personally, so what do I know? I have a feeling that perhaps my rants on especially arcane subjects should be abridged, and I hope, assuming you've read all the way to the end of this post, that I've given you some helpful information and not just made you sleepy.