Medieval Europeans equated Saracens with pagans so completely the words became interchangeable.

Evidence

The point of all this is that for many western Europeans throughout the Middle Ages, Saracens were pagans, and pagans were Saracens: the two words become interchangeable. When, in the early fifteenth century, Firmin le Ver composes his Latin-French dictionary, he defines “Saracenus” as “paganus,” noting that it derives “from Sarah, as in born from Sarah” (a Sara dicitur, quasi ex Sara genitus); for paganus he gives the French equivalents “sarrasin, paiens, mescreans.” The examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely; they have already been well cataloged in the works of Paul Bancourt, Michael Paull, and others. The image is so common that writers on Islam who know better—from the twelfth century on—go to great pains to explain that the Saracens are not pagans. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 702

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and to how medieval Christian taxonomy of ‘the other’ shaped later European self-definition; also resonates with the earlier chapters of this same book on how Saracens were depicted.
• DEFINE: Documents the etymological slide of Saracenus into paganus, showing how a term for a specific religious group became a generic category for non-Christians.