Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman (7 July1903 - 1 November2000) was a British historian known for his work on the Middle Ages. He was born in Northumberland. Both of his parents were Members of Parliament for the Liberal Party, and his paternal grandfather, Lord Runciman, was a shipping magnate. A King's Scholar at Eton College, he was an exact contemporary and close friend of George Orwell. In 1921 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge as a history scholar. His work on the Byzantine Empire earned him a fellowship at Trinity in 1927. After receiving a large inheritance from his grandfather, Runciman resigned his fellowship in 1938 and began traveling widely. From 1942 to 1945 he was Professor of Byzantine Art and History at Istanbul University, in Turkey, where he began the research on the Crusades which would lead to his best known work, the History of the Crusades (whose three volumes appeared respectively in 1951, 1952, and 1954).
Runciman was an old-fashioned scholar, uninterested in applying sociology or historiography to his accounts of the past. He was also an old-fashioned English eccentric, known, among other things, as an aesthete, raconteur, enthusiast of the occult, and friend of aristocrats and political leaders in many countries. He died in Radway, Warwickshire.
Quotes
'Unlike Christianity, which preached a peace that it never achieved, Islam unashamedly came with a sword'
'I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destiny of man.'
Runciman's major works are those in which the narrative of events is detailed, but the historian never gets lost in the detail; his task and duty is to compile and to recognize in particular events the wider and complex picture, its roots in the past and its significance for the future.
Runciman acknowledged the importance of good writing and said that once he had finished a text he would read it half-aloud to assure himself that the rhythm of the language was right and the sentences flowed.
Runciman understood the significance of the Crusades as an international movement that led to the destruction of the outstanding medieval civilization, the civilization of the Christians of the East who, as he notes, were its main victims.
Sir StevenRunciman, who has died aged 97, was the pre-eminent historian of the Byzantine Empire and of the Crusades; he was also a celebrated aesthete, gentleman scholar and repository of the civilised values of Edwardian times.
Runciman had a lifelong fascination with the supernatural (and the naturally superior); he later read the tarot for King Fuad of Egypt and became court fortune teller to King George II of the Hellenes.
StevenRunciman was knighted in 1958 and appointed a Companion of Honour in 1984.
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