Christian polemic tools served both reconquest triumph and crusade despair

Evidence

Just as authors in thirteenth-century Spain deployed the tools of anti- Muslim polemic to understand the victories of Christian kings over their Muslim adversaries and to justify their rule over their new Muslim subjects, other thirteenth-century writers used the same traditions to make sense of the much more confusing and disturbing events (from their standpoint) surrounding the thirteenth-century Crusades. The despair caused by Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem gave way to new calls for crusade, inspiring in various authors hopes of crusader victory, of mass conversion of Muslims, or of an alliance with a Christianized Mongol empire. These hopes were regularly dashed as the news reached Europe of the failure of successive Crusades, culminating in the Mamluk capture of Acre in 1291 and the conversion to Islam of the prominent Mongol rulers. The mood at the end of the thirteenth century was decidedly bleak. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1004

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the existing vault material about how the same antithesis discourse was deployed for distinct political projects.