Early crusade chroniclers felt no need to fact-check a hated subject

Evidence

In his early twelfth-century chronicle of the First Crusade, Gesta Dei per Francos, Guibert of Nogent, when he came to write about the career of Muhammad, observed that ‘it is safe to speak evil of one whose malignity exceeds whatever ill can be spoken’. In other words, when faced with something so bad, it was not necessary to check one’s facts and Guibert seems to have relied on misinformation brought back by pilgrims from the Holy Land. However, Guibert was at pains to correct one popular misconception, as he pointed out that it was not true that Muslims regarded Muhammad as God. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 75

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘It is safe to speak evil of one whose malignity exceeds whatever ill can be spoken’ — a genuinely quotable line that captures medieval polemic as license to slander.