Medieval Christians read Muslim military success as divine judgment favoring Islam

Evidence

In the first century of Islam, most of the former Christian Roman Empire, from Syria to Spain, was brought under Muslim control in a conquest of unprecedented proportions. How was God’s apparent abandonment of his Christian Empire to be explained? True, over the course of the Middle Ages Christian states conquered (or “reconquered”) many of the islands of the Mediterranean, all of the Iberian peninsula, and even, for a fleeting eighty-eight years, Jerusalem, Holy City to three religions. Yet at the same time, Islam was expanding across Asia and Africa and (with the rise of the Ottomans in the late fourteenth century) into the heart of Europe. How were Christians to respond? The simplest and obvious choice, for many, was to accept the logic of Muslim expansion; God must indeed prefer Islam; historical destiny and social pressure offered strong arguments in favor of conversion to Islam. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 47

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Medieval Christians equated automata and machinery with Muslim sorcery — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 947