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.

The recent suggestion that the late medieval Eurasian plague pandemic, the Black Death, had its origins in the thirteenth century rather than the fourteenth century has brought new scrutiny to texts reporting ‘epidemics’ in the earlier period. Evidence both from Song China and Iran suggests that plague was involved in major sieges laid by the Mongols between the 1210s and the 1250s, including the siege of Baghdad in 1258 which resulted in the fall of the Abbasid caliphate. In fact, re-examination of multiple historical accounts in the two centuries after the siege of Baghdad shows that the role of epidemic disease in the Mongol attacks was commonly known among chroniclers in Syria and Egypt, raising the question why these outbreaks have been overlooked in modern historiography of plague. The present study looks in detail at the evidence in Arabic sources for disease outbreaks after the siege of Baghdad in Iraq and its surrounding regions. We find subtle factors in the documentary record to explain why, even though plague received new scrutiny from physicians in the period, it remained a minor feature in stories about the Mongol invasion of western Asia. In contemporary understandings of the genesis of epidemics, the Mongols were not seen to have brought plague to Baghdad; they caused plague to arise by their rampant destruction. When an even bigger wave of plague struck the Islamic world in the fourteenth century, no association was made with the thirteenth-century episode. Rather, plague was now associated with the Mongol world as a whole.