Outlandish Knight:
The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman
by minoo dinshaw
allen lane, 784 pages, £30
No events in medieval European history are more discussed today than the wars fought under the banner of the Cross of Christ known to us, but not to those who fought them, as the Crusades. Originally conceived in the 1090s as military campaigns to recover Jerusalem for Christendom that would earn participants spiritual rewards, crusading soon spread across Europe and the Mediterranean, targeting supposed enemies of the Church including Balts and Spanish Moors, religious and social dissenters, and political opponents of the papacy. These wars have variously been understood as Western aggression against pacific Islam, a necessary defense against Islamic attack, a conduit for cultural and commercial exchange, a form of early colonialism, an expression of collective religious identity or social anxiety, and a symptom and vehicle of economic expansion.
The deep puzzle of wars fought for a religion that preaches peace remains. So does the sheer drama of military campaigns waged by hundreds of thousands of men and women with limited if ingenious technologies across three continents and five centuries. The story of the Crusades resonates still, an interest fueled by apparent, if largely specious, current parallels. In the Anglophone academic world, at least, over the last forty years the Crusades have become a minor growth industry. Yet the most popular modern guide in any language is Steven Runciman, a refined British private scholar of medieval Balkan and Byzantine history who insisted that he was “not a historian but a writer of literature” and argued that “Homer as well as Herodotus was a Father of History.” His long trilogy published sixty years ago still provides a base reference for public attitudes evident in journalism, film, and television. To this day, in educated, well-read, non-academic circles in Britain, whenever the Crusades crop up in conversation, someone is bound to say “Runciman.”
Sir Steven Runciman (1903–2000) descended, on both sides of his family, from a wealthy commercial background of shipping and public service. His father, Walter Runciman, became a prominent Liberal politician and cabinet minister, later notorious for an appeasing report in 1938 that recommended Czechoslovakia should hand the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. Steven’s mother, Hilda, was hardly less formidable, also sitting as a Liberal MP in the 1920s, the first instance of a married couple sitting in the House of Commons at the same time. Although later assuming a front of Scottish identity, Steven was brought up on the English side of the border in Northumberland. A precocious and self-contained child, from an early age possessed of an outstanding facility for languages, he was dazzling as a scholar at Eton and, at seventeen, a scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he went on to gain first-class honors and a prize fellowship.
His family background in commerce and politics and his own network of contacts made at school and university placed Runciman effortlessly within the highest circles of his time. His life supplies a running commentary on how close, if not closed, British influential elites were in the twentieth century. While building up a fearsome reputation for name-dropping and snobbery, with a special penchant for royalty and a passion for genealogy witnessed in the elaborate family trees at the end of his Crusades trilogy, Runciman nonetheless retained a wry detachment that wrong-footed many observers and critics. Although he actually did know or had met almost everyone of prominence in twentieth-century Britain, Runciman retained a degree of guarded, teasing, slightly costive independence, a determined individuality characterizing his career and historical work as much as it did his personal life.