Originally Posted by Sun Tzu
I have to write an essay on this, and I figured that I could ask some you people to shed light and give me some information or websites. It would be much appreciated.
The Crusades were virtually never self-financing, en spite of the sometimes spectacular plundering, particularly after the Fall of Constantinople in 1204; the expenditures and losses were almost always significantly greater.
The complexity of the financing of this remote warfare was quite different from the plunder of the intermitent warfare in Europe, so it became an stimulus for the re-emergence of banking techniques; i.e. the first attested bill of exchange was issued at Genoa in 1156.
The financing system evolved considerably through time.
The First Crusade and related expeditions were largely self-financing by any conceivable mean but especially through loans, typically mortgages; monasteries were presumably the greatest creditors.
Once the First Crusade demonstrate the immense costs of Holy War in practice, the monarchs involved in the later Crusades recurred to progressively heavier taxation.
It is possible that Louis VII may have raised a royal levy for the Second Crusade.
Both the aforementioned French king and Henry II of England certainly levied such taxes for the Crusades by the 1160s
The heavy Saladin Tithe for the Third Crusade is probably the better known example.
For the Fourth Crusade ecclesiastical taxing was added to the secular one by Innocenzo III since 1199.
To these universal taxes sometimes local taxes were added too, for example in France for the Albigensian Crusade.
It was estimated by the French Crown that even the relatively minor VII Crusade of 1248-1254 officially costed Louis IX of France no less than six times his typical budgetable annual income, even excluding the at least equivalent subsides from his subjects and other Crusaders and several unaccounted costs; some modern authors tend to estimate at least the double of that figure.
The ecclesiastical financing system matured by 1274 (when the decline of the Crusades themselves was already irreversible) when the Pope Gregorio X divided Christendom into twenty-six collectorates.
In economic terms, the most relevant result of the "Crusade spirit
" was this innovative concept that all society along Christendom must contribute to sustain those who risked their lives purportedly to protect the common good of the Church.