Bede only feared Saracens once they reached the West.

Evidence

For Bede (c. 673–735), monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow from his childhood, the Saracens were a distant and obscure threat. The conversion of the Berbers took place when he was almost thirty. Before then, the Saracen invasions had primarily been at the expense of the Persian empire and its eastern neighbors (about whom a Northumbrian monk could scarcely be expected to have much knowledge or interest) and against the Byzantine empire, which Bede disliked for the same reasons Isidore had: he opposed its universalist political pretensions and saw it as prone to all sorts of heresy. Only in later years, as Saracens conquered Spain and raided Italy and Gaul, did Bede see them as dangerous. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 431

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did distance from a threat shape a medieval historian’s perception of danger — and does Bede’s indifference to eastern losses mirror modern media concentration on proximate conflicts?