Europe’s anti-Islamic polemic arsenal was forged by 1300 and merely reused after

Evidence

The ideological responses to Islam that I examine in this book were redeployed countless times in medieval and modern Europe. Europeans would not again expend the same intellectual effort against Islam as did their forbears to explain, refute, convert. Rather, the intellectual weapons forged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were reused, anthologized, translated, published. Petrus Alfonsi’s attack on Islam found its way into the encyclopedic Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais; thirteenthcentury Dominican minister general Humbert of Romans recommended it as required reading for those who preached the Crusades, and numerous fourteenthand fifteenth-century authors reused it. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1356