As Shohat (1992) relates, the list of the Holy Inquisition's enemies/Others at the birth of modernity's conceptual apparatus consisted of a broad and profoundly dehumanizing theological category, the 'agents of Satan,' i.e., Jews, Muslims, Moors, women, witches, infidels, heretics, even the left-handed (the 'sinister'). These became the original Others of modernity, drawn from existing internal and external terminologies of relational differentiation and dehumanization, geopolitical anxieties and failed Crusader grudges. While the dominant "self" identities of Western thought now militated in favour of invented fixity and reductively Manichaean polarities, the Others were by definition overlapping and interchangeable, these very properties serving to further corroborate their difference. Most witches were women deemed dangerous because they possessed knowledge or were independent of male kin; most Jews and Muslims were theologically rendered proto-racially different at the level of blood and the body; and the vast majority of Jews and Muslims were also deeply socialized into and indistinguishable from Moorish, in other words African, cultures.  
Under the Inquisition, individuals might appear to be 'agents of Satan' along several axes of difference at the same time. The mobile categorial flexibility of the Other signified its dangerous alterity and non-humanity, as a literal holdover from the prior system, a threatening presence alternative to the new order if it could not be rendered savage and uncivilized to the point of expendability. Thus, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century conquistadors in the Americas 'found' and persecuted varieties of peoples they deemed Moors, and the Moors were also broadly identified as the obstacle to finding their mythic representative in Ethiopia, Prester John.