Eschatological urgency both fueled conversion hopes and crusading zeal.

Evidence

These thirteenth-century authors, like those of previous centuries, attempted to place the tumultuous events around them into God’s plan. As always, one of the most difficult things to explain was the complex net of relations between God, his chosen people, and his enemies. What was one to think of Muslims? (Or Mongols, heretics, or Jews?) How to place them in the divinely ordained march of history? Various twelfthand thirteenth-century writers dreamed that rationalistic polemics could convert Saracens to Christianity. A sense that the days of the end were drawing near helped fuel the hopes for conversion and gave a sense of urgency for the calls to crusade: Innocent III and Saint Francis, in the early part of the century, chided Christians to take up the cross and to go on 212 • Thirteenth-Century Dreams of Conquest and Conversion missions to Muslim lands. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1090

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the On Sacrifice article’s theme of how apocalyptic and salvific framing legitimizes collective violence and sacred duty.