Few historians would grant President Obama a valid point when he tries to compare Christian excesses during the Crusades with today's actions by the Islamic State.  ABC News asked a couple of noted historians of the Medieval period what they thought of the president's analogy. “I don’t think the president knows very much about the crusades,” Thomas Madden, a historian at the University of St. Louis, told ABC News. “He seems to be casting them as an example of a distortion of Christianity and trying to compare that to what he sees as a distortion of Islam in the actions of ISIS,” Madden said. “The initial goal of the Crusades was to give back lands to Christians that been conquered, due to Muslim conquests.” The Crusades, which began in 1095 with the call of Pope Urban II to recover Jerusalem from Muslim rule, were a series of wars that lasted nearly two centuries. Although no reliable estimate of casualties caused by...(Read Full Post)