So I was watching a video from the youtube channel "Real Crusades History" (a channel previously described on this subreddit as "having an ideological axe to grind"). In the video, where they debunk another video about the First Crusade, they claimed that after the islamic conquests in the 7th century, the mediterranean which had previously been flourishing with trade, now was infested with muslim pirates who raped and pillaged and kidnapped people to slavery, thus largely decreasing trade and making it dangerous for Christian pilgrims. As the book I'm reading (A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani) often presses the importance of the mediterranean- Indian ocean trade link to the caliphates, I can't help but doubt this statement. But I'm not the historian so that's why I'm asking you! In case you think I'm misrepresenting, here's the video: https://youtu.be/44N0rs9YPmA Also, feel free to bring up any other possible wrong things with the video!
The other issue with this claim is that Pope Urban II did not mention piracy during his call for the crusade. There are five contemporary accounts of Urban's speech at Clermont. In those five accounts, there are many descriptions of Muslim conquest over Christians and the cruelty and mutilation suffered by the Christians in Jerusalem. Of the pilgrims, Guibert de Nogent mentions that they are constantly forced to pay at every stage of the pilgrimage. What these accounts of Urban's speech do not mention is accounts of piracy.
Piracy was a part of mediterranean trade since hellenistic times. It was common for city-states to hire pirates to raid each others' trade, or just control them by keeping them on a payroll. There are pirates on the Ilyad, where Ulysses himself recounts being part of a raid against a coastal town.
In christian and muslim times however, the situation began to shift. Both religions theoretically condemned violence (especially slavery) against your brothers in faith, so piracy began to take another shape: privateering. There was a growing trend of considering piracy against other faiths as legitimate - an act of war, not a crime. A pirate that offered his services to a sultan, or one of the rich italian cities, could look forward to riches and even nobility titles. This is usually the point where channels like this jump the gun and start crying about "muslim provocation". The mediterranean didn't became "infested". The pirates only became more organized.
Saying that "muslim piracy decreased trade" or caused the crusades is just ludicrous. First off, the goods that a pirate stole could end anywhere. You had a moral obligation of freeing any slaves from your faith, but buying subsaharian slaves from muslim merchants to feed your galleys? completely legal. Genoa, in special, made a killing off buying slaves from their crimean outposts in Kaffa and selling them to muslim centers in Egypt and Northern Africa, not to count the circulation of goods between italy and the Middle East. Trade thrived, pirates or not - in fact, many of the rarest goods, such as cofee, were frequently bought from pirates because it was so much cheaper than getting them from the legitimate market.
I think this map of Genoese outposts and routes in the 13th and 14th centuries speaks for itself. Later, even amidst frequent wars against the ottomans, the venetians signed a series of trade deals with them (1479, 1503, 1522, 1540, 1575, among others) and the "Venetian Quarter" of Istanbul existed up to the end of the republic in the late 18th century. Keep in mind that the 16th and 17th centuries were the "golden age of piracy" in the mediterranean, when pirates like Barbarossa and the bucaneer fleets of the Knights Hospitaller were making a name for themselves.
About pilgrims - of course there were raids. Of course it was dangerous being a pilgrim. The problem is saying that raids against pilgrim ships were a cause for the crusades when there were so much greater questions in play, such as the pope's ambition of extending his authority in the byzantine empire.
