Crusade rhetoric centered on resentment over churches converted into mosques.

Evidence

With this general attitude we must associate the very lively resentment that was felt for the loss of church buildings used as mosques, during the lifetimes of the writers who speak of it. Mark of Toledo connected the original loss of provinces with this theme: at the Arab Conquest of Spain, where ‘formerly many priests offered the divine obsequy to God, now villainous men devoted supplications to the execrable Muhammad, and churches which had once been consecrated by the hands of bishops were now reduced to profane temples’. Humbert of Romans exemplifies the attitude to contemporary ‘profanation’, although his comments lead rather ludicrously up to an anticlimax. With his own eyes, he tells us, giving us to expect some horrible sacrilege committed in his presence, with his own eyes he has seen not, it turns out, the atrocity itself, but only the place where it was said to have been committed. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 628

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Christian writers nursed live resentment over churches converted into mosques; Militants frame mosque destruction as purifying humiliation and unifying their nation. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 414