Moors+ethnicity+other stuff

Hi,

The Moors black or not? Well, I'd say it depends.
1) Moors tend to be defined specifically as berbers. Eg When the coast of southern France where plundered in the 9th-10th c. but muslim pirates they were making the difference between Moors (berbers from Spain, mainly Almeria) and Sarrazin ("Arabs" from Tunisia mainly).
2) Berbers tribes are very different one from the other. Some of them tend to be quite dark according to our (well my) European views. But as they are lighter than the proper blacks they are know a "white" in places like Niger ou Mali. For instance the Almohade were berbers and were very dark (kind of nowadays Tuareghs).

In Spain most of the Ommeyyads mercenaries were berbers (other were slavic). During the Kingdoms of Taifa (after 1033) most of them were ruled by Berber kings. Conserning the Black african non-Berber, I've never heard they had any important military role in Spain, there may be exceptions but they're only exceptions. Although I think that in Egypt, the Ayyourids and the Mameluks may have used large units of sub-saharian people.

Berbers are very different one from the other and at first sight there is a world of difference between a Kabyl from the Aur�s (mountains kind of people, that is short with fair skin) and a Tuaregh (tall and very dark, living in the desert).

The first muslims who have crossed the straight (the Berber captain Tarik hence Gibraltar, Djebel al-Tarik) were called by a Visigoth prince against his lord. At least that is what the legend says.

Vandals in Cartago? I dont know for sure, but here are two facts: the Byzantine staid until they where fired by the Arabs and I reckon Vandals weren't that numerous (mostly warriors) hence must have been quite easely assimilated into the Africa's population.

M.

To my knowledge, the Arabs and the Berbers who ruled Spain from 711 onwards to the Al-Murabit (Almoravid) invasion tended to mix a lot with the local Spanish population, especially the aristocracy and the royal families. In fact, the most famous Cordoba Ummayad Caliph, Abd-al Rahman III apparently only had 1/32 of Arab blood in him. By the time of the Taifas states, so-called Arab rulers only had as little as 1/1024 of the original Arab blood. Most of the Moors in Spain therefore were virtually undistinguishable from the local population. However, many of the Al-Murabits who conquered Spain in the middle of the 12th century were original from the Niger Valley, and so they were black. To Western European eyes, they were still Moors, and this may have given rise to the perception that the Moors were black.

Well, not quite. The Al-Murabits were actually invaders from Africa in much the same way that Tariq invaded Spain in 711. I believ that they were actually invited to meddle in one of the conflicts betweent he Taifas states, much in the same way that in 711, the Arabs and Berbers took advantage of a dynastic dispute of the Visigoths. They conquered a substantial proportion (almost half) of the Iberian Peninsula, along with controlling North Africa from the Niger and the Senegal to Tunisia.

The Christian North was fighting with Arabs as well as islamized Spaniards who were called Mozarabs. What I'm saying is that the Arabs were Arab in language, culture and religion, but much less so genetically, due to intermixing.