Moors

The Moors were the Muslims who lived in the Maghreb and on the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily and parts of Southern France in the Middle Ages. In Europe, the word was often used for indigenous European people whose ancestors were converted to Islam, although Islam was not actually invented until 700 A.D., so the religion of the Moors who are indigenous to Europe was something else.

In 750 A.D. the Umayyad Dynasty was defeated in Syria. Many refugees came to what is now Spain and Portugal. They had a very big influence on the culture of these countries.

Umayyad Muslims were the ones who captured and named Al-Andalus, which means land of the Vandals. The majority of Moors in Iberia were native European populations who converted to Islam due to the Arab conquests of the peninsula. These Moors were forcefully converted to Catholicism after the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula in completion of the period popularly known as the Reconquista.

Other page

• Othello

Moors Media

• 

  Castillian ambassadors attempting to convince Moorish Almohad king Abu Hafs Umar al-Murtada to join their alliance (contemporary depiction from the Cantigas de Santa María)

• 

  Christian and Moor playing chess, from The Book of Games of Alfonso X, c. 1285

• 

  A figure of a Moor being trampled by a conquistador's horse at the National Museum of the Viceroyalty in Tepotzotlan.

• 

  Moros y Cristianos festival in Oliva.

• 

  The Great Mosque of Kairouan was founded by the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi in 670 during the Islamic conquest, to provide a place of worship for recently converted or immigrating Muslims.

• 

  This is a large mural located on the ceiling of the Hall of Kings of the Alhambra which depicts the first ten sultans of the Nasrid dynasty. It is a late-14th-century Gothic painting by a Christian Toledan artist.

• 

  Depiction of the Moors in Iberia, from The Cantigas de Santa Maria

• 

  Moorish army (right) of Almanzor during the Reconquista Battle of San Esteban de Gormaz, from Cantigas de Alfonso X el Sabio

• 

  The Moors request permission from James I of Aragón

• 

  Moorish and Christian Reconquista battle, taken from The Cantigas de Santa María