The Spanish called them 'Moors', but what name was used by Europeans in the Middle Ages for people of Arab origin?
Moors used as a racial designation for dark-skinned or black peoples, as with its use in English, seen as early as the fourteenth century. In medieval Romance languages, variations of the Latin word for the Moors (for instance, Italian and Spanish: "moro", French: "maure", Portuguese: "mouro", Romanian: "maur") developed different applications and connotations. The term initially denoted a specific Berber people in western Libya, but the name acquired more general meaning during the medieval period, associated with "Muslim", similar to associations with "Saracens". During the context of the Crusades and the Reconquista, the term Moors included the derogatory suggestion of "infidels".
Moors Moors The term "Moors" refers primarily to the Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Malta during the Middle Ages. The Moors initially were the indigenous Maghrebine Berbers. The name was later also applied to Arabs. Moors are not a distinct or self-defined people, and the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica observed that "The term 'Moors' has no real ethnological value." Europeans of the Middle Ages and the early modern period variously applied the name to Arabs, North African Berbers, and Muslim Europeans. The term has also been used in Europe in a broader, somewhat derogatory sense