The Moor is not always black and not always African

For many, the word "Moor" sounds synonymous with the word "Negro", and all thanks to the hero of the play "Othello" by Shakespeare, where the main character was a Moor and black. But to identify these two concepts is not worth it, because the Moor is not always a black man and not always an African.

A bit of prehistory

Originally, before our era, the Moors called the entire population of North Africa, which was not subdued by the Roman Empire, but was subordinated to local leaders. Finally, the Roman province of Mauritania was only at the turn of the century, when the last Moor of the Moors handed over his country to the Roman emperor. The Roman word Mauri (Moor) is borrowing from the Greek word "dark". Since the fall of the Roman Empire, the Moors continued to live in places of their concentration in the north-west of Africa, in the area of modern Algeria and Morocco until the beginning of the eighth century AD, when the expansion of adherents of the newest religion of Islam at that time did not lead to a significant expansion of the territories under control .

Main story

Since 711 the history of the Moors is directly connected with the history of Europe, the westernmost part of it - the Iberian Peninsula. It was in this year that the adherents of Islam crossed the narrow Gibraltar strait, defeated the Visigoths and captured their capital, Toledo. By 718, almost the entire peninsula was under the rule of the Arabs. Europe, since the fall of the Roman Empire, lost contact with the rest of the world, began to identify all adherents of Islam with the Arabs, for old times calling them Moors. 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 almost ousted from 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 days of the heyday of the Inquisition, which by 1492 expelled all Jews from the country, and in ten years the country was left by every Moor who did not accept Christianity. The importance of the Arabian possession of the Iberian Peninsula for many centuries has not been in vain. In addition to the monuments of architecture of that period, the Moors left a significant mark in the gene pool of the present Spaniards and Portuguese.

Afterword

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

And since among the Arabs came across warriors whose skin color was very unusual for medieval Europe - black, the memory of Europeans preserved memories of this. When Europe began to threaten the Ottoman Empire, that is, from the beginning of the sixteenth century, all adherents of Islam began to be associated with the Turks. And the Moors became identified with representatives of the Negroid race, which was exactly what Shakespeare helped. Russia was on the sidelines of European events, it was only freed from the Tatar-Mongol yoke and here it had its own name for the black representatives of Africa. This word was not "Moorish", this word was "arap", which was glorified by the ancestor of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin - Ibrahim Hannibal.