Aragonese crusader kings framed Moorish conquests as holy warfare against Islam

Evidence

Jaume consistently portrays himself as a righteous crusader in his autobiography, the Llibre dels feyts; he focuses on his military contests against the Muslims of the Balearics and Valencia, passing over in silence his legislative and judicial career. He describes how, before making the final decisive assault on the city of Mallorca, he prayed to the Virgin, proclaiming to her that “we have come here so that Mass may be celebrated in honor of your Son.” In the ensuing battle, the Aragonese troops sounded their battle cry: “Sancta Maria, Sancta Maria!” Jaume affirms that a Saracen defender later reported having seen the attack against the city led by a white knight bearing a white standard; Jaume asserts that it must have been Saint George, since “we read in histories that in other battles Christians and Saracens have seen him many times.” — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 914

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s Anidjar material on how the modern Islam-West binary was constructed partly through a long memory of holy war; the Spanish-specific texture (George vs James/Isidore patron-saint choice) adds genealogical depth to Razack/Aziz’s ‘war on terror as crusade’ thematics.
• SEED: The passing Saint George detail — crusade chroniclers importing Eastern holy-war heroes into Iberian campaigns — could anchor an essay on how the ‘crusade’ frame for the West was a cultural import from the East before it ever felt native to the West.