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 Shakespeare's play "Othello", where the main character was a Moor and it was black. But to identify these two concepts is not worth it, because the Moor is not always black and not always African.

A little background

Initially, even before our era, the entire population of North Africa, which was not subjugated by the Roman Empire, but was subordinate to the local leaders, was called the Moors. Finally, the Roman province of Mauritania became only at the turn of the epoch, when the last king of the Moors testament transferred his country to the Roman emperor. The Roman word Mauri (Moor) is a borrowing from the Greek word "dark." Since the sunset of the Roman Empire, the Moors continued to live in places of their concentration in northwestern Africa, in the area of ​​modern Algeria and Morocco until the beginning of the eighth century AD, when the expansion of adherents of the then modern religion - Islam, did not lead to a significant expansion of the controlled territories .

Main story

Since 711, the history of the Moors has been directly connected with the history of Europe, its westernmost part - the Iberian Peninsula. This year, adherents of Islam crossed the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, defeated the Visigoths and captured their capital, Toledo. By 718, almost the entire peninsula was under Arab rule. Europe, since the fall of the Roman Empire, having lost contact with the rest of the world, began to identify all adherents of Islam with the Arabs, from the old memory 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 driven 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 on the path to world domination.

But those were the heyday of the Inquisition, which by 1492 had expelled all Jews from the country, and after ten years each Moor who had not converted to Christianity left the country. The importance of the Arabian 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 in the gene pool of the current Spaniards and Portuguese.

Afterword

By the beginning of the Crusades in medieval Europe, there was a well-established concept: the 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, the memories of Europeans also preserved memories of this. When the Ottoman Empire began to threaten Europe, that is, from the beginning of the sixteenth century, all adherents of Islam began to be associated with the Turks. And the Moors began to be identified with representatives of the Negroid race, which Shakespeare contributed to. Russia was aloof from European events, it was only freed from the Tatar-Mongol yoke, and here was its name for black representatives of Africa. This word was not "Moor", this word was "Arap", which was glorified by the ancestor of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin - Ibrahim Hannibal.