[In the following essay, Saunders offers a brief overview of literature pertaining to the Crusades, beginning with the contemporary witness William of Tyre. Saunders discusses several other early accounts as well as later treatments of the Crusades through the twentieth century.]

The Holy War seized on the imagination of Europe and called into being a wonderful literature of song and history. Almost every noble family of the West boasted crusaders among its ranks, and a large and growing public became avid for details of these deeds done beyond the seas. Nothing did more to stimulate the production of historical narratives, most of which were compiled in France. The best of the contemporary witnesses, William of Tyre, who was born in Frankish Syria, was one of the master-historians of the Middle Ages. His great work,¹ with its fascinating digressions on the manners and customs of the Turks and Arabs, the terrors of the desert, the usefulness of camels, and the sugar plantations of the Levant, was composed in Latin and carried the story down to 1184. It was continued by several hands in French, and one of the earliest books printed in England by Caxton was a translation of William's account of the siege and capture of Jerusalem in 1099.

When the Crusades had become a memory, the Italians in the days of the Renaissance were the first to attempt a general historical survey of the movement. Benedetto Accolti, a professor of law at Florence and secretary of the Republic in succession to Poggio, was joint author with his brother Leonardo of the ponderously titled De bello a Christianis contra Barbaros gesto pro Christi sepulchro et Judaea recuperandis libri tres (Venice, 1452), a history of the First Crusade written chiefly out of William of Tyre. As a work of scholarship the book was of small value, but in Italian and French translations it gained a wide popularity, being reprinted as late as 1731, and it is supposed to have inspired Tasso's immortal epic, Jerusalem Delivered (1574), the Christian Iliad of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

Yet it was beyond the Alps that the Crusades attracted the most affectionate attention, since in France they were considered virtually as a national enterprise. Paulus Aemilius (Paolo Emilio), a reputable historian of Verona, was invited to Paris by Charles VIII and entrusted with the task of writing up the reigns of the French kings: the fourth book of his De rebus gestis Francorum (1517) treats of the Holy Wars and displays a more careful research than the superficial compilation of the Accolti brothers. As the level of French scholarship rose, it was but natural that efforts should be made to seek out and edit the original memorials of the Crusades. In 1611 Jacques Bongars, a learned diplomat who spent many years and much money in the service of Henry IV, brought out in two great folios, under the patriotic title (borrowed from Guibert of Nogent) of Gesta Dei per Francos, ‘the Deeds of God done through the Franks’, a collection of all the principal contemporary writers of the Crusades. As a historical sourcebook of the Holy Wars it was quite unrivalled in its day and indeed kept its place for well over two hundred years. Here were conveniently gathered together the texts of William of Tyre, Albert of Aix, Fulcher of Chartres, James of Vitry, and almost all the other Latin writers who ranked as primary authorities. In the reign of Louis XIV a group of French savants published a splendid edition of the Byzantine historians, whose narratives so often supplement and correct the Western accounts of the Crusades. The Greek side could now be studied, and Sieur du Cange, best known for his marvellous and still unsurpassed Dictionary of Medieval Greek and Latin, edited with a wealth of learning Villehardouin's famous book on the capture of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade of 1204.

Patriotism prevented the French from being harshly critical of the Crusades, but Protestant Europe was scornful of an enterprise planned and sponsored by the popes, to whom the most sordid motives were maliciously ascribed. Thomas Fuller, building on the Bongars collection, produced in his Historie of the Holy Warre (1639), the completest survey yet made in English, but its virulent anti-papalism deprived it of all claim to objectivity. ‘This war’, he wrote, ‘would be the sewer of Christendom and drain all discords out of it’, and elsewhere he described it as ‘the pope's house of correction, whither he sent his sturdy and stubborn enemies to be tamed’.² Fuller's lively style and quaint conceits make him readable still, and he has the merit of being one of the first to discuss the ethics of the Crusades, the lawfulness, that is, of attempting to deprive the Muslims of the possession of Palestine. A century later the Lutheran church historian Mosheim, though severely critical of the popes, expressed a more moderate opinion: ‘The Roman pontiffs and the European princes were engaged at first in these crusades by a principle of superstition only, but when in process of time they learnt by experience that these holy wars contributed much to increase their opulence and to extend their authority, by sacrificing their wealthy and powerful rivals, then new motives were presented to encourage these sacred expeditions into Palestine, and ambition and avarice seconded and enforced the dictates of fanaticism and superstition.’³

In the Age of Reason the Crusading studies suffered from the general depreciation of all things medieval. To men like Hume and Voltaire the Frankish expeditions to the Holy Land were nothing but orgies of superstitious militarism, unprovoked assaults by feudal barbarians on the richer and more sophisticated culture of the East. ‘Parmi les Francs’, says a historian of the period, ‘une multitude de gens sans aveu et de libertins sortirent de l’Europe et ne passèrent en Asie que pour s’enrichir, se livrer de plus en plus à leurs vices et y trouver l’impunité; les crimes de ceux-ci, le fanatisme de quelques autres, et le mélange bizarre de religion et de chevalerie, ont fait désapprouver un siècle plus éclairé ces sortes de guerres.’⁴ Gibbon in his more balanced manner attempted to weigh the mixture of motives which impelled the Latin Christians in their thousands to take the cross: ‘Of the chiefs and soldiers who marched to the holy sepulchre’, he writes, ‘I will dare to affirm that all were prompted by the spirit of enthusiasm, the belief of merit, the hope of reward, and the assurance of divine aid. But I am equally persuaded that in many it was not the sole, that in some it was not the leading principle of action’, and in describing the frightful massacre of the Muslim population perpetrated in Jerusalem after its capture by the Crusaders, he characteristically adds: ‘Nor shall I believe that the most ardent in slaughter and rapine were the foremost in the procession to the holy sepulchre.’⁵ But the rationalist historian is in general cool or tepid and inclined to treat the whole business as slightly absurd. Only with the coming of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century did the Crusades return to favour, and then they were studied with more enthusiasm than understanding. Once more the French took the lead; Napoleon's expedition to Egypt reawakened memories of St Louis and Outremer, and Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme drew a generation weary of the dry abstractions of the Enlightenment back in spirit to the ages of faith and chivalry.

In 1811 Joseph Michaud, a conservative and Catholic royalist who had narrowly escaped death during the Revolution, began the publication of a full length Histoire des Croisades, which was completed in six volumes in 1840. His aim was to show that the Crusades had been militarily necessary to save Christendom from being overwhelmed by Turkish Islam and that contact with the East had stimulated the growth of the arts and sciences in Europe. His German contemporary Wilken, who also brought out a history of the Crusades in seven volumes between 1807 and 1832, was the first to utilize Arabic and Syriac sources; this revealed to Michaud the necessity of exploring the libraries of the East, and in his later years he visited Palestine, not as he said to reform the errors of his life, but to correct the mistakes of his History.⁶ Partly because of his urging, the Academy of Inscriptions was induced to replace Bongars by a vast Recueil des historiens des Croisades, and under its auspices a series of texts ably edited and translated not only from Latin and Greek but from Arabic, Armenian, Syriac and other Oriental languages was issued between 1841 and 1906. It became at last possible for the student to view the whole Crusading movement from the Muslim and Byzantine, as well as from the Western standpoint. This great French collection of sources remains to this day an indispensable tool for all workers in the field, though its arrangement is awkward and its scholarship now (in part at least) antiquated.

Meanwhile the Crusades had attracted the attention of the new school of critical historiography which had gathered round Ranke and aimed to get at the truth of ‘what had really happened’ in the past by a severer and minuter scrutiny of the original sources than had hitherto been attempted. One of Ranke's ablest pupils, Heinrich von Sybel, later to win fame by his studies of the French Revolution and the founding of the Bismarckian Reich, was assigned the task of re-examining the Crusading chronicles in the light of the new principles of criticism. He produced in 1841, at the age of twenty-four, a History of the First Crusade, which swept away the long-current legends of Peter the Hermit and Godfrey of Bouillon, and in particular destroyed the naïve notion that the whole movement was set going by the preaching of the eloquent Hermit of Amiens, an interpretation as childish as that which would explain the Reformation as the result of a quarrel between Dominican and Augustinian friars. Von Sybel's book, which went into a second edition in 1881, has not yet lost its value, and its penetrating critiques of William of Tyre, Albert of Aix and other historians, are still valid.⁷ Other German scholars built soundly on these foundations. Prutz published in 1883 a valuable Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzüge, the first serious investigation of the non-military aspects of the Crusades, though marred by a tendency to ascribe to the Holy Wars almost all the changes that occurred in Western Europe between 1100 and 1300; and Röhricht, among numerous other writings on the subject, produced in 1898 a History of the Kingdom of Jerusalem which remains after more than sixty years the standard authority on the greatest of the Frankish principalities in the East.

The English-speaking world, notwithstanding the fame of Richard Lion-heart, was curiously backward in this field until the turn of the century. Archer and Kingsford's The Crusades (1895) was followed by Stanley Lane-Poole's Saladin (1898), still the best biography of the great Muslim hero; W. B. Stevenson's The Crusaders in the East (1907), a short but excellent survey, and Ernest Barker's admirable article, ‘Crusades’, in the 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, reprinted in book form in 1923 and even now after fifty years the most illuminating brief introduction. In the United States an outstanding school of Crusading specialists sprang up under the inspiration of Dana C. Munro, who devoted close attention to the feudal institutions of the Frankish States in Syria. Munro himself wrote little, but a posthumous volume of lectures, published in 1935 under the title of The Kingdom of the Crusaders, challenges comparison with Barker for its mastery of the whole enormous field. His best-known pupil, LaMonte, was the author of a scholarly monograph, Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1932), but he died prematurely in 1949, leaving behind an ambitious plan for a comprehensive, co-operative work which began to appear in 1955 from the press of the University of Pennsylvania. The first volume contains contributions from fifteen different scholars, three of them (Cahen, Gibb and Lewis) distinguished Orientalists. The whole work is planned to go far beyond the fall of Acre in 1291 and to cover the long Crusading epilogue of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the concluding volume will attempt an evaluation of the influence and consequences of the Crusades.

The Americans are specialists, each concentrating on his own minute piece of work in the great factory of history, but the Old World still brings forth men who are not afraid to take bold, Pisgah-like views of the subject and to adorn their narrative with the graces of a distinctive style. René Grousset, whose capacious and inquiring mind ranged over the whole vast expanse of Asian history from China to Armenia, composed, in the days when the French Mandate over Syria and the Lebanon had recalled the earlier ‘France beyond the seas’, a Histoire des Croisades (3 vols. 1934-6). This lively and fascinating work has the peculiar merit of enabling the reader to view the Western intruders into the Levant from the Muslim vantage-point. Grousset neglects the arts and has small interest in the constitutional history of the Frankish States, but no one has treated so thoroughly the Muslim reaction to the Crusades or the impact of the Mongol invasions on the situation in Syria. Since almost all previous accounts of the Crusades have been heavily weighted in favour of the West, it is good to have the balance redressed by a skilled Orientalist though the ardent French Catholic is not always fair to Islam.⁸

More recently, Sir Steven Runciman has published a History of Crusades (3 vols. 1951-4), a happy marriage of art and scholarship which is likely to remain for many years to come the principal source of information for the educated English-speaking reader. He also has abandoned the old-fashioned Western approach, but unlike Grousset, he takes his stand at Constantinople; and as befits one who made his reputation in Byzantine studies and possesses astonishing mastery over many Slavonic languages, his sympathies incline to the Greek East, and he rates the Fourth Crusade and the sack of the imperial city among the grossest crimes of history. The rude and barbarous Franks are often roughly handled, and we are never allowed to forget that the most permanent result of the Holy Wars was the ruin of the Byzantine Empire and the Christian Orient.

Despite this impressive mass of historical achievement, little has been done to familiarize the Western reader with the Muslim case. How did the Crusades look from the other side of the hill? What did the Muslims think of these sustained onslaughts from the West? How did they react? A good deal of material translated from the Arabic chronicles is embedded in the great French Recueil, five volumes of which are devoted to the Oriental sources, but this is likely to be read by none but specialists. Few Muslim historical writings of Crusading times are available to the general educated public, among them being the memoirs of Usamah b.Munqidh, a cultivated Syrian shaikh and friend of Saladin, who died in 1188,⁹ the Chronicle of Ibn al-Qalanisi, a notable of Damascus whose story comes down to 1176,¹⁰ and Baha al-Din's Life of Saladin, whose author died in 1234.¹¹ To these may be added brief references to the Franks and the Crusades in recently translated Arabic books such as Ibn Jubayr's Travels, which covers the years 1183-5,¹² and the famous Muqaddima or Introduction of Ibn Khaldun, the philosophic historian who lived in the fourteenth century.¹³ This is meagre enough. No more urgent need confronts workers in the field of Crusading historiography than the publication of sound and accurate translations of the leading Arabic chroniclers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Only when we are provided with these will it be possible to get the Holy Wars into proper perspective: only then will we of the West be able to see the conflict from both sides.¹⁴

Notes

1. Historia hierosolymitana, or Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum. The first printed edition appeared at Basel in 1549. Eng. trans. by J. Badcock and A. C. Krey, A History of Deeds done beyond the Sea, New York, 1943. See also A. C. Krey, ‘William of Tyre: the making of a historian of the Middle Ages’, Speculum, XVI, 1941.

2. Fuller's Historie, 1840 reprint, pp. 16, 18.

3. Mosheim, Eccles. History, Eng. trans. Maclaine, 1790, III, 447-8.

4. De Guignes, Hist. des Huns, Paris, 1756, tom.I, part 1, p.13.

5. Decline and Fall, ch. 58.

6. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, tom. 7, p. 39. Michaud compiled a Bibliothèque des Croisades, 4 vols. 1829, a useful and meritorious collection of source-material which was, however, soon superseded by the fuller and richer Recueil.

7. There is an English translation by Lady Duff Gordon, The History and Literature of the Crusades, London, n.d. (c. 1865), published in Routledge's Universal Library series.

8. See a critique of Grousset in an article by T. S. R. Boase, ‘Recent Developments in Crusading Historiography’, History, Sept. 1937. Grousset's later and smaller work, Les Croisades, Paris, 1944, is perhaps more balanced and objective than his larger history.

9. Usamáh ibn Murshid, called Ibn Munkidh, an Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the period of the Crusades, Eng. trans. P. K. Hitti, New York, 1929.

10. The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, Eng. trans. H. A. R. Gibb, London, 1932.

11. The Life of Saladin by Behâ-ed-Dîn, Eng. trans. C.R. Conder, Palestine Pilgrims' Text Soc., London, 1897.

12. The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, Eng. trans. R.J.C. Broadhurst, London, 1952. This book contains (p. 317) the oft-quoted passage in praise of the Frankish landlords in Syria.

13. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, an Introduction to History, Eng. trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols., London, 1959.

14. The Italian Arabist F. Gabrieli has recently published a number of translated extracts from the Arabic sources, Storici arabi delle crociate, Turin, 1957. See also, for further references, the art. ‘Crusades’ in the new Enc. of Islam. …