American encounters with the Islamic world began almost as soon as the first colonists arrived in the New World. The first known Muslim to arrive on American shores dates back to 1537, when a Spanish explorer brought his African Muslim slave, Estaban de Dorantes, also known as Esteban the Moor, to what is today Florida and Texas. By the early nineteenth century, Muslim slaves in the United States numbered in the thousands, although their religious beliefs drew scant attention from slaveowners. In contrast, theological beliefs about the Islamic faith played an important role in shaping American interactions with Muslims abroad, beginning with the Barbary Wars in 1805 and extending to American colonial governance of the Philippine Islands after the 1898 Spanish-American War and the arrival of the first Muslim immigrants to the United States.