ABSTRACT
‘Mahometan’, and to a lesser extent ‘Musselman’, were terms for followers of Islam at a time before ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ were in use. 1 The postclassical Mahometanus was a rendering of the Arabic name for Muhammad (d. 632), the founder of Islam. Islam, along with Judaism and Christianity, was an Abrahamic religion. 2 Prolonged English encounters with Islam stretched back to pilgrimage and crusading in the early Middle Ages, while the Spanish conquest of Muslim-occupied Spain into the fifteenth century linked Arabic and Iberian cultures together in the English imaginary through terms such as ‘Moor’ and ‘Morisco’. The collapse of the Christian Byzantine empire following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 shifted international political power, and ongoing Ottoman expansion ‘propelled Mahomet into a wider Christian consciousness’. 3 While ‘Moors’ often referred to North African Muslims, who were sometimes also categorised as ‘blackamoors’, ‘Mahometans’ often referenced Ottoman imperial might: thus in 1529, Thomas More described the ‘Machometanys’ as ‘a sensual sect [that] dyd in a fewe yeres draw the great part of the world unto it’. 4
