Medieval Latin legal terms for Muslims mixed religious and ethnic categories.

Evidence

The decrees of Nablus were ecclesiastical canons passed at a Church council presided over by the highest religious authority in the Crusader States, the patriarch of Jerusalem. … What exactly was meant by the term ‘Saracenus’ (Muslim) and what did the framers and users of law in the Crusader States understand by it? Was it intended to define a religious or an ethnic/racial category? Indeed, did twelfthand thirteenth-century Europeans in the Crusader States distinguish between these categories and, if not, what are the implications for our understanding of their attitudes towards their subject peoples? The evidence that might enable us to determine the question is limited. One important clue is provided by the presence of a Muslim who had converted to Christianity, Walter Mahomet, as one of the prominent landowners in the kingdom of Jerusalem around the time of the Council. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 197

Categorization

• QUESTION: Did twelfth-century Europeans conceptually separate religion from ethnicity at all? This is a genuinely open scholarly question worth chasing.
• DEFINE: ‘Saracenus’ is the technical Latin term for Muslim, and its ambiguity between religious and racial/ethnic category is the load-bearing issue.