Moors

\nMoors is a vague term often used in English to describe the medieval Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb and al-Andalus. Their culture is similarly often called "Moorish". The name derives from the ancient Berber tribe of the Mauri and their kingdom, Mauretania, which became a Roman province after its last king Bocchus II willed it to Octavian in 33 BCE. Mauretania lay in present day Morocco and Western Algeria. The name of Mauri was applied by the Romans to all non-romanized natives of North Africa still ruled by their own chiefs, until the 3rd century AD. After the Maghreb came under Muslim rule, the term was transferred in European usage to refer to any non-Christian inhabitants of the area; and after North African Muslims conquered Spain, it came to refer equally to Muslims in Spain. Since North Africans were darker-skinned than Europeans (although not black), "Moor" eventually came to be applied indiscriminately by English speakers to blacks, Muslims, Saracens, Persians, or Indians. Shakespeare's Othello was "the Moor of Venice". During the 17th century, Africans were sometimes distinguished from others as blackamoors. In Spanish usage, "Moro" (Moor) came to have an even broader usage, to mean "Muslims" in general (just as "Rumi", Roman, came to mean "Christian" in many Arabic dialects); thus the Moros of Mindanao in the Philippines, and the Moriscos of Granada. Until the early twentieth century, "Moor" was often used by Western geographers to refer to "mixed" Arab-Berber North Africans, especially of the towns, as distinct from supposedly more pure-blooded Arabs and Berbers; thus the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica defines "Moor" as "the name which, as at present used, is loosely applied to any native of Morocco, but in its stricter sense only to the townsmen of mixed descent. In this sense it is also used of the Mahommedan townsmen in the other Barbary states." But even then, it recognized that "the term Moors has no real ethnological value." In heraldry, the "Moor" or "Blackamoor" is usually shown as African. See also: Islamic architecture, Othello, the Moor of Venice, Blackamoor\n---- Not to be confused with moor land. Category:History of the Maghreb