HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 24, Issue 622, 1 June 1951, Page 5

HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES

Sir-In the review of Runciman’s History of the Crusades, by W. B. Sutch, there appear some errors and perversities. The reviewer evidently thinks that the Great Schism, out of which arose the Greek Orthodox Church, occurred before 717 A.D., instead of some hundreds of years later. Moslem rule is said to have been lenient and pleasant to Christians‘in Jerusalem in the 11th Century (Shades of "St. Bernard and Peter the Hermit!). The statement follows that the period 11th to 14th Century was to see a conflict between Western barbarism and the civilised East and the suggestion is made that this occurred (inter alia) because younger sons of French and Norman princes wanted Christian Byzantine land (Shades of St. Louis and Joinville, of Godfrey, of Raymond, and of Richard!). In any case, this is like saying that Servia started World War I. because she wanted part of the land in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The "Societies of Europe" are said to have been in this period "poor and

primitive." I suppose "societies" of Europe means the nation of England. where Gloucester cathedral was in building and Chaucer writing; France where St. Thomas Aquinas was working and where Chartres windows were being made, Italy of Giotto and Dante. We are then told that there was no authoritative work in English on the Crusades until Runciman. Perhaps no complete account, but Joinville and Villehardouin have been translated into English for over a hundred years and Hilaire Belloc wrote a useful if short account. Nor is it possible to gather from this article whether these statements and opinions are the reviewer’s or whether he attributes them to Mr. Runciman.

EUROPEAN

(Wellington).

(Our reviewer replies as follows: "My statement was that the First Crusade (in the llth Century) was to create an ‘irreparable schism between the Greek and Latin ¢hurches.’ I was referring to something more fundamental than the insertion of the word filioque in the Creed. The doctrinal differences on the nature of the Holy Ghost between the Latin Church and the Orthodox Eastern Church-also called Greek Church-began with Pope Leo I, in the 5th Century. In 1054 papal legates (without authority) excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople, but several attempts to bring the rival creeds together were made, notably those at Lyons in 1274 and Florence in 1439. The formal unity between the two branches was ended in 1472 when the patriarch of Constantinople repudiated the Florentine union. "What is in the review is a summary of the work of scholarly historians who, over the last century, have stri away a good deal of the exaggeration and legend from the crusades. For example, 11th Century heroes invoked by your correspondent-Peter, Godfrey and Raymond-were guilty of infamous actions. (I can give details if your correspondent wants them.) "Yes, in the Dark Ages before the Renaissance, Europe was as poor and primitive as its church architecture was magnificent. (Even as late as Chaucer, who died in 1400, the Church owned one-third. of the wealth of England.) In the 11th Century and taking one Eastern example only, Constantinople was ten times the size of any city of the West, its power was based on communities of free peasants (not serfs as in the West), and if art and architecture are the measure of civilisation, it was high above Western Europe. "As for the authorities on the crusades, Belloc is, of course, not one.. And Villehardouin’s work is an official apology for the diversion in 1204 of the Fourth Crusade from an attack on Egypt to an attack on Christian Constantinople, so that, inter alios, the Chrissen Mec 3 could divide up the Christian