No, I disagree with that Graham. By Shakespeare's time, Aquitaine had been lost to England for 150 years, and in any case Muslims had been driven out of northern Spain hundreds of years earlier- only Granada remained Moslem by the 14th century. The Crusades had familiarised Christendom with the fact that Islam maintained a great deal of linguistic and cultural unity as well as the religious connection- several crusades targetted North Africa. It's clear that they did distinguish between African Blacks and the peoples of North Africa/ Arabia/ Turkey (who seem to have been lumped together), and Othello was certainly meant to be the former, hence the racial insults like "thick lips" used by Iago. But was this distinction a new one? At the start of the 17th century, the European rape of sub- Saharan Africa was beginning to develop and (Black) slaves were first taken in serious numbers.