ABSTRACT
THE publication of the first volume of M.René Grousset’s history of the Crusades, which is reviewed elsewhere in this issue, brings out again, and all the more vividly because of its wealth of detail and effort to present a complete and rounded-off picture, the very serious gaps in Orientalist research on this period. Whereas the study of the Western and Greek sources has progressed to a point at which it may be said that little more remains to be done, research. on the Oriental sources is incredibly backward. The European scholar has at his disposal, apart from the topographical studies of van Berchem1 and M.René Dussaud,2 only two works of any size, Derenbourg’s study of Usāma ibn Munqidh,3 and Professor W.B.Stevenson’s The Crusaders in the East (Cambridge, 1907), together with such articles as those on the Syrian cities by Honigmann and others in the Encyclopdedia of Islam. Valuable as these are, they do not carry him very far. Usāma presents a lively picture of certain aspects of Syrian life, but he was a minor figure and the scope of his material is too restricted. Professor Stevenson attempted for the first time to situate the Crusaders in their eastern surroundings, but the main object of his work was the careful sifting of the Oriental sources for data of political history and chronology.
