Medieval Christian accounts ranked non-Christians below the land itself

Evidence

It is surely a significant indication of the author’s own sense of hierarchy that non-Christians are placed not only after Christians but at the end of the account, after places, features and ecclesiastical organisation. The intent is surely to treat them as lesser or even non-participants in the state of the Holy Land. The first point to note is that the strict legal divide between Frank and non-Frank is less important to the author than the identification of peoples by a process of categorisation that is broadly conceived along confessional lines. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 202

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to orientalism/othering scholarship — how enumeration of peoples encodes a hierarchy of belonging; parallels the ordering logic in colonial travel writing.