Crusading ideology cast Islam as aggressor that robbed Christendom of its provinces

Evidence

Of the preaching of the Crusade in general, it is enough to recall that it was seen as a Holy War primarily because it was intended to recover land that rightly belonged to the Christians. The test of true Christianity was coming to be thought of as loyalty to the Apostolic See, so that, increasingly, Eastern Orthodoxy as well as the Eastern heretical Churches began to seem more than schismatical, something of an aberration; but in spite of this, Christians were still thought to be, or at least to have been, a single nation which in the rise of Islam had been robbed of a third of its best provinces. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 625

Categorization

• XREF: Links directly to the vault’s Anidjar/Jew-Arab genealogy and how Islam is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside — here the origin story of that construction in crusading ideology.