Any estimate of the numbers who engaged in the crusades must be pure guesswork. The statistics of medieval chronicles, always notoriously inaccurate, seem to reach the acme of unreliability in the figures of the crusaders engaged in the different expeditions. The main body of the first crusade, which started in 1095, was compared in number with the sands of the seashore or the stars in heaven; even moderate contemporaries made it 600,000 or at least 300,000 strong; perhaps it was really 100,000. There were six or eight separate expeditions lasting down to 1270, and we may say that a million men, roughly speaking, and probably many less rather than more, took part. =98. Commercial aspect of the crusades.=—Even the transportation of this number of men, with their baggage and equipment, must have been a great stimulus to the growth of Mediterranean shipping. The first crusade went almost entirely by land, but the sufferings and losses were so great that crusaders were driven to the sea route, and this became gradually the regular way of reaching the Holy Land. Italian merchants accompanied the expedition from the beginning, not as real crusaders but as contractors for transportation and supplies, turning both the needs and the successes of the crusaders to their commercial profit. A fleet from Genoa and Pisa accompanied the first crusade along the coast of Syria, selling provisions. The Venetians waited until Jerusalem had been taken; then fitted out a fleet which fought the Pisans, quarreled with the Greeks, and in return for very slight services rendered to the crusaders demanded that in every city captured they should have a market, church, and freedom from taxes. “Whilst the warriors of Christendom were fighting for glory, for kingdoms, or for the tomb of Christ, the merchants of Venice fought for counting-houses, stores, or commercial privileges.” “The other crusaders obeyed the new impulse, the Venetians utilized it.” The fourth crusade, starting soon after 1200, was fairly captured by the Venetians and turned into a commercial expedition for their profit. When the time for starting came, the feudal knights, improvident as ever, could not pay the sum agreed on for their transportation, and Venice used her power over them as debtors to force them to aid her, first to capture Zara on the Adriatic, a Christian city but a commercial rival, then to take Constantinople itself, the key to the trade of the Black Sea. The crusade accomplished nothing against the infidels; it was merely a means by which Venice built up her commercial and colonial empire at the expense of other Christians.