This is the edition of the Anonymi Gesta which I have: a reprint made by the University of Toronto Libraries:
It's a fairly well-made volume. Reprints like these, of pre-copyright books, tend to be of okay quality when made by university libraries. The ones made by fly-by-night publishers you've never heard of, with pictures on the covers which make it clear they were made by people who can't read Latin, are very much hit-and-miss, quality-wise. I got lucky with my copy of Hagenmeyer's edition of the crusade letters, made by one of those fly-by-night operations. The front cover is mostly covered by a photo of rippling water. It's a fairly pleasant photo. It has nothing to do with the subject matter of the book.
In Hagenmeyer's editions, the actual primary texts, the letters written between 1088 and 1100 and the anonymous chronicle by a crusader, take up up a very small amount of space compared to Hagenmeyer's Erlaeuterungen, his notes, written in German. In fact, each of these volumes could be considered a historical work written by Hagenmeyer, with the letters and the chronicle included among the footnotes, except that in the case of Anonymi Gesta, the anonymous chronicle, Hagenmeyer's text appears mainly in the form of footnotes. Footnotes which take up by far the greater part of most of the pages, leaving room for a few lines of the Latin text per page. In the case of the volume of letters, the actual letters cover 55 pages, and they actually cover most of those pages most of the time, but the entire volume is over 500 pages long.
That's not a complaint, because what Hagenmeyer writes is very sensible, highly informative and thoroughly scholarly in a way in which, for example, I have never matched, not even back when I was in grad school. I'm just pointing out that what you're getting, by volume, is almost all Hagenmeyer, with the primary texts also included, as opposed to mostly primary text, plus a little bit of introduction and notes, as is often, perhaps more often than not, the case with editions of ancient and Medieval and more recent Latin texts.
There are many highly romanticized stories of the Crusades in Western literature. If you go back and study the eyewitness accounts and contemporary letters and such -- even the ones written by Crusaders themselves, and by their countrymen. Never mind the accounts written by Orthodox Greeks and other Eastern Christians, and Muslims and Jews -- then the Crusaders suddenly appear in a much less flattering light. The excuse giving for all of these Frenchmen, Italians, Germans and other Westerners to travel east and fight wars, was that they were responding to a call for help from the Greek Emperor in Constantinople. And the leaders stopped in Constantinople on their way to the Holy Land, and swore oaths of loyalty to the Emperor. Oaths which they broke in almost every case. They swore they would turn over all the land they conquered to the Byzantine Empire. Instead, they stayed and ruled it themselves. They committed horrendous massacres of civilians and non-enemies and women and children. For example, when the soldiers of the First Crusade conquered the city of Jerusalem: they literally slaughtered almost every human being inside the city walls: not just the Muslims, against whom they had been fighting, but also all of the Jews and Eastern Christians who were there, who had not been fighting against them at all. Even the accounts written by the Westerners are horrific. And Muslims and Jews and Eastern Christians haven't forgotten, and why should they, even if the West very soon started telling itself completely unrealistic stories about the whole enterprise? We Westerners should be more careful with the term "crusade."
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