Talk:Faith/@comment-24.238.95.53-20171129230102/@comment-87.128.18.178-20180427092609

This is my personal educated guess, but I think that even during the middle ages, leaders generally wanted to appear virtuous. I am quite sure that "we are defending ourselves from the evil non-believers!" is a much better rallying cry than the more honest "we want those lands over there, go and take them from the people already living there." This is true today and there is no reason to believe it wasn't 500+ years ago.

If my hypothesis is correct, we would expect propaganda from both Islam and Christianity which claims their offensive conquest is actually merely defensive, or a just preemptive strike.