Europe’s religious othering began internally against pagans before projecting outward against Islam

Evidence

One of the root meanings of “pagan” is peasant (paysan in French). This suggests that Christianity was the umbrella for a wider set of meanings and that the original difference between Christians and heathens ran within Europe. The distinction between Christians and Muslims and other faiths came later. Campaigns of conversion within Europe - first aimed at the countryside and then at Ireland, the Frisians, Saxons, Slavs, and so forth - set the framework for the campaigns that were directed outward, such as the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula and the Crusades overseas. While the Crusades were directed against Islam, there were also Crusades within Europe. Internal Crusades were directed against dissident faiths - such as the Cathars and the Bogomils - and later against “heretics” and witches (Cohn, 1975). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 181

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the common vault-wide equation of Europe’s religious boundary with an Islam-facing frontier — relevant to how the era’s ‘internal difference’ column always precedes the external one.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 181