Moor is not always black and not even always African

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:48

For many, the word "Moor" sounds synonymous with the word "Negro", and all thanks to the hero of Shakespeare's play "Othello", where the main character was a Moor and it was black. But these two concepts should not be identified, because the Moor is not always black and not even always African.

A little background

Initially, even before our era, the Moors were called the entire population of North Africa, which was not conquered by the Roman Empire, but obeyed the local leaders. Mauritania finally became a Roman province only at the change of eras, when the last king of the Moors, by will, handed over his country to the Roman emperor. The Roman word Mauri (Moor) is a borrowing from the Greek word for "dark". Since the decline of the Roman Empire, the Moors continued to live in their places of concentration in northwestern Africa, in the area of \u200b\u200bmodern Algeria and Morocco until the beginning of the eighth century AD, when the expansion of adherents of the newest religion at that time - Islam, did not lead to a significant expansion of the controlled territories.

Main Story

Since 711, the history of the Moors is directly connected with the history of Europe,its most western part - the Iberian Peninsula. It was in this year that the adherents of Islam crossed the narrow Strait of Gibr altar, defeated the Visigoths and captured their capital, Toledo. By 718, almost the entire peninsula was under Arab rule. Europe, having lost contact with the rest of the world since the fall of the Roman Empire, began to identify all adherents of Islam with the Arabs, calling them Moors from old memory. The heyday of the power of the Moors in the Pyrenees came in the tenth century. By the end of the eleventh century, during the Reconquista, the Moors were practically forced out of the peninsula, and the final victory was won in 1492, when Spain sent Columbus to the shores of America, taking the first step towards world domination.

But those were the heydays of the Inquisition, which by 1492 expelled all Jews from the country, and ten years later every Moor who did not accept Christianity left the country. The significance of the Arab possession of the Iberian Peninsula for many centuries was not in vain. In addition to the architectural monuments of that period, the Moors left a significant mark on the gene pool of the current Spaniards and Portuguese.

Afterword

By the beginning of the crusades in medieval Europe there was a common concept: a Moor is an Arab, an ardent adherent of Islam.

And since among the Arabs there were warriors whose skin color was very unusual for medieval Europe - black, memories of this were preserved in the memory of Europeans. When the Ottoman Empire began to threaten Europe, that is, from the beginningsixteenth century, all adherents of Islam became associated with the Turks. And the Moors began to be identified with representatives of the Negroid race, which was facilitated by Shakespeare. Russia was aloof from European events, it had just freed itself from the Tatar-Mongol yoke, and here there was a name for the black representatives of Africa. This word was not “Moor”, this word was “Arap”, which was glorified by the ancestor of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin - Ibrahim Gannibal.