The Crusades were part of a broader North European expansion process.

Evidence

My point is that the Crusades were not just a religious movement… . They were not even, by themselves, the cause of the European break-through. They were part of a much larger, much wider process: a process which can be seen all over Europe and on all the frontiers of western Christendom: beyond the Pyrenees, beyond the Elbe, on the Scottish border, in Ireland. This process is essentially a north European process. It is based on a new population-growth and new techniques, agricultural, social, military… . Perhaps, as Gibbon wrote, the Crusades were a diversion of this great expansion into the sideline of unprofitable imperialism; perhaps the imperialism was inseparable from the expansion. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1763

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Robinson’s argument that Europe’s expansion was driven by internal demographic and technical forces, not merely religious zeal — relevant to the book’s thesis about racial capitalism’s origins.