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The most current understanding of the crusades is the context of the pilgrimage. This differs from the capitalist concept of colonialism and settler colonialism in that the crusades were not a expansion for the sake of acquisition of either sources of labor or resources for a metropole. Yes people made money and some people conquered land, but this was in a very different economic context and much more limited than that of commodity relations. The classical European view that most people still cling to of the nobles of Europe exporting their surplus sons in an attempt to conquer land to increase economic spheres of influence just doesn't hold to modern data analysis. Additionally the crusades' weren't distinct projects that started and stopped but a continuous process that waxed and waned over centuries. Yes there were heightened periods of crusading in which powerful European figures led large expeditions around which historians have periodized "the crusades," eg the First Crusade etc... But this periodization doesn't reflect the lived reality pf people but rather a modern academic framework placed on the history to understand it. Their main "goal" was the control and maintenance of the holy sites in Palestine which had been closed to Christian pilgrims after the defeat of the Romans at Manzikert at the hands of the Seljuks, and the subsequent conquest of the levant by the self same seljuks who began massacring Christian pilgrims; something that they quickly realized was a bad idea because pilgrims are good money.

One of the striking things about the crusades, as alluded to above, was the fact that the main figures who ended up crusading were wealthy and important people who, to use a bourgeois framing, made no profit on the venture and most importantly seemed not concerned with it either, in fact the returnless expenditure on crusade could be said to have been the point, as it was a service to Christendom for the sake of ones soul. The overwhelming majority of people who "took up the cross" as it was termed, because again crusading is a modern historiological concept that was never used by medieval people, were just pilgrims who traveled to the holy sites and then left. In fact, for those nobles that did take up rulership in Outremer their inability to retain western Christian men at arms, as while there was a constant influx that ebbed and flowed over the centuries corresponding with the crusading fervor in Europe the overwhelming supermajority of these Europeans LEFT to return to Europe, was a serious problem that was probably a driving factor in the accommodation and assimilation with the Muslim neighbors, many of whom, after centuries, they ended up identifying with more than the srange pilgrims from the west. And this is another important thing to emphasize is that it was a bilateral relationship in which people and ideas, and yes conflict, went both ways.

Long story short it was a complex and interesting sociological phenomenon that bears only passing resemblance to anything like capitalist colonialism let alone settler colonialism.