The Crusaders and the Red Sea in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods
Abstract
The Crusader expansionist policy in the Arab region is one of the most prominent indications that the Crusader movement was a colonial movement carried out by Western Europe for the purpose of achieving colonialism, and among them was the domination of international trade by controlling the main commercial outlets, especially since the Red Sea was the bridge linking trade between Far East and Europe since ancient times. In spite of the attempt of contemporary European historians, both of them and modernists, to bury the true crusade movement by concealing behind the religious slogans that say that the purpose of the European Morocco at the time was to help their Byzantine brothers and restore the Holy Land in Palestine (the Kingdom of Christ). The objective view of the events that accompanied the Crusades reveals to us from the outset the falsehood of those allegations promoted by the Westerners, as the nefarious actions that the Crusaders carried out during their crossing of Byzantine territories represented in the acts of murder, plunder and plunder that did not result from even the churches of Constantinople itself and the preoccupation of some leaders of the first crusade to establish Emirates of them in the heights of the Levant and their abandonment of continuing their creep towards Jerusalem is another evidence of what they were neglecting in terms of colonial expansionism, and what confirms this tendency is their continuation of this approach after achieving their declared and alleged goal of occupying Jerusalem, as their policies later expressed the real ambitions to impose hegemony The region and the exhaustion of its economic potential, at the forefront of criticism of controlling competition in international trade, which was then subject to sovereignty. This explains to us to a large extent the reason behind the rapid response of the Italian trading cities to the call of Pope Urban II to contribute to the Crusades and the consequent commercial privileges obtained from that contribution in the areas captured by the Crusaders ").