The Polemical Creed of a ‘Bewildering Breed’: Reflections on the First Crusade
The crusader zeal and its attendant polemic established critical precedents for the proliferation of Anti-Islamic tropes and narratives in the premodern period. Throughout the four crusades, these narratives settled in the European canon and the Christian collective ‘psyche’. The discourse produced in this period is foundational in that it ‘sets the stage’ for contextualizing the manifestation of Islamophobic rhetoric across the Latin West, Iberia, and the colonies of European empires.
May 14, 2026