Seventeenth-century European scholars still presented Islam as a Christian heresy built on medieval legends

Evidence

The idea that Islam was at first a schism of Christendom survived the divisions of Europe, and we find Herbert supposing that Muhammad preached against ‘Pope Boniface’s usurpation of the title of Universall Bishop’. Belief in the Sergius legend and in other mediaeval legends also still survived, even that of the dove that whispered in Muhammad’s ear, trained to supply for the Holy Ghost; Febvre, the pseudonym of a rather aggressive but not ignorant Capuchin missionary, is a case in point; and George Sandys, whose voyage began in 1610, offers his readers much the same sort of anthology of mediaeval legends as Polydore Vergil’s just a century earlier. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1577

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier work on medieval Christian-Islamic polemic (Peter the Venerable, Ricoldo) and to how long religious misrepresentations persist across centuries.