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. 

Random Notes

I've been screwing up some of my favorite songs, "Weird Al" style. The Who's "Eminence Front," for example: "People forget/ Forget they're hiding/ Behind an elephant's butt/ It's an elephant's butt/ It's a big one." 

And then there's "Family Affair" by Sly & the Family Stone. I've given it what I call the Goldilocks Treatment: "It's a family of bears / It's a family of bears/ It's a family of bears / It's a family of bears."

It has occurred to me that the Casio G-Shock Rangeman GW9400-1,

because of its size (large), shape (closer to spherical than most watches made since AD 1600), styling cues and startling range of technical capability (solar recharging, radio synching with an atomic clock, altimeter, barometer, ambient-air compass, a really nice backlight, etc, etc), could be nicknamed the Death Star. I am aware that Citizen has a watch called the Death Star, and I am unimpressed.

In my life I've only had one brand-new car, a 2003 Saturn Ion 1. I still have it. Lately I have begun to daydream that if I keep it long enough, like an original VW Beetle or a Pontiac Aztek, it will suddenly change from a cheap piece of junk into an expensive collector's item. I am aware that this is an unrealistic fantasy.

I've been looking at the footnotes in John Stoye's The Siege of Vienna, NY, Chi, SF, 1965, and almost all of the sources are in German, with a few in French. I found one in Italian. And I found one in Romanian, which impressed me for about a minute, the amount of time it took me to figure that Stoye could've had someone translate it for him. No Turkish, no Polish, no Hungarian, no Czech -- unless I overlooked something, which is possible. Even so, Stoye was certainly no Runciman. 

There are those who think Runciman's linguistic prowess has been greatly exaggerated. I am not one of those.

Crusading Historians

There were gallant, pure-hearted Crusading knights -- where? In people's imaginations. 

 Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, first published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, severely disturbs this view of things, all the more so because it is so well-written and thoroughly researched that few of Gibbon's critics have even tried to say that it is not. Instead, the typical attack on Gibbon begins with some variation of "Gibbon's monumental work is masterfully written and exhaustively researched. But ..." and then goes on to claim that, despite the mastery and thoroughness, Gibbon got it all wrong.

For a while, Gibbon's negative view of the Crusades was contained to a relatively small academic readership by the means of abridged editions which ended around the time of the fall of the Western Empire in AD 476, so that many readers were eventually surprised to learn that Gibbon carried the story down past the fall of the Eastern (sometimes called the Byzantine) empire in AD 1453 and very close to his own time. Including a very large portion devoted to the Crusades, which portrayed the Crusaders in a much less flattering light that had been usual in the West. 

Flash-forward to the mid-20th century, when some readers of Steven Runciman's 3 volume History of the Crusades, published 1951-54, were startled to read Runciman's assertion, right there on the first page of the preface of the first volume, that Gibbon's chapters on the Crusades still "well deserve study." It seemed that this Runciman person, whom many were lauding as the greatest 20th century historian from England, referred to Gibbon as England's greatest historian, ever, as if there were not much debate about it. 

And then the attacks on Runciman began to pour in, so similar to the attacks on Gibbon that it's really difficult not to notice: Runciman's opponents acknowledge that he writes well and researches thoroughly, but...

And just as in Gibbon's case, the attacks come from those who feel that Runciman has been unfair to the Crusaders. 

It could be that the most highly regarded historian of the Crusaders since Runciman Is Jonathan Riley-Smith. I say it could be, because those who admire Runciman, and Gibbon, might well see much to criticize in Riley-Smith, and vice-versa. Some colleagues would call Riley-Smith the best historian of the Crusades since Runciman. I think some would call him something else, although they might manage to be more polite about it than I.

Just in case in it's not already clear: I'm on Gibbon's and Runciman's side. Furthermore: I don't think Riley-Smith is even a particularly good historian, let alone among the greatest scholars of his time.

Let's take his own stated aim, to examine the motivations of those Westerners who participated in the first Crusade. First of all, it implies that others, most certainly including Gibbon and Runciman, have failed to examine those motives. Further, it gives Riley-Smith great room to be imaginative. He's trying to restore the image of the gallant Crusaders on white horses.

For example, he rejects the very notion that any Crusaders went to war against the eastern infidels out of motives of personal gain, because, in fact, and nevermind those few who gained actual kingdoms or counties in the East, most of them ended up losing money on the enterprise.

Using this sort of thinking, we could say that most of the people who go to Las Vegas to gamble are not hoping for personal gain. It's a fact that almost all of the gamblers in Vegas lose money.

I recently heard an episode of "In Our Time," the BBC radio series hosted by Melvyn Bragg, devoted to the Third Crusade. It first aired in 2001, I heard it in 2021. Riley-Smith was one of the three invited experts. Toward the end of the episode, the massacre perpetrated by the Crusaders at the climax of the First Crusade, when they captured Jerusalem after a long siege, and killed non-combatants of the city by the thousands, men, women and children, Muslims, Jews and Eastern Christians indiscriminately -- this massacre was mentioned, an event similarly described by eyewitnesses of all religious affiliations. Riley-Smith became audibly angry, insisting that there was nothing unusual about the Crusaders' behavior at this moment, insisting that the Muslims were just as bad, refusing even to refer to the event as a massacre, repeatedly using the term sack instead of massacre. He even started to talking about ways in which Christians' mentality could have impelled them to greatly exaggerate the horror of the -- sack -- in their descriptions of it. 

Yes, concentrating on people's motivations as Riley-Smith does, gives an historian a very great amount of flexibility in his depictions of events. 

One thing is encouraging: of all the historians who attacked Gibbon during his own lifetime and for a century after -- I don't know one of their names. I'm confident that very few of you could name a single one of them.

Random Notes

I recently, finally, got ahold of a copy of Steven Runciman's History of the First Bulgarian Empire. But whoever made this hinky edition -- they forgot to include the index! Is this important to me? Yes, it's important to me! It's not as bad as if they had left out the 3rd chapter and the bibliography, but only in the sense that cutting off one of my ears would not be as bad as cutting off one of my legs. It's still very bad! And it's just completely thrown me off. They left in a map of Bulgaria at the end of the book, but the reprint is so small and so poorly-done that it's just about useless. Are there more maps, and/or other illustrations in a legit edition of A History of the First Bulgarian Empire? Hey! You find a copy of a legit edition, and then you tell me!

I've been binge-watching Bill Burr, and I don't hate him so much any more. He seems like a guy in therapy, saying shocking, horrible things because those things are inside of him, and he has to get them out in order to deal with them, and heal. Except that in Burr's case it also makes him a very successful stand-up comedian. Burr has said, repeatedly, that he knows he's a very sick, damaged person, and that he's trying to get better. That alone makes him better than a Republican. He's Democratic/Green, apparently, although he very often enrages Democrats and Greens. And Republicans, and Libertarians, and independents, and apolitical aesthetes.

And he doesn't seem to mind if he shocks people, which I think is a good position for a "serious" comedian to take. I'll give you an example: Bill was talking about Trump supporters who love the way that, according to them, Trump "triggers" overly-sensitive liberals with his Tweets. Bill is not impressed. He says that Trump offends maybe 60% of the public with his Tweets, which any moron could do. Bill says that it would actually take some creativity to offend nearly everyone with a Tweet. Like, over 90% of the general public. For example, he says, you could tweet: "Trump is such a bastard, he made me vote for a woman!" and than just sit back and enjoy the fireworks.

And he made me laugh when he talked about airlines. I would've thought the whole topic of airlines was played and tired for stand-up comedy, but Bill had some nice touches. He talked about having flown coach for 20 years before making it to first class. His description of first class air travel is nice: for example, he describes a seat in first class as "a chair large enough to hold a human body." And he describes being seated in the back of coach once during that earlier time, and there was still an empty seat next to him close to takeoff, and he started to have hope that he would experience what he called "poor man's first class," being able to stretch out on two coach seats. But then, just before takeoff, a very fat man got onto the plane, and sure enough, he was coming all the way to the back to sit next to Bill, and as the fat man approached, Bill began to scream and kick "like Quint sliding down into the mouth of the shark at the end of Jaws."

There are some comics who actually are right-wing bigots. And then there are some who joke about things we don't usually talk about in public, and say the quiet parts loud, and are sometimes mistaken for bigots. Like Sam Kinison and "Dice" Clay and Sarah Silverman. And Bill Burr. Okay, keep hating him if you want to. Bill will certainly understand.

Early yesterday, Twitter blocked an account from the Trump campaign. And then later yesterday, Twitter crashed. Or did it? I became very paranoid, wondering whether Trump had shut Twitter down (I can't be the only one who was wondering. He's threatened to do it numerous times), wondering whether a great crackdown had finally begun, whether an unmarked van was coming at last to break down my front door and take me to an undisclosed location. But I'm still at large. 

BE STRONG, MURRKA! THREE MORE MONTHS! MEE R MUNKEE! MEE LUV YU! VOTE 4 TH OTHER GUY!

1 Particular Difficulty in Reading Runciman's Sicilian Vespers

The Sicilian Vespers is the name given to a rebellion in Sicily which broke out on Easter Monday, the 30th of March, 1282, in Palermo, in which the native Sicilians shook off the control of King Charles I and his occupying army. Both Charles (better known as Charles of Anjou) and his army were French, and unpopular with the local population.

In the Preface to his book The Sicilian Vespers (Cambridge, 1958, p xii), Steven Runciman warns the readers that this book is not easy reading and is not for everyone:

"I have [...] tried in this book to tell the whole story of the Mediterranean world in the second half of the thirteenth century with the Vespers as its central point. The canvas is wide; it has to stretch from England to Palestine, from Constantinople to Tunis. It is also crowded with characters; but a historical canvas is necessarily crowded, and readers who are afraid of crowds should keep to the better-orders lanes of fiction."

Well, he sort of warns the reader there, and he sort of doesn't. It may seem as if he's saying that it's just another book of history. But it's not. As Runciman says, it is crowded. It is extraordinarily crowded. Besides describing, in just 293 pages, an extraordinary amount of letters, meetings, treaties, breaches of treaties, battles, truces, conspiracies and other daily business of the Medieval ancien regime, the fact that so many Emperors, Empresses, kings, queens, dukes, duchesses, counts, countesses, Popes, bishops and other members of that big inbred family which ruled Europe, and who were all referred to by their first names, had the the same first names, makes the book extremely difficult reading. For example: there's only one Dante mentioned in the book, the one we've all heard about, and there's only 1 Pons, and only 1 Plaisance, but there are 2 Alberts, 2 Alexanders, 3 Alexius', 4 Alfonsos, 2 Andrews, 3 Andronicus', 3 Annas, 3 Baldwins, 7 Bartholomews, 5 Beatrices, 2 Benedicts, 3 Bernards, 4 Bonifaces, 6 Charles', 4 Conrads and 1 Conradin, 4 Constances, 3 Constantines (1 of them a town), 3 Eleanors and 2 Eleanoras, 2 Ferdinands, 10 Fredericks, 4 Geoffreys, 2 Georges, 2 Gerards, 4 Gregorys, 7 Guys, 2 Helenas, 19 Henrys, 2 Honorius', 5 Hughs, 3 Ibns, 3 Innocents, 3 Irenes, 7 Isabellas, 5 James', 4 Johannas, 25 Johns and 1 John-Gaetan and 1John-Peter and 1 John-Tristan, 3 Jordans, 3 Ladislas', 4 Lewis', 4 Manfreds, 8 Margarets, 8 Marias, 3 Martins, 2 Matthews, 2 Napoleons, 7 Nicholas', 7 Ottos and 1 Otho, 13 Peters, 9 Philips, 3 Raymonds and 1 Raymond-Berengar, 7 Richards, 7 Roberts, 5 Rogers, 6 Simons, 2 Stephens and 3 Stephen-Uros', 2 Thepdores, 7 Thomas', 2 Urbans, 2 Violantes, 5 Walters and 16 Williams.

So, can I honestly claim to have read this book? I've turned all the pages from front to back in order, but I can't say that I was always sure which of the 5 Hughs was being referred to at any given time, whether it was Hugh III of Cyprus, Hugh IV of Burgendy, Hugh of Les Baux, Hugh the Marshall of France or Hugh ("the Red") of Sully -- not to mention other Hughs I've heard of who aren't even in this book -- or why he was doing what he was doing on that particular page. And that's only the Hughs. As you might imagine, it was even harder to keep all of the Henrys and Williams straight.

Actually, it's misleading to say that it was difficult: it was impossible. I'm going to have to study these 293 pages much more if I want to really understand the book.

(Worth the trouble? Totally. Runciman's the bomb.)

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.

John Beckwith's 'Art of Constantinople' Contains No Colour Photographs

This shocked and saddened me: a book on Byzantine art, indeed, what appears to be considered a standard work on the subject,containing 203 photographs over 153 pages -- every single one of them in black and white.

I'm referring to the 2nd edition of 1968. The 1st was published in 1961. I thought that just possibly, what with Beckwith having spent the intervening 7 years in riotously-colorful Swinging London, it might have occurred to him add more color to his book on the very beautifully-colorful art of the Eastern Romans. This is an example of how buying books in used-book stores instead of online could have spared a horrible disappointment.

Beckwith begins his chapter on the iconoclastic period by remarking that there is an almost total lack of visual evidence relative to the time just before iconoclasm erupted. How ironic that Beckwith complains about this, the author of a book entirely lacking color photographs. Did color photography really suck that hard in 1968? Was Beckwith in 1968, not yet 50 years old, nevertheless already such a fogey that he was hopelessly out of touch with contemporary developments in color photography? Can it be that Swinging London did affect him, but negatively, so that he published his works in a black and white fashion as a form of conservative protest? (You know what would be really ironic, is if it turns out that the 1961 1st edition is chock fulla color.)

Something else which surprised me, much less unpleasantly so than the lack of color, is the very first sentence in Beckwith's book, at the beginning of the Acknowledgements, thanking Steven Runciman "for constant encouragement and advice." I'm so used to seeing lesser writers, enraged because Runciman has demolished their traditionalist, romantic, pro-Western notions about the Crusades with his consummate professionalism and command of many relevant source languages other than Latin and French, impotently attacking him or attempting to damn him with faint praise, but I can't remember having read anything nice about him in print before written by someone other than myself or William Gaddis or the writers of his obituaries.

Although I knew of course that Runciman had friends and admirers, still it was nice to see a dissent among all the usual anti-Runciman sniping. Still, it rebounded a bit against Runciman. Yes, I'm afraid I'm still on the photographs. You see, I'm the sort of guy who likes art books very much, but to look at much more than to read. I don't think I've ever actually read an entire art book. What've I got against Runciman now, because Beckwith was apparently his protogee to some extent? A renewed suspicion of elitism, is what. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for elitism in some cases, it's just that I'm against it in others. I'm all for it, for example, when in the preface to The Sicilian VespersRunciman bluntly informs the reader the the prose of the book to follow is complicated because the events it portrays were complicated, and advises readers confused by history to stick to fiction. But if Beckwith had nothing but black and white photos in his book because he, like Runciman, constantly traveled from one sumptuous collection of the actual objects under consideration to the next and gave little thought to those unable to do the same, well then there's an elitism against which I am, to imitate Winston Churchill.

It's only a suspicion, far from a certainty, and for all I actually know no-one was more upset by and protested more energetically against the lack of color illustrations in Beckwith's and Runciman's book than Beckwith and Runciman. An author, after all, is not the same thing as a publisher.

Anyhoo. Perhaps this will be the first book about art whose text I actually read from start to finish, and perhaps reading it will actually benefit me when and if I actually come across a book full of quality color photographs of Byzantine art. The fact that Runciman encouraged Beckwith definitely makes me more interested in his prose.

(And btw, yes, I am aware that quite a few of my blog posts, like this one, refer to books which I am about to read, instead of, much more conventionally, books which I have already read. A few thoughts about that. For one, a difference between a post like this and many a conventional book review is that I freely admit I haven't read the book, while book reviewers often lie and claim they have. One of many good reasons to read jack green's FIRE THE BASTARDS!is the way he busts big-time book reviewers for this rather serious sin. The entire book is about the shortcomings of the reviews of William Gaddis' first novel The Recognitions,which I, like green before me, have actually read. For the full delicious effect of righteous indignation I recommend reading the novel first, and then green's book. And two, eh, I think I write interesting stuff. So, just two thoughts about that, not a full few as promised.)

Runciman's Critics

I wondered whether Frazer and Runciman earned any Doctorates other than the scads of honorary ones they each received. (It seems quite clear that a century ago, a Doctorate was not considered nearly so essential in academic circles as it is today. All sorts of perfectly leading authorities and illustrious professors stopped at an MA and then got on with their careers.) On the title page of the Bibliography and General Index of the unabridged Golden Bough, I saw that Frazer actually had three Doctorates: in addition to an LL.D. and a Litt.D. he had a D.C.L., which is either a Doctorate of the Canon Law of the Catholic Church, or a Doctorate of Civil Law. I confess I know little about the Doctorate of Canon Law and whether it's conceivable that Frazer would've had one; however, he was very interested in Latin literature and ancient and Medieval Italy, and a given university typically offers either an LL.D. or a Doctorate of Civil Law and not both, and Frazer remained very closely tied to Cambridge for his entire academic life and career, two things which would suggest that his D.C.L. was a Doctorate of Canon Law.

In any case: I found nothing at all about non-honorary degrees earned by Runciman, other than a mention in his New York Times obituary that he had earned an MA at Trinity College, Cambridge. And that's only the New York Times, so who knows. Neither the 1951 nor the 1972 Encyclopædia Britannica contains an article about, nor even by Runciman. Shocking.

In the course of searching for evidence of his degrees, I ran into a lot of familiar and unpleasant criticism of Runciman by nasty little Eurocentric revisionist worms like Thomas Madden and Christopher Tyerman, who unfortunately seem to be the most highly-esteemed living historians of the Crusades. (Tyerman brushes aside Runciman's assertions that many Crusaders were adventurers looking for material gain by pointing out that the majority of Crusaders lost financially through the Crusades rather than winning. Does he really think that would-be Crusaders at the time could foretell how the Crusades would go economically, and that therefore everyone with mercenary motives backed out? Or is he only pretending to be that stupid?) Runciman is probably still the most highly-esteemed Western historian of the Middle Ages, living or dead, but unfortunately, as he is dead, he can no longer personally respond to the ridiculous attacks upon him and his works. I guess it's up to me. How ridiculous are the attacks on Runciman's work? This ridiculous: the main thrust of these attacks is that Runciman wrote well. I'm not joking. The passive-aggressive trope: "Runciman could write well, but [...]" is not merely quite popular among Runciman's detractors -- it's ubiquitous. (Apparently even they have grasped that they'd never be able to get away with claiming that he wrote poorly.) And unfortunately even many of Runciman's current fans, among whom I can see few giants, have picked up on this meme, and say things like "[...] but he could write very well." As if writing well were only for novelists, poets and playwrights and had no place in the work of historians. (It takes up little enough space in the works of Madden and Tyerman.) As if writing well were anything more or less than an indication that an historians knows what he or she is doing -- writing, namely. I read about a conference held around the turn of the millenium in Spain, ostensibly in Runciman's honor, where several participants complained of the alleged "narrowness" of Runciman's sources. Narrowness? Really? See, this is one of those demonstrations that God did not exist, because some little pissants spoke this way at a conference about Runciman and did not immediately vanish in flashes of lightning and puffs of black smoke. Narrowness? How many historians of the Crusades have given equal weight to both Latin and Greek Christians sources and Arabic and Turkish Muslim sources? How many of them have been able to read Mongolian, or Armenian, or Georgian? Let alone Latin and Greek and Arabic and Turkish and Mongolian and Armenian and Georgian and Hebrew and Syriac and Ethiopic and Russian and Bulgarian and Slavonic and Persian and Norse, plus an unusually broad variety of the contemporary European and Middle Eastern vernaculars, thus missing very little of importance in the secondary works? How many? Obviously: one. The same one who was reading and writing Latin and Greek at age six. There may never yet have been another human being on Earth who was less narrow in his learning than Professor the Honorable Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman. Madden and Tyerman together couldn't carry his mental jockstrap. Oh btw OMG I just found out that Madden, favorite of the National Review and the so-called "History Channel," Thomas F Madden, wrote the current Encyclopædia Britannica article on the Crusades. These are very good days for reactionary revisionist pseudo-historical apologist crap.

Being an Atheist Doesn't Mean You Don't Have to KEEP Thinking Rationally

So you've figured out that God is a fairy tale and that Jesus didn't walk on water. Congratulations. But that was a pretty low hurdle you just cleared, Sparky. Also, the rise of "new" atheist authors like Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris, their spending more and more time on the bestseller lists and TV, makes it less and less likely that you cleared it on your own. In short, as the public presence of atheism spreads, so does the visible presence of dumb atheists.

They state flatly that Jesus never existed. Now, I'd be with them if they'd said that the stories of Jesus multiplying loaves and fishes and walking on water were just as fictitious as stories of Harry Potter flying and casting spells. But that's not what they're saying. They're saying that Jesus is as fictitious as Harry Potter, not allowing for the possibility that someone named Jesus really did preach, for example, the collection of bad advice and farfetched promises which has come to be known as the Sermon on the Mount, and really was crucified in Jerusalem on Pontius Pilate's watch. I don't know if there was such a man. I certainly don't know that there wasn't.

They say that the earliest records of His life appear 70 years after His alleged death. No. The Gospels, according to most experts, date from AD 70 and later, which would be 70 years after Jesus's alleged BIRTH, Sparky, which would be 35-40 years afters His alleged death. And they forget, or more likely didn't know, that the writings of St Paul are the earliest known writings about Jesus, pre-dating the Gospels, beginning to appear within 20 or 25 years of His alleged death.

But some of these atheists are even dumber, and insist that the Bible was written around AD 400 at the Council of Nicea under Constantine's supervision, ignorant of the facts that 1) the Council of Nicea took place in AD 325, not in 400, 2) Constantine had been dead for 63 years in AD 400, 3) Constantine didn't care much what was in the Bible, he just wanted the bishops to stop squabbling among themselves and for a unity of the Church to mirror the unity of the Empire, 4) that manuscript fragments of the New Testament pre-dating Nicea by over a century have been found -- just generally really spectacularly ignorant.

"Gnostic" has become a buzzword. Today's atheists have learned that Gnostics were opposed by early Christians, and apparently that's enough for their approval -- the enemy of their enemy is their friend. These atheists have not gone to the trouble of finding out anything about the Gnostics, or Arians, or other dualists, whose teachings, in fact, were even crazier than those of conventional Christians, and who were often viciously antisemetic, claiming that the Old Testament represented the imperfect, evil world of the Demiurge which was to be wiped away by the new and perfect spiritual world of Jesus -- see Steven Runciman's book The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy.

One self-satisfied atheist bonehead I've run across recently points out triumphantly that the lack of video and photography in Jesus' time, and the practice of reading intestines and tarot cards, are relevant to the quality of historical statements about the period and that therefore the Magi are fictitious. (I couldn't make this up. Well -- I wouldn't. I didn't.) Neither video nor still photography existed in the time of George Washington or Christopher Columbus. Does this guy think that therefore nothing can be said about Washington or Columbus? (He might. I wouldn't be surprised.) Intestines were read in the Roman Senate -- does he think therefore that Julius Caesar is a fictitious character? Does he think tarot cards were read in the time of Caesar and Jesus? If so, he's off by over 1200 years. I mention this atheist not because he is a rare bird, but because, on the contrary, he does NOT stand out from the mass. He's TYPICAL.

It would be nice if we could transition from an age of discourse among believers to an age of reason. But I think we may be overly-optimistic if we believe that this is already occurring. All too often conventional religion is being traded for beliefs which are equally unsound, resting in an equally uncritical way upon equally unsound authority. I'm not saying there are no bright atheists who think critically and do serious research into historical subjects before pontificating upon them. I just wonder whether there are very many of them, or if typically second-hand reliance on one set of authority has merely been exchanged for equally unthinking acceptance of other authorities.

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.