Across the Mediterranean and Beyond: Fighting Islam by Embracing Muslims in Tirant lo Blanch

Because the representations of Muslims in the fifteenth-century novel Tirant lo Blanch are closely related to those in previous medieval works, I attribute their inconsistencies to their usefulness for colonial purposes, instead of to the book’s multiple authorship as other scholars have argued. At a time when Christian rulers were planning both the conquest of the last Iberian Muslim kingdom and the expansion of their political and commercial dominion to other continents, Tirant lo Blanch shows how the same ideological and literary strategies that helped justify the subjugation of Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula during previous centuries could be successfully applied in other regions of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at the beginning of the Age of Exploration.