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FOREWORD 
 For some four or five years I have been waiting for the oppor tunity to
write this foreword. Since there are so many footnotes in the pages which
follow, I am moved to employ them even here. This book is the first of five
volumes. Its appearance has been long delayed. During the years of waiting,
however, there has often gone through my mind the wise maxim attributed to
Augustus, of which Petrarch once reminded Boccaccio: Whatever is being done
well enough is being done soon enough. 1 If, then, both contributors and
editors have done their jobs well enough, our readers will forgive us the
long wait. I hope so, for I foresee now some further delay before we can
bring out the remaining volumes. Since we have had very familiar terrain
to traverse in the first volume, we have gone far; we have covered the first
hundred years of the crusades, and the second volume will reach the beginning
of the fourteenth century. 
 The third volume will be devoted chiefly to the crusades of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. The fourth will cover the political and ecclesiastical
organization of the crusader states, propaganda, financing, legal and political
theories relating to the crusades, and the like. If chief emphasis is given
in the early volumes to the history of the states established in Syria, Palestine,
and Cyprus, no less attention will be given, as we proceed, to the history
of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, to the more durable states in continental
Greece and the Morea, and to those in the islands of the Aegean. Some fine
chapters have already been written on agricultural conditions in the crusader
states in Syria and Palestine; on commerce and industry, as well as on the
Genoese and Venetian empires; and others are now being prepared on numismatics,
sigillography, and heraldry. Five excellent chap ters on art and architecture
were written five years ago, and last year their authors patiently revised
them; I think that we shall be able to include four of them in the third
volume. Volume V will 
 1 Epp. rerum senilium, XVI [XVII], z, in Opera, Basel, 1581, II, 965: "...et
saepe mihi per animum recursat sententia Caesaris illi[us] sapientissimi
principis Augusti: Sat celeriter fieri quicquid fiat satis bene." 
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