THE DREAM AND THE TOMB: A History of the Crusades <i> by Robert Payne (Scarborough House: $14.95, illustrated).</i>

The late Robert Payne infuses this exceptional history with the energy and vivid characterizations of a novel. He demonstrates that the Crusades were never a simple battle between the forces of Islam and Christianity, but a complex series of conflicts involving Muslims and Latin and Greek Christians, whose mutual distrust, ignorance and hatred doomed any possibility of a stable peace. Ostensibly seeking to free the shrines of Jerusalem--especially the Tomb of Christ--from the hands of the Infidel, the Crusaders went to war for motivations that ranged from genuine piety to simple greed. The resulting 200 years of sporadic warfare produced an array of fascinating characters--Bohemond, the charismatic Norman Prince of Otranto; Sultan Yusuh ibn Ayyub, better known as Saladin; the impetuous Richard Coeur de Lion--but remarkably few admirable figures, except Baldwin IV, the intelligent, just and ill-fated Leper King of Jerusalem. Payne stresses that the medieval religious experience imbued that vision of Jerusalem with a power alien to modern readers, a power that justified personal sacrifice, arduous toil--and merciless slaughter.