The Christianisation of Latin Europe as Seen by Medieval Arab-Islamic Historiographers

Abstract

The article aims at defining what Arab Muslims of the crusading period knew about the conversion of Latin Europe to Christianity through an analysis of Arabic-Islamic sources written up to the fourteenth century. Whereas Christianity seems to have interested the first generations of Muslims mainly as a theological phenomenon, the emergence of more comprehensive forms of Muslim historiography led to the creation of Arabic texts dealing with the formation of Christianity. The latter’s primary focus lay on the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. However, the premises that set the stage for the emergence of Latin–Christian Europe (Roman hegemony in the West, ‘period of migrations’, Romano-Germanic successor states) do not seem to have been fully understood until translated Latin sources were diffused in the Arabic-Islamic world. Hence, most references to the Christianisation of the post-Roman peoples of Western Europe are short and out of chronological context. Continuity is only fully acknowledged in the case of the papacy.