They who, among us, have written ancient history, had for guides the historians of Rome and Athens. The brilliant colours of Livy, of Tacitus, of Thucydides presented themselves naturally to their pencils; but I have no models to follow, and am compelled to make those historians of the middle ages speak whom our times despise. They have rarely sustained me in my labour by the charm of their style, or the elegance of their narrations; but if they have afforded me no lessons in the art of writing, they transmit to me at least events whose interest will make up for the deficiency of their talent or mine. Perhaps it will be found, in the perusal of this history, that a period in which everything is astonishing loses nothing by being presented in a simple and faithful picture. The unaffected style of our old historians, in my view, appears to reanimate the persons and the characters they describe; and if I have profited by that which they have taught me, the age in which they lived will not be ill represented in my pages. It would have been easy for me to have censured with severity, as has usually been done, their ignorance and their credulity, but I respect in them the frankness and the candour of the periods of which they are the interpreters. Without yielding faith to all they say, I have not disdained the fables they relate to us, and which were believed by their contemporaries; for that which was thought worthy of credit then serves to picture to us the manners of our ancestors, and forms an essential part of the history of past ages. We do not now require much sagacity to discover in our ancient chronicles what is fabulous and what is not. A far more difficult thing is to reconcile, upon some points, the frequent contradictory assertions of the Latins, the Greeks, and the Saracens, and to separate, in the history of the crusades, that which belongs to religious fanaticism, to policy, or to human passions. I do not pretend to resolve more skilfully than others these difficult problems, or to elevate myself above my subject, by offering positive judgments upon the nations and ages which will present themselves before me. Without giving myself up to digressions in which it is always easy to make a display of learning, after having scrupulously examined the historical monuments which remain to us, I will tell honestly what I believe to be the truth, and will leave dissertations to the erudite, and conjectures to philosophers.