Steven Runciman

Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman, known as Steven Runciman, was an English historian best known for his three-volume A History of the Crusades (1951–54). He was a strong admirer of the Byzantine Empire. His history's negative portrayal of the crusaders and contrasting more favorable views of Byzantine and Muslim societies profoundly impacted the popular conception of the Crusades.

Born in Northumberland, he was the second son of Walter and Hilda Runciman. His parents were members of the Liberal Party and the first married couple to sit simultaneously in Parliament. His father created Viscount Runciman of Doxford in 1937. His paternal grandfather, Walter Runciman, 1st Baron Runciman, was a shipping magnate. He was named after his maternal grandfather, James Cochran Stevenson, the MP for South Shields.

After receiving a large inheritance from his grandfather, Runciman resigned from his fellowship in 1938 and began traveling widely. Thus, he was an independent scholar, living on private means for much of his life. He became a press attaché at the British Legation in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, in 1940 and at the British Embassy in Cairo in 1941. From 1942 to 1945, he was a Byzantine Art and History Professor at Istanbul University in Turkey. He began researching the Crusades, leading to his best-known work, the History of the Crusades (three volumes appearing in 1951, 1952, and 1954). From 1945 to 1947, he was a representative in Athens of the British Council.

Most of Runciman's historical works deal with Byzantium and her medieval neighbors between Sicily and Syria; one exception is The White Rajahs, published in 1960, which tells the story of Sarawak, an independent state founded on the northern coast of Borneo in 1841 by James Brooke, and ruled by the Brooke family for more than a century.

Jonathan Riley-Smith, one of the leading Crusades historians, denounced Runciman for his perspective on the Crusades. Runciman had told Riley-Smith during an on-camera interview that he considered himself "not a historian, but a writer of literature." Yet, according to Christopher Tyerman, Professor of the History of the Crusades at Hertford College, Oxford, Runciman created a work that "across the Anglophone world continues as a base reference for popular attitudes, evident in print, film, television and on the internet."

Edward Peters (2011) says Runciman's three-volume narrative history of the Crusades "instantly became the most widely known and respected single-author survey of the subject in English." John M. Riddle (2008) says that Runciman was the "greatest historian of the Crusades for the greater part of the twentieth century." He reports, "Before Runciman, in the early part of the century, historians related the Crusades as an idealistic attempt of Christendom to push Islam back." Runciman regarded the Crusades "as a barbarian invasion of a superior civilization, not that of the Muslims but of the Byzantines."

Mark K. Vaughn (2007) says, "Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades remains the primary standard of comparison." However, Vaughn says that Tyerman "accurately, if perhaps with a bit of hubris, notes that Runciman's work is now outdated and seriously flawed." Tyerman himself has said, "It would be folly and hubris to pretend to compete, to match, as it were, my clunking computer keyboard with his [Runciman's] pen, at once a rapier and a paintbrush; to pit one volume, however substantial, with the breadth, scope, and elegance of his three."