Steven Runciman

Sir Steven Runciman was the preeminent English-language historian of the Crusades and of Byzantine civilization in the twentieth century, a scholar whose combination of prodigious erudition, literary elegance, and grand narrative ambition produced historical works that have never been superseded as either scholarship or literature. Born in 1903 in Northumberland into a distinguished Liberal political family — his father was a Member of Parliament and later Viscount Runciman — he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a student and later friend of the great medievalist Eileen Power and where he absorbed both rigorous historical method and the conviction that history could and should be written for intelligent general readers, not merely for specialists.

Runciman’s major achievement is his three-volume A History of the Crusades (1951–1954), reviewed on WritersReview, which remains the most widely read account of the Crusading movement in any language. Beginning with the origins of the First Crusade and ending with the fall of Acre in 1291, the work combines exhaustive use of primary sources — Latin, Greek, Arabic, Syriac, and Armenian — with a narrative sweep and a prose style that make it as compelling as any novel. Runciman’s perspective was notably sympathetic to the Byzantine and Islamic worlds that the Crusaders disrupted, and his famous final judgment — that the Crusades were “a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost” — gave the work a moral authority that has shaped how the Crusades have been understood in the English-speaking world ever since.

His other major works include The Byzantine Theocracy (1977), The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965), and The Sicilian Vespers (1958), each of which brings the same qualities to bear on specific episodes in Byzantine and Mediterranean history. Runciman was a remarkable polymath: he spoke a dozen languages, traveled extensively throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East, was a practicing astrologer, and moved with equal ease through the royal courts of Europe and the scholarly seminars of Cambridge and Princeton. His life, like his work, seemed to belong to an earlier and grander intellectual dispensation.

Runciman was knighted in 1958 and received honorary degrees from universities across the world. He continued to write and speak publicly until very near his death in 2000 at the age of ninety-seven. Modern scholars have subjected some of his interpretations to revision — his sympathy for Byzantium sometimes shading into a bias that recent historiography has had to correct — but the fundamental achievement of his Crusades history, its combination of narrative power and documentary mastery, remains extraordinary. For anyone approaching the history of the medieval Mediterranean for the first time, Runciman remains the essential starting point and an object lesson in what historical writing, at its best, can achieve.