/blog-gone

My Berkeley educated brother links an article on the "real history of the crusades":

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

I've never heard of crisismagazine but it looks interesting...