(a) Official reports and letters from individual Crusaders; Fulcher, Gesta Peregrinantium Francorum, the diary of a witness; Albert of Aix, Chronicle, second-hand, from eye-witnesses, with masses of details uncritically handled; William of Tyre, Historia Rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, also in touch with eye-witnesses, and using written sources, a book composed with discrimination and literary skill, but mingling legend, toned down, with historical fact—the Herodotus of the Middle Ages; Anna Comnena, Alexias; Nicetas, Historia; Chronicles of the Crusades (Bohn); The Chronicle of Morea (14th century; ed. Schmidtt).
For the most part the Crusades have been studied from the standpoint of Western Europe, since it was there that they originated. Instigated by the Latin Church, they were carried on by swarms of devotees, fanatics, penitents, and adventurers from France, Germany, Italy, England. While the goal of their enterprise was in the East, and while the people most seriously affected by their achievements were Orientals, the Eastern Church and Empire took but a small part in the actual movement, which was a great upheaval and eruption of Western Christendom. Nevertheless, it falls in with the object of the present volume to study the Crusades from the novel standpoint of that half of Christendom which was the witness of the romantic
