Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman (7 July, 1903 - 1 November, 2000) 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. It is said that he was reading Latin and Greek by age five. In the course of his long life he would master an astonishing number of languages, so that, for example, when writing about the Middle East, he relied not only on accounts in Latin and Greek and the Western vernaculars, but consulted Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian sources as well. 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

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). 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 independant nation founded on the northern coast of Borneo in 1841 by the Englishman James Brooke, and

In his personal life, Runciman was an old-fashioned English eccentric, known, among other things, as an aesthete, raconteur, and enthusiast of the occult. He was also known for his remarkably sunny disposition and openness of spirit, and made friendships with people from all walks of life and all classes in many countries, from the most humble to aristocrats and political leaders. He died in Radway, Warwickshire.

Works

• The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and His Reign (1929)
• The First Bulgarian Empire (1930)
• Byzantine Civilization (1933)
• The Medieval Manichee : A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (1947)
• A History of the Crusades: Volume 1, The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1951)
• A History of the Crusades: Volume 2, The Kingdom of Jerusalem (1952)
• The Eastern Schism: A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches in XIth and XIIth Centuries (1953)
• A History of the Crusades: Volume 3, The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades (1954)
• The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (1958)
• The White Rajahs (1960)
• The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965)
• The Great Church in Captivity (1968)
• The Last Byzantine Renaissance (1970)
• The Orthodox Churches and the Secular State (1972)
• Byzantine Style and Civilization (1975)
• The Byzantine Theocracy (1977)
• Mistra (1980)
• A Traveller's Alphabet.Partial Memoirs. (1991)

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."
• "Riches should come as the reward for hard work, preferably one's forebears'."

See also

• Fall of Constantinople

References

• Sir Steven Runciman: Bridge to the East. Produced and Directed by Lydia Carras. Amaranthos Films; Channel 4 TV (UK), 1987.

Steven Runciman