Christian hatred of Mohammedans manufactured the image of Moorish cruelty and blackness

Evidence

However, Elizabethans “associated [Africans] in the popular imagination with monsters, so that the play’s numerous references to monstrosity would have resonated with Othello’s racial characteristics to establish his extreme difference to typical Europeans.” Elizabethans thought that Africans were monsters. The constellation of attitudes concerning Africans was widespread and historically situated: “From Spanish hatred of the Moors, reinforced by the general Christian hatred of Mohammedans and by experiences of piratical depredations, came the Elizabethan emphasis upon the cruelty of these people—and upon their blackness.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 309

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core thesis: the image (Othello as monster) precedes real contact — fear without an object. The quote explicitly names Spanish and Christian hatred as the manufacturing engine.
• QUESTION: Pirate depredations’ role in reinforcing the image — were these real encounters, complicating ‘fear without object’?