I have complained about it before but I heard on of the guests from guerrilla history on the deprogram make this argument and it made me want to gouge my eyes out. This kind of trans historical argumentation is both stupid and unmarxist, just stop! Sorry I felt the need to vent.
These states were not imperialist and they weren't settler colonies. This framing doesn't make any fucking sense when transfered to a medieval context. Like the best you could say is that the Italian city states represented an early firm of merchant capital, but even then that is an incredibly complex phenomenon that has only a tenuous connection to modern capitalism. Calling these city states early capitalism is just a fancy way of saying "lol u hate capitalism yet you exchange good or service! Curious!"
Seriously just stop. I don't know why this set me off but it was like a week ago and I am still mad about it.
"Simple pilgrimages faced more of a threat from the sea and disease than from the Arabs"
Yes but those were accepted background things, the will of god. The disruption caused by the conquests in the east by the seljuk turks, not Arabs, was a very new, and controllable by human will, phenomenon.
"Everybody knows they were out for conques"
I am really sorry but the actual history of the crusades to the lavant doesn't support your supposition. It's also interesting that you cite my, and the current, scholarship as eurocentric when you are just parroting the old eurocentric view of the crusades as being this metaphysical clash of civilizations. The crusades to the Baltic and central Europe were definitely interesting, and part of a longer trend of germanic migration eastward that had been going on for centuries, and different from thise to the levant. The Reconqista could definitely be argued as an origin point for European colonial expansion, but thay was at best at the tail end of the crusading phenomenon, and many scholars would argue was a distinct social formation from the others. Sometimes a bird is a duck and sometimes it is a heron, just screaming loudly that it's the same because all birds are ducks doesn't make it true.