Crusade-era apocalypticism linked Saracens and heretics as joint enemies of Christendom.

Evidence

Innocent III came to the papal throne in 1198 and was to make his mark as the most powerful and influential Pope of the Middle Ages. Innocent was anxious to recoup Christian losses in the East. Jerusalem had fallen to Saladin in 1187, and the third Crusade, led by Kings Richard the Lionhearted of England and Philip Augustus of France, was unable to wrest it back. Joachim of Fiore, the Calabrian abbot and mystic that Richard had stopped to visit on his way East, identified Muhammad and Saladin with key elements in the Apocalypse and predicted that Christendom would be devastated by an alliance between Saracen armies and Cathar heretics. This devastation would be followed by a final Christian victory to be won not by crusading armies but by humble, pious missionaries. The fourth Crusade, undertaken in the sixth year of Innocent’s pontificate, also went awry. The Venetians, who held its purse strings, led it to capture first the Dalmatian port of Zara, then the largest city in Christendom, Constantinople. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1005

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘On Sacrifice’ and Islam-West opposition claims by showing how heretics (Cathars, later targeted in crusade) and Saracens were apocalyptic allies — the conflation of internal and external enemies that Anidjar/others trace.
• XREF: Connects to existing vault claims about medieval Christian apocalyptic mapping of Islam onto beast-figures; Joachim of Fiore’s framework grows into later anti-Islamic prophecies.