Proximity to Islam led Christians to abandon the idolatrous image of Saracens

Evidence

While the image of the pagan Saracen lives on in the Chansons de geste, liturgical drama, and saints lives until the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries (and in village fiestas until the twentieth), assuring the Christian readers of the truth of their own religion, it dies quickly among those who have closer contact with Islam. Among the chronicles of the Crusades, only those dealing with the first Crusade portray Saracens as idolaters. Spanish Christians from the eighth century on had known enough of Islam not to present it as idolatry; other Western writers, using knowledge of Islam gleaned from Spanish and Eastern sources, will increasingly portray it as a variant, heretical version of Christianity. These Latin authors, like their earlier Eastern and Spanish counterparts, will make sense of Islam by painting its prophet in the familiar hues of a diabolically inspired heresiarch. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 726

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general theme in the reader’s knowledge base about how out-group images persist in popular culture long after elite knowledge corrects them.