Going on before
John Julius NORWICH
A History of the Crusades Vols 1 and 11 general editor: Kenneth M. Setton (Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press 238s)
'Whatever is done well enough is done soon enough.' This shattering dictum, attributed by Petrarch to the Emperor Augustus and felicitously quoted by Professor Setton in his foreword to the first of these volumes when it was originally published in 1955, is even more apposite now than it was then. He intended it as a gentle justification of the seventeen-year delay which had separated the initial proposal for a five-volume History of the Crusades from the ap- pearance of its first fruit; but since then things have got worse instead of better. After seven mine years, in 1962, the second volume emerged; and now, just as we might be forgiven for hoping that the third might be on its way, we are faced with the first pair again, republished by the University of Wisconsin instead of that of Pennsylvania but containing, so far as I can see, only one new piece of information—that the series has been replanned in six volumes instead of five.
Since the project, if its present rate is maintained, will not be complete until a few weeks after my 102nd birthday, I had better go on record now as saying that—timing apart—the work to date has been done ad- mirably. Indeed, these two volumes alone probably constitute the fullest account, not just of the Crusades themselves but of the events and conditions that gave rise to them and the races and peoples whom they affected, yet to have appeared in any language.
One obvious question immediately springs to mind: how do they compare with Sir Steven Runciman's splendid trilogy? The answer is that they don't. His is a work of literature as well as history, written and intended to be read as an integrated whole. He has made his contributions to the present volumes also; but then so have twenty-eight other scholars, with the inevitable result that there is little feeling of continuity, let alone drama. To read them straight through, one after the other, would demand a good deal more stamina than most of us possess. But this is a drawback inherent in the genre; it is in no way the fault of the editing, which could hardly be bettered. There are virtually no overlaps and I have spotted only two contradictions—one on the question of Saladin's popularity with the Abbasid Caliphate during the Third Crusade and one (admitted in a footnote) on the veracity of a palpably ludicrous story that, on his way
.1 home after the Second, Louis VIlt.,tre- crowned Roger H King of Sicily. And in any case, this multiple authorship is not without its advantages. For one thing, it allows the editors to cast their net a good deal wider. So carefully do they set the scene, with separate chapters on the Reconquista in Spain, the Normans in Sicily, the Ismailis, the Seljuks and the Assassins, that it is not till Chapter VIII and page 253 that the First Crusade gets under way.
Their mandate obliges them to include, at appropriate stages, further chapters on the Albigensian Crusade, the Children's Crusade (with a fascinating disquisition on the Pied Piper of Hamelin) and even the 'political Crusades' of the thirteenth century waged by militant popes like Gregory IX or Innocent IV against rulers like Frederick II or his son Manfred whose political objectives differed from their own. After these it is with something like relief that we return to the real thing in the shape of St Louis, 'perhaps the only real Crusader who ever existed, and certainly the last', before plunging into still more background chapters on the Turks and the Ayubids, the Mongols and the Mamelukes, and the Kingdoms of Cyprus and Cilician Armenia.
What, it may be asked, is there left for the other four volumes? The Crusades of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for a start; then, Professor Setton promises us, there are to be studies of the political and ecclesiastical organisation of the Crusader states, on their propaganda and financing, on the Latin Empire of Constantinople, the more durable states in continental Greece and the Morea, and those in the islands of the Aegean. 'Some fine chapters,' he goes on, 'have already been written on agricultural conditions.., on commerce and industry as well as on the Genoese and Venetian Em- pires; and others are now being prepared on numismatics, sigillography and heraldry. Five excellent chapters on art and architec- ture were written five years ago . . But those words themselves, be it remembered. were penned in 1955.
When—if—it is all ever finished, right down to the final atlas and biggest-ever bibliography, the world will have not so much a history as an encyclopaedia of the Crusades, for which our grandchildren will, I trust, be properly grateful. The trouble is that the writing of history is just as subject to the passing of time as anything else—a fact which these two republished volumes makes all too clear. Here they are, mint-fresh (though their jackets smell simply disgusting), their thirty-seven maps the best I have ever seen . in history books, their gazetteers beyond praise (though I wish they wouldn't persistently spell Liege with an acute accent), their proof-reading ex- emplary—fifteen hundred pages without a misprint in such a work seems little less than a miracle.
But when so much trouble has been taken over a new edition, why have the admirable bibliographies at the start of eaCh chapter not been brought up to date? Those in Volume I list nothing published after 1954. And how can the editors, speaking of the Ismaili imam who migrated from Persia to India in the last century, have retained the sentence 'His grandson is well known as the Aga Khan'? That grandson's grandson has i by now been in power for thirteen years.
I hope that the future volumes will contain a few genealogical tables—the one con- venience inexplicably lacking in the first two. I also hope that their illustrations will be larger, more numerous (especially for the sections on art and architecture) and cor- rectly identified: the mosaic from St Sophia reproduced in Volume I over the caption `Alexius I Comnenus' is in fact a portrait of a completely different Alexius who never became Emperor—the son of John II. Most of all, I hope that they will appear before all the contributors are dead. Four of them are already; and posthumous publications are no fun for anyone.
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