This chapter examines the different lenses through which Corippus represented the Moorish world. It looks first at the many terms the poet used to refer to all of the ‘Moorish’ groups within North Africa – ally or enemy alike. It then considers the specific ethnonyms within the Iohannis and addresses their value for our understanding of North Africa in this period. It notes that Corippus’ accounts of ‘Laguatan’ identity (an ethnonym preserved in many forms in the Iohannis, but unique to the poem) may well indicate forms of affiliation that were much more fluid than has previously been acknowledged, and incorporated a range of different groups, regardless of their origins.

The chapter closes with a discussion of the ‘catalogue of tribes’ in Iohannis Book II, which has been central to much modern scholarship. It argues that this catalogue was intended to evoke the final triumphal ceremony which marked the conclusion of John’s campaigns in 548. This has an important narrative function, but also reveals the cognitive assumptions which underpinned imperial views of the Moorish world from Carthage. This was not an ordered ‘map’ of tessellating tribal groups, but was instead an image of a diverse – but ultimately subjugated – world.

The introduction provides the historical context behind the book. It also introduces conceptual terms that are central to the book – republic, vecino, ciudadano – and whose definitions have shifted since the early modern period. Subsequently, it examines Latin American historiography on race, political participation, and citizenship. Finally, it provides a chapter outline.

This chapter demonstrates how proto-Sunni traditionalists deployed forms of ethno-racial reasoning in constructing discourses of heresy and orthodoxy. It explores five interrelated themes embedded within such discourses: the confessional ambiguity of Abu Hanifa’s ancestors; conflicting accounts of Abu Hanifa’s genealogy; attempts to establish Abu Hanifa’s servile social status; a wider semantic field of foreignness to label Abu Hanifa; and criticisms of his views on Persian as a liturgical language. In this way, the relationship between orthodoxy, heresy, and society comes into sharp relief.

Chapter 5 draws on notarial records and census reports (padrones) to track the ethnic language used to describe Afro-descended residents of Veracruz and other Gulf Coast cities and towns. Comparing this data to published studies of other Mexican and Caribbean areas, I argue distinctive African ethnic labels retained meaning in coastal communities longer than they did in the Mexican interior, reflecting patterns of usage in the Caribbean. This was true not only among individuals, but collectively in the form of confraternities. As late as 1667, at least five confraternities in Veracruz continued to use language of African ethnicity, while confraternities elsewhere in Mexico had long since abandoned ethnic language. The final section of the chapter uses the admissions records of the Hospital Nuestra Señora de Loreto to examine the size and shape of Veracruz’s Caribbean-born population. Because the records include birthplace information for the hospital’s predominantly free-black women who were its patients between 1684 and 1695, they allow us to understand more tangibly the intersections of Mexican-Caribbean networks and ethnic labeling.

The century and a half from AD 1250 to AD 1400 saw massive shifts in the distributions of human populations on the Plains, the social groups that they lived in, and the interactions among these groups. These shifted again in the next 100 years, transforming the human landscape of the Plains in just a few generations. We see these changes more precisely in at least some areas because the radiocarbon calibration curve is smooth and straight for the 1400s (Figure 7.8). There seems especially to have been a major shift in settlement in the mid-1400s that corresponded with a dramatic drought (a “megadrought”) extending from the Dakotas into Texas (interestingly, tree-ring data suggest that the Canadian prairies were not affected by this drought, although the later 1400s were relatively dry there; Case and MacDonald 2003; Cook et al. 2007; Stahle et al. 2007). I consider this interval among farmers first and then turn to hunter-gatherers.

I began this volume by noting the disconnect between widespread and long-standing views of the indigenous people and environment of the Great Plains and the reality of the character and history of that region. Mounted bison hunters like the ones we often visualize did live on the grasslands, but they existed for little more than a century and a half and many of the most famous groups who lived this way migrated to the Plains during the Colonial Era. Focusing on them neglects not only the farmers who dominated the Plains for a millennium but also the diversity of hunter-gatherer ways of life that people have lived there for perhaps 15,000 years or more. Like human history throughout North America, human history on the Plains is not a story of an unchanging way of life fixed for centuries in the forms that Euroamericans encountered; it is a story of constant change and interaction between human beings and the region’s potentials and limits. It is also a story that is difficult to understand without thinking about how Plains people reached out beyond the grasslands, establishing social and economic connections that spanned much of North America.