Crusade chroniclers fabricated Muslim portraits by repurposing early Christian martyr narratives

Evidence

The story of Thiemo presents a vivid portrait of the enemy that the crusaders went off to fight, as they imagined him; or at least as their chroniclers imagined them. The picture is shocking both for its hostility and for its wild inaccuracy, its Technicolor horror: a king who worships golden idols, seeks out Christian pilgrims, and delights in ripping off their limbs and drinking their blood. This portrait (like Hrotsvitha’s portrait of ‘Abd al-Rahmân) is pieced together with images from the stories of the early martyrs of the church, stories very familiar to clerical authors through the daily monastic reading of the martyrologies. Not that all readers of this story believed it. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 604

Categorization

• XREF: Directly grounds the vault’s Anidjar/Aziz/Razack claim that Western Islamophobic tropes are constructed through Christian self-narrative rather than observation of Muslims — here showing the literal mechanism (martyr-story templates).
• ADDENDUM: Supports how moral-panic framing over an invented enemy gets built from recycled narrative templates, parallel to the dress-panic recycling in the immodesty article.