Spanish explorers projected medieval Muslim-monster imagery onto New World peoples before genuine contact

Evidence

European explorers used a language steeped in anti-Muslim rhetoric, which insisted that Arabs, Turks, Moors, and other Muslims were non-human. The Spaniards had a particularly strong anxiety surrounding Muslims ( Moriscos) rooted in the racial purity laws that emerged after the Reconquista. Muslims who managed to remain in Spain had to contend with the outlawing of Muslim practices, dress, and even the use of Arabic. For Spanish explorers, the people they encountered in the Americas were not people, but monsters of Plinian and medieval varieties, including Muslim creatures. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 568

Categorization

• QUESTION: What specific Plinian monstrous races were mapped onto which American indigenous groups, and which medieval bestiaries supplied the categories?
• XREF: The ‘fear without object’ — image preceding contact — connects directly to the reader’s core thesis about projection. Also connects to Said’s Orientalism chapter structure on the medieval European imaginary.
• SEED: Potential essay: ‘The conquest of the Americas as an extension of the Reconquista’ — how crusading logic was exported wholesale to justify genocide of peoples who had nothing to do with Islam.