Naming North Africans in Latin Christian Chronicles from Medieval Iberia

Abstract This article examines the words used by Christian chroniclers in medieval Iberia to refer to North Africans. Following the Islamic conquests of the Peninsula in the early eighth century, Iberian Christians increasingly associated North Africans with Islam – and, conversely, Muslims with North Africa. I demonstrate that the term “Moor” reflected a growing tendency over the Middle Ages to collapse religious identity and geographical origins, and further suggest that it was racialized in various ways. In other cases, chroniclers employed scriptural identifiers like “Moabite” and “Hagarene” to distinguish between Muslims from North Africa and those from Iberia. While such terms acknowledged a measure of geopolitical specificity in the present, they simultaneously asserted a kinship between contemporary Muslims and ancient biblical peoples, casting them as religious others, denying their coevalness with Christians, and further racializing them. Finally, I discuss the use of the word “barbarian,” which was sometimes applied to Muslims in general, but was occasionally used to refer to North Africans in particular, drawing on Arabic usage to associate barbarity and lack of civilization with North Africa. Ultimately, I argue that the application of such labels to North Africans and Muslims functioned to displace them geographically and temporally, serving Iberian Christian colonizing impulses and projects over time.