This makes sense given the semiology of monsters, which includes "fixing horror elsewhere, in an obviously and literally foreign body." Saracens and Ethiopians existed along the edges of the universe, represented on maps with a normative center and dangerous borderlands, always occupied by strange and frightening creatures, Plinian monsters, and non-human races that served as examples of God's displeasure. These maps were theological tools which suggested that those who dwelled the farthest from the Christian center were the most dangerous. "In those maps that give a theological turn to geography, monstrous men are represented in a narrow band at the edge of the world, as far as possible from Jerusalem, the center of Christianity." The classification of the Saracens as a monstrous race is a result of this cognitive mapping. By the time of the Crusades, Muslims were understood to be a race of creatures cursed by God and alienated from the human world:

XREF: Connects to medieval cartography, orientalism, and the othering of non-European peoples as theological geography. QUESTION: Worth chasing how this mapping logic evolved into later colonial cartography.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 116