Tom Smith and Maimon Schwarzschild of the excellent The Right Coast blog had an interesting exchange about the Crusades, which I link to partly because it reminds me of a couple of conversations I had with Lex:
Maimon Schwarzschild’s Response
Smith’s rejoinder to Schwarzschild’s response
Schwarzschild’s reply to Smith’s rejoinder
Strangest thing I’ve ever read about the crusades: Geraldine Heng argues in Empire of Magic (Columbia UP, 2003) that Historia functioned to help culture deal with the cannibalism practiced on the Turks by the Latin Christian crusaders in the first crusade of 1098 (2).