Conquistadors exchanged the names Muslim and Indian so completely that temples were called mosques.

Evidence

So interchangeable were Muslims and Indians in the conquistador’s minds that they called Indians ‘Muslims’ and Indian temples ‘mosques.’ At one time, according to Bernal Diaz’s account, the Spaniards even considered naming the first city they saw as Great Cairo. Aztecs were often associated with the Moors, so much so that when battling the Indians, ‘the Spaniards often invoked the aid of holy figures such as the Virgin Mary or St. James, known in Spanish as Santiago Matamoros, patron saint of Spain against the Moors’ (rechristened Mata-indios to better suit his new or renewed role). — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 585

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The Santiago Matamoros to Mata-indios rebranding is a perfect emblem of the reader’s manufactured-monster thesis — the same saint re-forged against a new surrogate enemy.

Related

• Conquistadors literally renamed Indians and temples as Muslims and mosques (similarity 0.97)
• Conquistadors treated Indians and Muslims as interchangeable enemies. (similarity 0.96)