A pope officially identified Islam with the apocalyptic beast

Evidence

Chapter 8 examines how various chroniclers struggled to make sense of the Crusades, from the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 to the fall of Acre in 1291. Like their counterparts in earlier centuries, these chroniclers needed to explain the place of these events in the divine plan. Pope Innocent III identi- fied Islam with the beast of the Apocalypse and hoped that new Crusades could bring about its demise. The chroniclers of these Crusades described the hopes raised by their initial successes and by rumors of a grand anti- Muslim alliance with the Mongols, and how these hopes were progressively dashed. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 72

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the vault’s genealogical claim that the West has cast Islam as a cosmic/eschatological enemy, not merely a political rival — the beast-of-the-Apocalypse identification is an early institutional source of that framing.
• CANDY: Pope Innocent III officially identifying Islam with the apocalyptic beast, and his hope that fresh crusades could kill it off, is a darkly tweetable historical tidbit.