Reconquest ideology delegitimized Muslim rule as African and heretical

Evidence

Alfonso’s Estoria, like the chronicles of Lucas de Tuy and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, expresses this royal ideology of reconquest. The kings of León and Castile inherited the ideologically charged vision of history from their Asturian predecessors. Theirs was the only legitimate rule in the peninsula: heirs to the Goths, protectors and restorers of the church, even (for Alfonso) heir to the Roman emperors, who could deny their legitimacy? Certainly not the dynasties of foreign, African interlopers, benighted followers of an obscene, heretical pseudoprophet. This is the ideology forged by these medieval kings and their clerical chroniclers, an ideology affirmed by military success, which will thrive into later centuries and cross the Atlantic. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 975

Categorization

• XREF: Explicitly states this medieval ideology “will thrive into later centuries and cross the Atlantic” — direct genealogical bridge to Aziz’s account of anti-Muslim tropes exported to the Americas via conquest and settler colonialism.
• SEED: A piece tracing how the medieval Iberian claim that only Goth-descended Christians had legitimate rule was transplanted to American soil — grounding modern settler-colonial delegitimization of indigenous and Muslim others in the same template.