Sir Steven Runciman, historian; born, July 7, 1903, died November 1, 2000
Sir Steven Runciman, a scholar of the Byzantine Empire whose respected work, A History of the Crusades, broke with the Western tradition of romanticising the Catholic invaders, has died aged 97.
His three-volume A History of the Crusades, published between 1951 and 1954, became the standard work on the subject.
Instead of focusing on the popular Western viewpoint that crusaders were heroes fighting barbarians to win control of the Christian Holy Land, Runciman drew on Muslim, Greek, and Armenian sources to give the Eastern view.
''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 a sin against the Holy Ghost,'' Runciman wrote.
Runciman's research and his curiosity took him to remote
corners of the world in the 1920s and 1930s.
His memoirs, A Traveller's Alphabet, paint a picture of a privileged and convivial man - the son of wealthy and well-connected parents - who was on easy terms with diplomats and scholars.
He wrote of a steamer voyage to China in 1925 and a piano duet with Henry Pu Yi, the last emperor; 1938 travels in French Indochina and a ballet performance at Angkor Wat; caviar sandwiches with Queen Marie of Romania and the glamour of Bucharest - once the Paris of the Balkans.
In the late 1950s, Runciman went to Sarawak to research The White Rajahs, a history of the English family that ruled it before it became part of Malaysia.
''That he contrived to write so many books of a sort calling for slow and difficult research, yet also found time to crisscross the globe so thoroughly, is only partly to be explained by a long life, a comfortable income, and a worldwide network of friends and
relations,'' critic Sir Frank Kermode wrote, attributing some of Runciman's success to his ''gifts of grace''.
Runciman's 80th birthday party at Claridges is said to have ''entered high-class
party folklore''.
''It was the most cosmopolitan group of people I've come across anywhere in the world,'' said one who attended. ''There were Whirling Dervishes and Greeks in costume hobnobbing with bishops, and at least four queens - reigning and ex.''
James Cochran Stevenson Runciman was born July 7, 1903.
Both his parents were Liberal Members of Parliament and his father, Walter Runciman, later Viscount Runciman, was a Cabinet Minister and diplomat.
Educated at Eton and at Cambridge University's Trinity College, Runciman used his mastery of Bulgarian as press attache at the British legation in Sofia until the Germans occupied it. He joined the British Embassy in Cairo in 1941, worked for the government information service in Palestine in 1942, then became professor of Byzantine art and history at the University of Istanbul from 1942 to 1945.
After a two-year stint in Greece as British Council representative, he returned to the academic world, lecturing widely and writing medieval history.
Runciman became an honorary Whirling Dervish and was recipient of other exotic honours - Knight Commander of Greece's Order of the Phoenix and Bulgaria's Order of the Madara Horsemen. A dozen universities in Britain, the United States, and Greece awarded him honorary degrees, and he was knighted
in 1958.
His later books include The Eastern Schism, 1955; The
Sicilian Vespers, 1958; The Fall
of Constantinople 1453, 1965; The Great Church in Captivity, 1968; The Orthodox Churches and the Secular State, 1972,
and Byzantine Style and Civilization, 1975.
Runciman did not marry.
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