this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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The nature of production and "economy" (which almost doesn't feel appropriate as a term) in medieval Europe was very different from later in the early modern period where we find the first manifestations of capitalism and colonialism and imperialism in our contemporary, Marxist sense.
The incentives are just different for the people involved in the crusades than that of settlers. Sure, in a superficial sense, there are similarities: some people from place go to another place and make war for their own gain. But when we break it down, the specifics of the incentive structure are different because they relate to different society and economy underpinning them.
The crusaders weren't going to the Levant or Egypt to establish a periphery with exploitable natural resources and labor to feed their manufacturing back home. Even if some of them moved there, they weren't quite doing it to settle either. These were already developed, wealthy places. The crusades were basically peer-conflicts. The European polities and Kings did not have the technology or infrastructure to subjugate in such a totalizing manner the people there.
It's difficult. There's a lot of things I want to express and touch on that give shape to the particular nature of the crusades as opposed to other wars of conquest or colonization. There's the religious aspect, which isn't just meant as a sort of basis for the crusades absent any material incentive, but that the Catholic Church was an immensely important and present force in the political (and personal) lives of the people who carried them out. Maybe the most important thing is that there was not capitalism and that the direct, important players of the crusades were not capitalists. The concept of reinvesting your surplus into more numerous, more productive, more intensive capital in order to expand ever-faster was not the way that kings were negotiating power then. The holy land was wealthy. It would provide a tax base, it would provide opportunity, it would provide glory, status, and legitimacy among peers and challengers. That's probably more along the lines of what the incentives for the crusades were for the nobility.
At least, this is a loose organization of some of my thoughts on the matter. There's more to say, certainly.
For me the fact that a majority of the big players in the crusades were already powerful individuals who effectively lost everything in their prosecution, exemplifies what you put so well.
Yes, but that’s exactly what happened on the Greek islands after the 4th crusade. (Oremen and olives) That’s what happened in the Teutonic order in the Baltic crusades (farmers and food for German cities) that’s what happened in Spain and North Africa during the reconquista (these colonies exist today) what Spanish and Portuguese explorers did. (They viewed themselves as crusaders) This was between 1200-1500. This is the context a Dr and medieval historian is talking about and didn’t have time to get into.
it's what happened in Crete under Venice but many others were seized as personal property of various italian/frankish lords, with an ambiguous relationship to the metropole & other latin authorities in greece. compare Negroponte or Naxos to Candia. direct rule from Venice was the exception, not the rule of the division of the empire.
really? i'd rather assumed they used their surpluses to fund their military expansion like the hospitallers, maybe sending money to the catholic church. any good books on them & the livonians?
the reconquista bleeds right into real-shit colonialism at the end and at least i think it's pretty sloppy to try and put it in the same bucket as the first crusade because participants used some of the same words. even in the reconquista itself the things most characteristic of colonialism, the expropriation, ethnic designation and deportation of groups is at the very end when Granada folded. the christians didn't do that for 200 or more years of reconquista (depending when you say the reconquista 'started'). when Portugal took Ceuta they already had rounded the Cape, when Spain took Melilla America had been discovered.