The Moors: The Word, the History, and the Evidence

by bam

Moor was never the name of a people. It was a label, and where it pointed changed with the century and with whoever was using it: the Mauri of Roman North Africa, Amazigh confederations of the Sahara and the Atlas, Arab ruling families, Iberian Muslims of every ancestry, sub-Saharan Africans, and eventually anyone Europe wanted to place outside Christendom. This course teaches the word and the history together. You get the real record of al-Andalus and North Africa: the 711 crossing, the Umayyad emirate and the caliphate of Cordoba, the surgery and astronomy and philosophy that moved into Latin through Toledo, the Almoravids and Almohads, the long shrinking of Muslim Iberia, 1492, and the Moriscos. You also get the historiography beside it: which famous claims rest on one source written seven centuries later, which numbers no surviving document supports, and which arguments serious historians are still having. Where a claim is contested, the course names who contests it and on what grounds, and declines to hand you a verdict it cannot source.