The Period of the Crusades

The Period of the Crusades is presented as a hinge in the history of European commerce, not through accounts of battles or individual campaigns but through their unintended economic consequences. The book argues that the Crusades rekindled commercial activity, first giving commerce a foothold among the Italian states. In its interpretation, an age of religious fanaticism helped set in motion a commercial revival whose effects reached far beyond the campaigns themselves.

Commerce Rekindled

The author makes the Crusades the initiating circumstance in a larger account of Europe’s commercial development. Commerce had not yet found its later center in Great Britain; its revival began instead among the Italian states. The point is not that the Crusades were undertaken to promote trade, but that their historical consequences, in the author’s reading, exceeded the intentions of those who took part in them.

The account then distinguishes this initial revival from the further conditions that enabled commerce to grow. Various developments, attributed to Providence, established freedom in commercial cities in Italy, Germany, and France. Toward the close of the twelfth century, the Hanseatic League formed: a confederacy of eighty prominent cities extending from the Baltic region to Cologne on the Rhine. These developments mark the spread and organization of commerce after its renewed foothold.

A Changing Commercial Geography

The book describes commerce as seeking a center across several nations before finding one in Great Britain. The Italian states, the cities of the Hanseatic League, Portugal, and Spain all preceded Great Britain in commerce and discovery. This sequence makes the commercial history of the period part of a wider shift in geographic influence, rather than a story of immediate English ascendancy.

England’s later progress, the author explains, was repeatedly delayed by political and military upheavals: the division of the kingdom into the Saxon heptarchy, Danish and other northern incursions, the Norman conquest, English kings’ claims to the throne of France, and the wars between the houses of York and Lancaster. These circumstances belong to the subsequent course of the commercial story, but they clarify the contrast the book draws between the early revival associated with the Crusades and Great Britain’s later commercial position.

Providential Interpretation

The author places the commercial consequences of the Crusades within a theological argument about historical causation. He calls the Crusades wild efforts of fanaticism, yet argues that Providence overruled them to rekindle commerce. In this account, an action’s religious purpose or moral character does not exhaust its historical effects: events and human choices can contribute to outcomes their participants did not intend.

Trade matters in this interpretation because the book regards it as necessary to carrying the gospel to all nations. The commercial revival associated with the Crusades thus forms an early link in a much longer chain of developments that the author connects to worldwide religious communication. The period’s significance, as presented here, lies in this indirect consequence: commerce was renewed in one part of Europe, expanded through successive centers, and eventually became part of the infrastructure through which the gospel could travel farther.