Word: runciman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES, by Steven Runciman. The third and last volume of the best written and most scholarly history of Christianity's greatest show of militant faith...
...HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES, VOL. Ill: THE KINGDOM OF ACRE (530 pp.)-Steven Runciman-Cambridge University Press...
Among the best accounts ever written is Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades, now brought to authoritative completion with the third volume, The Kingdom of Acre. Historian Runciman writes in the magistral tradition of Gibbon, Macaulay and his mentor, G. M. Trevelyan. The first two volumes (TIME, Dec. i, 1952) told how the half-civilized Prankish warriors, massacring Saracens on the walls of Jerusalem and Tyre, won dazzling triumphs and founded a kingdom in the Holy Land. The concluding volume relates the somber story of how the warrior pilgrims, having lost the Holy City while squabbling over lands...
Greed & Folly. For all his excellence in telling the story, Historian Runciman finishes with a startling piece of moralizing hindsight: "The historian as he gazes back across the centuries at their gallant story must find his admiration overcast by sorrow at ... the limitations of human nature. There was so much courage and so little honor, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which...
...demand to expel the Moslems from the Holy Land throbbed in the conscience of Christian Europe through the 12th century, and for many years thereafter. Few places in the West escaped the eloquence of the Crusader preachers. Writes Historian Runciman, describing a sermon of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the most famous of them: "Very soon his audience was under his spell. Men began to cry for Crosses-'Crosses, give us Crosses!' It was not long before all the [cloth] that had been prepared to sew into Crosses was exhausted; and Saint Bernard flung off his own outer garments...