Italian merchant city-states emerged from crusade logistics into commercial trade

Evidence

Once the religious enthusiasm and fanaticism that clothed the carnage of the crusades had abated, and the ambitions of Norman and Frankish feudal lords and their clerical allies had been satiated or overwhelmed by the weight of bureaucratic administrations and the seductions of corruption, the sea trade of the Italian coastal states turned from the merchandising of war, the conveyance of armies, and the financing of invasion, to the conventions of commercial trade and of course piracy. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 463

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the rise of European mercantile capitalism that Robinson traces as the economic system that would generate racial slavery.