Christians fighting internal enemies displaced that violence onto imaginary Muslim idolaters

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

• XREF: Contradicts/complicates vault claims treating medieval Islamophobia narrowly as reaction to actual Muslim power: here the Saracen enemy is partly a projection enabling violence against domestic Christians.
• QUESTION: Chase whether this projection mechanism parallels later racial enemies (Jews as internal, Muslims/Saracens as external scapegoats) in Orientalist discourse.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the immodesty/dress moral-panics article: imaginary enemies mobilized to justify in-group violence already anticipate how moral panics relabel internal threats as external barbarism.