Christians fantasized Muslims as pagan idolaters to justify crusading violence

Evidence

Far from these communities of dhimmis, Christians of northern Europe and of Byzantium could imagine their Saracen enemies as idolaters who practiced the discredited and colorful rites of the ancient pagans, devoting sacrifices and prayers to a pantheon of idols that included Jupiter, Apollo, Priapus, and their special god Muhammad. This image of Saracen idolatry provided a useful caricature with which the Christian author could justify and glorify the killing of Muslims and the conquest of Muslim territories. By creating a largely imaginary enemy outside the bounds of Christian Europe, the Chansons de Geste could revel in the knightly violence that was in reality more often directed at internal Christian enemies. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1359

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: Could be an article on how imagined enemies historically justify violence that is actually aimed at internal rivals.
• XREF: Relates to the general phenomenon of displacing internal conflict onto external scapegoats, similar to Girard’s scapegoat theory.

Related

• Christians fighting internal enemies displaced that violence onto imaginary Muslim idolaters (similarity 0.90)
• Medieval European epics invented Saracen idolatry to justify crusader violence (similarity 0.85)
• Christians projected their own relic practices onto imagined Saracen idolatry. (similarity 0.84)
• Crusade-era writers invented Saracen idolatry to justify their own violence (similarity 0.83)
• Christians imagined Muslims as Jewish co-conspirators in killing Christ (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval Christians portrayed Muslim Ka’ba worship as hidden pagan idolatry. (similarity 0.82)
• Christians refashioned real Muslim persecutors into classical-style idolaters for hagiography (similarity 0.81)
• Depicting Muslims as idolaters supplied the first textual justification for crusade (similarity 0.81)
• Christian art fused Jews and Muslims into one eternal-enemy figure. (similarity 0.81)
• Proximity to Islam led Christians to abandon the idolatrous image of Saracens (similarity 0.80)
• Crusaders justified conquest by recasting Muslims as pagan Roman idolaters (similarity 0.80)
• Image-veneration was a genuine doctrinal wedge between the two faiths (similarity 0.80)
• Casting Islam as paganism let crusaders frame their war as revived martyrdom. (similarity 0.80)
• Casting Islam as revived paganism reframed crusade as continued Roman martyrdom struggle (similarity 0.80)
• Immediate political motives, not ideology alone, drove medieval representations of Islam (similarity 0.80)