Medieval accounts attributed Christian apostasy to Islam to poverty and coercion, not conviction

Evidence

Fidenzio gave considerable attention to the cruelties of the Muslims against the Latins, and, writing like Ricoldo of the later military campaigns of the mamliiks, he specified the same misfortunes, the killing and capturing, the reduction to slavery or beggary, the prostitution of women, the destruction of churches and their conversion into mosques. He said that women and children were beaten to make them become Muslim. Leaving aside terror, which prevailed only at the sack of cities, the practical reasons given for actual apostasies from Christianity were most commonly a matter of worldly pressure of various kinds; poverty in particular was often mentioned. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 743

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the rubric-theme of how apostasy/conversion gets narrated from the outside — parallels the vault’s interest in the modern construction of ‘the Muslim’ as one who converts or is converted by force, echoing the forced-conversion tropes analyzed in Anidjar.