Thirteenth-century Castilian anti-Muslim ideology assembled existing canonical and historical strands

Evidence

Alfonso did not invent this ideology, of course; he wove it together of familiar strands: denigration of Islam’s prophet, affirmation of Visigothic Christian rights to rule over Iberia. Over the course of the thirteenth century, the various strands begin to come together. Canon lawyers such as Catalan Dominican Ramon de Penyafort define the place of Muslims in Christian kingdoms, basing their arguments on canon law regarding Jews. Alfonso’s father-in-law, Jaume I of Aragon, presents himself as a crusader and devotee of the Virgin Mary, protector of his Muslim and Jewish subjects and promoter of Dominican missions to them. Leonese Lucas de Tuy and Archbishop of Toledo Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada continue the historiographical traditions of their Asturian and Leonese forbears, chronicling the restoration of right Gothic rule and the reclamation of churches lost to the Arab invaders. The writers working in the scriptorium of Alfonso el Sabio weave these ideological strands together to form an ideology of Castilian Christian power over Muslims and Jews. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 908

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘weaving together of familiar strands’ model of ideology-construction connects to how moral panics and other ideologies are assembled from preexisting materials.