The Recueil des historiens des croisades (trans: Collection of the Historians of the Crusades) is a major collection of several thousand medieval documents written during the Crusades. The documents were collected and published in Paris in the 19th century, and include documents in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Old French, and Armenian.[1] The documents cover the entire period of the Crusades, and are frequently cited in scholarly works, as a way of locating a specific document. When being quoted in citations, the collection is often abbreviated as RHCorR.H.C..
Images of the documents can be viewed in some major libraries. The 1967 reprint of the entire collection by Gregg Press can also be found in major libraries, and there are also full-text PDF files available online, which have been made available by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France Gallica project. Documents can be downloaded in their entirety, or stepped through page by page, with both the original text, and a French translation.
According to the introductory Report[2] to the first volume of the Western Historians, this collection brings up to date the previous collection published in 1611 by Jacques Bongars under the title Gesta Dei per Francos,[3] due to "the discovery of many literary and historical monuments which Bongars could not have suspected the existence", including those published in the collections of Duchesne, Archery, Mabillon, Martène and many other foreign compilers.
The editors of this collection have chosen to consider 1291 as the end date of the Crusades, since the fall of Saint-Jean-d'Acre completed the ruin of Christian institutions in Palestine. So historians posterior to the middle of the fourteenth century are not included. Were also excluded works more literary than historical, like novels on the Crusades, and also the narration related to the conquest of Constantinople by the French and the Venetians, because they did take almost no part in the events of Palestine. Neither was included Joinville's Histoire, because the commission of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres did class this author among France's general historians.
The RHC is divided into five series:
Full title: Assises de Jérusalem ou Recueil des ouvrages de jurisprudence composés pendant le XIIIe siècle dans les royaumes de Jérusalemetde Chypre, par M. Le Comte Beugnot
