Books: The Massed Typewriters

• Share

A HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES, VOL I-THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS (694 pp )—Edited by Marshall W. Baldwin and Kenneth M. Setton—University of Pennsylvania ($12).

U.S. scholarship, like the U.S. armed forces, has become famed for massive deployment, abundant materiel and relentless attention to detail. During the past ten years a task force of some 65 U.S. historians and foreign allies, with headquarters at the University of Pennsylvania, has fanned out across the ancient paths of the crusaders. Objective:

a five-volume history to record only the most rigorously verified facts. When Britain's Steven Runciman concluded his own excellent one-man history (TIME, Oct. 25) he said wryly: "It may seem unwise for one British pen to compete with the massed typewriters of the U.S."

Looking over Pennsylvania's Volume I, readers will find that three of the best sections were contributed by Historian Runciman himself. The work shows both how broad and how narrow the product of massed typewriters can be.

The First Crusade, from the West's wildfire response to Pope Urban II's appeal, to its dazzling end in the reconquest of Jerusalem in 1099, is one great drama.

But no movie about the great Godfrey of Bouillon and his fellow crusaders is likely to grow out of this book. Under the learned hands of the chroniclers, commanded by Editor-in-Chief Kenneth Set-ton, Peter the Hermit shrinks from the legendary preacher to a voluble nobody traipsing to Jerusalem behind Pope Urban's carefully marshaled armored forces.

The valor, chivalry and pious faith displayed by those forces in storming Jerusalem also fade away—presumably not proved.

Volume I is at its best when it broadens out to tell the Saracen side of the story more fully and ably than it has ever been told before. Tracing sectarian rivalries within Islam, the book fills in the shadowy picture of the dread "Assassins." At the command of Syria's Sinan, the'"Old Man of the Mountain," these fanatics rubbed out leading Moslems (and Christians) who refused to recognize certain descendants of the Prophet's son-in-law AH as Islam's leaders. It was their reputed reliance on hashish to fortify themselves for their religious duty that gave these sinister sectaries their name and the West a handy word.

Oxford's Egyptian-born Sir Hamilton Gibb, famed historian of the Arabic world, who moves this summer to Harvard, contributed distinguished chapters on the efforts of three Moslem leaders to break down Islam's intricate political barriers.

When the last of these, Saladin, finally achieved a measure of unity, Christian-held Jerusalem fell to his armies in 1187.

"The reign of Saladin," says Historian Gibb, "is one of those rare and dramatic moments in human history when cynicism and disillusion ... are for a brief period dislodged by moral determination." This is the nearest thing to an approving judgment in a volume whose authors seem to view the crusades as basically just the most protracted phase of an immemorial conflict between East and West.