From the First Crusade launched in 1096 to the fall of Acre in 1291, a series of armed expeditions, mostly preached by the papacy, set out from Latin Europe to seize and hold the Holy Land and other territories in the eastern Mediterranean. They established short-lived Crusader states such as the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which were gradually reconquered by Muslim powers. The campaigns brought sustained, if often violent, contact between Latin Christendom and the Islamic and Byzantine worlds. Italian maritime cities supplied much of the shipping and finance.
The Crusades stimulated long-distance Mediterranean trade and the rise of the Italian maritime republics — Venice, Genoa and Pisa — channelling new goods, capital, credit techniques and knowledge into Europe's commercial cities.