Pseudo-Methodius explained Muslim conquest as divine punishment for Christian sexual sins.

Evidence

While the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius presents the sweep of world history using the same notion of six millennia employed by Isidore, its major preoccupation is to explain Muslim hegemony and the conversion of Christians to Islam in Christian terms. Just as God gave the Holy Land to the Jews to punish the sins of its previous inhabitants, “So too with the sons of Ishmael, it is not because God loves them that He allows them to enter into the kingdom of the Christians, the like of which has never been done in any of the former generations.” What are the unprecedented sins being punished? For this author, they are not Christological but sexual, described in lurid detail: men dress in drag as harlots in the market place and fornicate with each other; men take their sons and brothers to whorehouses to share the same prostitutes; men fornicate with men and women with women, and so on. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 319

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my interest in how political defeat gets reframed as theological punishment — parallels other apocalyptic literatures that explain foreign hegemony via internal sin.