Latin Christians sought Mongol alliances against Islam as anti-Muslim strategy

Evidence

Yet various Latin Christians pinned their hopes on a Mongol-Latin alliance to defeat the forces of Islam (see chapter 8). The Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 lent credence to these hopes. It is with this mixture of hope and apprehension that William of Rubruck set out from Acre in 1248, bearing letters from Louis IX along with a portable cloth chapel embroidered with scenes from Christian history “to see if he [Louis] could draw them to our religion.” — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1133

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s genealogy of the Islam-West binary: here Islam and Latin Christendom are not yet a settled opposition — each races to court the same pagan power, complicating the fixed-us/them picture in Anidjar.