Widespread miscegenation (interracial marriages) began to alter the landscape, producing people of all shades, from jet black to near white. Eventually the volume of intermarriages between Blacks and whites led to the disappearance of the Black skin colour in Europe.
For 700 years (711-1492 A.D) the Black Moors had dominated and ruled Spain, southern France, and much of Scotland (southwest Europe), giving Europe its finest civilization ever, considering that Europe had again sunk to a level of almost complete barbarism after losing all of the civilizing principles that were bestowed upon them by the ancient Black Greeks and Romans.
Initially, Spain was the only country in Western Europe that had any semblance of civilization, but gradually it began to spread to Italy, Portugal and Northern Europe.
Some historians considered the invasion of Spain to be a total disaster. “The White people in these Iberian countries were not viewed in a favourable light. The Moors held a particularly low view of these Whites. They had often beaten them on the battlefield and with inferior numbers. The Europeans in other countries of this continent were also looked upon with disdain for their low intelligence and backwards way of life.”
Many alternatives have been used by the Europeans during ancient times for the term Moor which described the indigenous Afrikans, and contrary to popular belief, this term was not interchangeable with Islamic or any specific Arab or Afrikan ethnicity, religion, or civilization. The English word Moor came from the Greek word mauro which literally means Black, blackened or charred, a term used by the Greeks to describe the Black skin colour of the Afrikans.
The evolution of the word from the Greek mauro to the Latin word maurus is obvious. The English transliteration is maurus with mauri being the plural form. This term was specifically used by the Romans when referring to the Black Afrikans, and writers in both Greek and Latin used the term literally as a racial identifier.
Other derived terms like the German mohr, the Spanish and Italian moro, the French maure, the Portuguese mouro, the Romanian maur and the Dutch moor, were also commonly used during the middle ages with reference to Black Afrikans, a term which can still be found in one of the oldest Dutch texts from the 1300s A.D.
Further evidence of the correct interpretation of the Latin term maurus can be found in the early English – Latin dictionaries.
For example, In Samuel Johnson’s “A Dictionary of the English Language (1768)”, “Moor” means “Negro” or “Black-a-moor.”
In John Etick’s “A new English-Latin dictionary (1783)”, the term “Maurus” means “Moor,” “Negro,” and “Aethiops.”
In William Young’s “A new Latin-English dictionary (1810)”, “Maurus” means a “Black Moor.”
According to the “Ainsworth’s Latin Dictionary” by Alexander Jamieson, Robert Ainsworth (1828), the term “Maurus” means “Black Moor.”
In John Wilkes’ “The Encyclopaedia Londinensis (1817)”, “Moor” is listed as: “[maurus, Lat. Gr., Black.], a Negro; a Blackamoor.”
In John Olgilvie’s “The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language (1882)”, a “Moor” was defined as a “Black man” or “Negro.”
In English dictionaries and Encyclopaediae before the 20th century, the English term “Moor” meant “Black.”
The word “Mora” in Spanish originally meant “Moorish woman”, but now it can also mean “Blackberry”.
The word “Moreno” in Spanish means “Dark-complexioned” which now also means “Brunette”.
The word “Moricaud” in French, means “Blackamoor” or “Dark-skinned”, and “Morillon” means “Black grape”.
In Arabic writings however, the term “Moor” practically did not exist, but the term “Berber” was used to describe the inhabitants of Islamic North Afrika to the west of Egypt.
The word “Mora” in Italian also means “Negro” or Moorish female” in addition to “Blackberry”, and “Moraiola” means “Black olive”.
However, by the 20th century, “Maurus” and “Moor” were all of a sudden defined as Berber and Arab, which was a major departure from its ancient antecedent.
The English word “Moor” did not come from the term Almoravid which is the English interpretation of the Arabic name Al-Murabitan that translates as “those who are ready to defend.” In fact, the Latin and Greek versions of the word “Moor” were used for many centuries before the existence of the Almoravid dynasty, which, according to Arab historians were not even native to Afrika.
Barbari or Barbarians was the name given to the indigenous people of North Afrika by the Romans, not because of any cultural inferiority, but because certain social customs were different to those of the Romans.
From that term evolved the name Berber, so in medieval and modern times, the Afrikans were also called Berbers.
According to earlier versions of the Oxford English Dictionary, the Moors were commonly identified as very swarthy and Black as early as the Middle-Ages and as late as the 17th Century, which is why the word Moor was often synonymous with Negro. (On the left) is a Moor from Aswan, Egypt.
The original Moors, like the original Egyptians, were Black Afrikans, but as intermarrying became more widespread, only the Berbers, Arabs and coloureds in the Moroccan territories were called Moors, while the darkest and Black skinned Afrikans were called Black-a-Moors. Eventually, the term Black was dropped from Blackamoor.
In North Afrika and especially the Muslim Arabs, mixed breeds and Berbers are currently classified as Moors.
Around 46 B.C. when the Roman army entered West Afrika and encountered Black Afrikans they called them “Maures” based on the Greek adjective “Mauros” meaning “scorched or Black”. Furthermore, during the European Renaissance, explorers, writers and scholars applied the term Moor to Blacks in general, using both words synonymously.
To the Greeks, the Moors were “a Black people” (Mauros), and to the Romans they were “a Black woolly-haired people” (Maurus), also known synonymously as Ethiops, Niger (Negro), and Afer (Afrikan). Moreover, as late as the 5th Century A. D., Procopius, a Roman historian, called the people of Morocco, Black.
In addition to the numerous sources which support the view that the Moors were a Black-skinned people, there was no doubt in the minds of the Christians of early Europe as to their ethnicity. In the Chanson of Roland (Song of Roland) written after the Moors had invaded France in 718 A.D., the invaders were described as “Blacker than ink with large noses and ears, with nothing white except the teeth”.
The Chanson of Roland states that the 50,000 strong Moorish army was led by Marganice, the Emperor of Ethiopia and Carthage
. Their most valiant figure was Abisme (Abyssinian) who was described as “Black as melted pitch”.
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