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Heltaher
Heltaher

Sacred Profits: The Institutional Economics of Holy War

Key Insights
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  • Religious institutions serve as powerful coordination mechanisms that reduce transaction costs for elite-benefiting projects by providing legitimation, organizational infrastructure, and enforcement capacity.
  • The Crusades generated substantial economic returns for the Church, Italian merchants, and nobility through taxation, trade monopolies, and land acquisition, despite frequent military failures.
  • Systematic divergence between stated religious objectives and achieved material outcomes reveals institutional optimization for resource accumulation over doctrinal consistency.
  • The coordination mechanism persists across contexts, from medieval crusading to modern resource conflicts, whenever elites need mass mobilization without direct compensation.

References
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