The Crusades’ logistic demands incubated Italy’s dominant mercantile city-states

Evidence

On account of their logistical appetites, the Christian Crusades, beginning in the eleventh century against the Saracens in Jerusalem, brought to fruition the mercantile Italian city-states of the Middle Age. These entrepots dominated southern and western European commerce with the non-European world until the middle of the fourteenth century. By the beginnings of that century, though Papal and regal levies for crusades increased in number and frequency, actual crusades had almost entirely ended. 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: Shifts from war provisioning to commerce anticipates the later point about how European capitalism emerges from warfare logistics rather than purely market rationality.