Saracens : Islam in the medieval European imagination

Medieval Christian writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways.

What ideological purposes did these offensive portrayals serve?

This book provides a comprehensive study of Christian polemical responses to Islam in the Middle Ages.

Christians needed to make sense of how and why God - who was supposed to be on their side - would allow Christians to be defeated by Muslims, as well as to explain away the opulent wealth and successes of Islamic culture, to which Christians were tempted to convert.John Tolan shows how Christian responses to Islam changed from the 7th to 13th centuries, crystallizing into polemical images later drawn upon by Western authors in the 14th to 20th centuries.