The Holy Wars

A HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES, VOL. Ill: THE KINGDOM OF ACRE (530 pp.)--Steven Runciman--Cambridge University Press ($6.50).

The devotion of the medieval Crusaders who marched in great waves toward the unknown East to wrest the sepulchre of Christ from infidel defilement stands in history as an everlastingly marvelous drama. Modern readers (and historians) don't quite know what to make of the Crusades. At best, they speak of a "miracle of faith," at worst of "blind fanaticism" mixed with greed. The word crusade is becoming fashionable again, but few 20th century men can imagine a faith as real, natural and all-inclusive as life itself, so that heroism and villainy, love and war, passion for God and passion for politics could all find room in it.

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 and trade, also lost their crusading fervor.

Saints & Sultans. When the rulers of France, England and Germany led forth the third and greatest of the Crusades, they were playing international politics on the side. England's towering, blond Richard the Lionhearted stormed the supposedly impregnable fortress of Acre, and later fought at Jaffa with such bravery that when his horse fell, the admiring Sultan Saladin sent him two fresh chargers. But Richard himself had backslid so far as to bargain with the infidel, offering to marry his sister to the Sultan's brother in return for access to Jerusalem.

The fourth Crusade was turned--by the cunning of its Venetian outfitters and the headlong cupidity of the expeditionaries --into a campaign against Christians. The Crusaders wound up sacking invitingly weak Constantinople, until then the greatest Christian city on earth.

When later Crusades invaded Egypt, Brother Francis of Assisi went ashore to persuade the Sultan to let the Christians pass to Jerusalem in peace. "The Moslem guards were suspicious at first," says Run-ciman, "but soon decided that anyone so simple, so gentle and so dirty must be mad, and treated him with the respect due to a man touched by God. He was taken to the Sultan al-Kamil. who was charmed by him and listened patiently to his appeal, but who was too kind and too highly civilized to allow him to give witness to his faith in an ordeal by fire. Francis was sent back with an honorable escort to the Christians."

As the crusading tide ebbed, the Saracens picked off one beleaguered Christian fortress after another--Antioch, Tripoli, and finally, in 1291, Tyre and Acre. That was the end of the Prankish kingdom in the East, though the West went on talking for centuries of liberating Jerusalem (Vasco da Gama and Columbus both piously hoped to take it from the rear).

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 is the sin against the Holy Ghost."

This may be true. Yet it remains significant that a 20th century historian, viewing the Age of Faith, ultimately sees in it mainly "intolerance." Reading this verdict--delivered in history's bloodiest century, in which tolerance of evil has done at least as much harm as intolerance of good--the reader is bound to wonder just who is being self-righteous.

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