Medieval Christendom named Muslims Saracens, Moors, Ishmaelites, and Agarenes interchangeably

Evidence

A NOTE ON TERMS I have almost always translated the word Saracenus as Muslim; the word Muslim in a translated passage must represent Saracenus or one of its equivalents, Maurus, Ismaelitus and Agarenus. (Occasionally Saracenus has another meaning, for example, when it is applied to pre-Islamic Arabs.) In mediaeval usage it was possible to become a Saracen or a Moor, just as later men were said to ‘turn Turk’. Saracen means a man who holds the same religion as Muhammad, that is, a Muslim. | prefer to avoid its use in modern English because of its quaint and romantic associations. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 106

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the medieval Latin terminology (Saracenus, Maurus, Ismaelitus, Agarenus) for Muslim identity as religious rather than ethnic.
• XREF: Complicates the vault’s genealogy of ‘the Muslim’: these names encode the theological construction of Muslims via biblical descent (Ishmael, Hagar), relevant to Anidjar’s Jew/Arab enemy construction.
• ADDENDUM: The fluid convertibility (‘become a Saracen, turn Turk’) parallels how dress-identity signifiers in the modesty-panics article were shifting markers, and connects to sacrifice-article’s rendering, showing identity categories as constructed and shiftable rather than fixed.
• SHARE: For a medievalist colleague tracking how post-schism Europe named its Muslim other.