ABSTRACT
The theme of this year’s symposium is of broad interest, engaging the attention of historians outside the field. Indeed, the interaction of cultures and peoples who, in one way or another, find themselves in close contact is a perennial historical problem and an important question in modern historiography. In the early period of the first phase of European expansion there were two main impulses, two main forms of expansionary movement, intersecting at important points and lending support one to the other. One is economic expansion, focused on the Mediterranean and eventually the Baltic, fueled by trade and later facilitated by the development of manufactures and banking institutions. Medieval exploration is connected with the missionary and mercantile tradition rather than the tradition of crusade, although there are undoubted links to the latter as well. A third pattern of medieval colonization is exemplified by the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was established in the late eleventh century and lasted until 1291.
