Frankish monks conflated Muslims and Vikings as one undifferentiated pagan threat

Evidence

For Aimoin, the three martyrs were victims of “pagan persecution,” just like the Parisians who weathered the repeated attacks of pagan Vikings. At roughly the same time as he wrote his account of the translation of the three martyrs, Aimoin also wrote a collection of miracles of his monastery’s patron saint, Germain, who performed miracles to protect his monks and to kill the pagan Vikings who defiled his church. Clearly the monks of Saint Germain were looking for powerful protectors against “pagan” enemies and were uninterested in learning about the differing natures of their “pagan” errors. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 574

Categorization

• XREF: Strengthens the vault’s understanding that the West’s ‘Islam’ was constructed from pre-existing categories of the enemy rather than from encounter with actual Muslims.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how far did the Muslim-as-Viking conflation extend in Carolingian-era sources beyond Aimoin, and what rhetorical work did it do?