volume one

Xiii
INTEODUCTION.
revolutions which the historian of the crusades has to
describe. A writer who has preceded us by two centuries^
and who calls the history of the Crusades a right royal his-
tory, is surprised at the silence preserved to his time.* " ]
esteem it," says he, "a deplorable thing that such persons
inferior in no* way to those who have been so much celebrated
by the Greeks and the Eomans, should have falleu
into sucii obscurity, that we search in vain to discovej
and they appear to m«
who they were and* what they did ;
highly culpable, who, possessing learning and the skill to
write* have left these histories neglected." Everybody
ought now to be of this opinion, and regret that our great
writers have not entertained the noble subject of the Cioisades.
AYhen I undertake to supply the want created by
their silence, I am duly impressed with the difficulty of the
task.
They who, among us, have written ancient history, had
for guides the historians of Eome and Athens. The brilliant
colours of Livy, of Tacitus, of Thucydides presented
themselves naturally to their pencils ; but I have no models
to follow, and am compelled to make those historians of the
middle ages speak whom our times despise. They have
rai-elv sustained me in mv labour bv the charm of their stvle,
but if thev have afforded
or the elesance of their narrations ;
me no lessons in the art of writing:, thev transmit to me at
CI? ' »
least events whose interest will make up for the deficiency
of their talent or mine. Perhaps it will be found, in the
perusal of this history, that a period in which everything is
astonishing loses nothing by being presented in a simple and
faithful picture. The unaffected style of our old historians,
in my view, appears to reanimate the persons and the characters
they describe ; and if I have profited by that which
thev have taught me, the ao:e in which thev lived will not be
ill represented in my pages. It would have been easy for
me to have censured with severity, as has usually been done,
their ignorance and their credulity, but I respect in them
the frankness and the candour of the periods of which they
* History of the Holy War made by the French and other Christians
for the deliverance of Judea and the Holy Sepulchre, composed in Greek
and French, by Yves Duchat, a Trojan. This history is translated almost
literally from the History of Accolti, entitled De Bello Sacro.