Christians refashioned real Muslim persecutors into classical-style idolaters for hagiography

Evidence

The Cordovan martyrs’ persecutors were stripped of their Islamic garb by the martyrs’ Frankish hagiographers. Hrotsvitha, nun at the abbey of Gandersheim at the turn of the millennium, will go a step further and clothe them in the familiar attire of classical Roman idolaters. In a long poem glorifying the martyr Pelagius, Hrotsvitha does acknowledge that the Saracens allowed Christians to practice their ancestral religion, yet asserts that they inflicted the death penalty on anyone who blasphemed the gods they made of gold. The good Christians who longed to gain the martyrs’ palm would insult the marble idols before which the Saracen prince prostrated himself and burned Sabaean frankincense (which Hrotsvitha associates with Arabs thanks to her reading of Isidore). — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 593

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the genealogical thread: the Saracen is being dressed in the Roman pagan’s clothes because scribes had no independent knowledge — the invented enemy derives from recycled templates.