Islam menaced Europe more in 1600 yet mattered less intellectually than in 1000

Evidence

The problem loses much of its interest and complexity after this period. This may seem surprising. To judge only from the map, Islam pressed more menacingly on western Europe in 1600 than it had done eight hundred years earlier. It had obliterated Byzantium; it stood on the frontier of Germany and all along the southern shores of the Mediterranean. But the main problems with which we are concerned had been, if not solved, at least shelved. — R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 71

Categorization

• QUESTION: Southern asserts the West’s intellectual problem with Islam was ‘shelved’ by 1600—worth tracing exactly which questions were shelved vs solved. The secularizing and New World factors are listed but not weighted.
• DEEPTHINKING: Top-tier: the core paradox that the material/military threat grew while its intellectual challenge dissolved, because the West’s own evolving thought redefined what counted as a problem—this inverts the usual ‘threat drives response’ assumption.

Related

• Islam posed the most far-reaching problem medieval Christendom faced (similarity 0.86)
• Europe’s image of Islam tracked its political and military needs, not theology (similarity 0.84)
• European scholarship on Islam turned disinterested only once Islam ceased threatening Europe. (similarity 0.84)
• Mid-fifteenth-century European thought on Islam surpassed all earlier and later centuries (similarity 0.83)
• Islam’s intellectual peak came within four centuries, far faster than the medieval West’s (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval theological justification for opposing Muslims has faded in Europe. (similarity 0.82)
• Ottoman decline opened non-hostile European study of Islam (similarity 0.81)
• Renaissance scholarship long coexisted with unrevised medieval views of Islam. (similarity 0.81)
• Western hostility to Islam shifted from theological to political rationales across the centuries (similarity 0.81)
• The West is framed as having surpassed religion while Islam remains mired in it (similarity 0.81)
• Scholarship on medieval Islamophobia has lagged behind that on Christian-Jewish and heretic relations (similarity 0.81)
• Islam served as Europe’s principal civilizational other for centuries. (similarity 0.80)
• The mid-fifteenth-century writers treated Islam as an urgent practical problem, not a cosmic role (similarity 0.80)
• The fear of Islam intensified amid Ottoman decline and colonial expansion (similarity 0.80)
• Islam served as Europe’s constitutive outsider against which its civilization defined itself (similarity 0.80)