By 1300 the Saracen idolater replaced the Roman pagan as medieval villain template

Evidence

Hrotsvitha dressed Pelagius’s persecutor, ‘Abd al-Rahmân, in the familiar and despised garb of a classical pagan idolater. The author of the Life of Saint Katherine does precisely the opposite: he paints the classical Roman emperor Maxentius as a familiar literary personage, the evil Saracen king who worships idols of Mahound and Tervagant and who persecutes Christians. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 718

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the inverting topos: instead of fitting a Muslim into a pagan mold, later writers fit a classical Roman emperor into the now-familiar ‘evil Saracen’ stereotype.
• XREF: Echoes the pattern I traced before of stereotypes migrating backward in time and colonizing earlier historical figures.