Iberian kings borrowed crusade prestige to elevate local Moorish wars

Evidence

Some historians hesitate to use the term “crusade” to describe Jaume’s conquests, noting (correctly) that even for the king himself, a crusade to the Holy Land had a special prestige that the Iberian campaigns lacked. Yet clearly Jaume uses the imagery and ideas of crusading to glorify his own exploits against Muslims closer to home. His descriptions, and indeed probably his actions, are influenced by the idealized image of the crusader. Jaume saw his successes as part of a wider confrontation between Islam and Christendom: he planned (though failed) to head East to crusade in the Holy Land, and he claims to have received letters from the Mongol khan that proposed a Mongol-Aragonese alliance against Islam. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 914

Categorization

• XREF: The East as archetype and West/Iberia as derivative copy anticipates the vault’s existing ‘the West defines itself against the East’ genealogies; Jaume’s inward turn of crusade energy is a medieval prototype of later identitarian holy-war rhetoric.