The Moors were not a single tribe or people, but a term that the Greeks and Romans applied to the peoples of northwestern Africa. In the 7th century CE, this region was conquered from the Byzantine Empire by Muslim armies advancing west from Egypt. The local peoples soon converted to Islam themselves. In 711 CE, a Muslim army made up largely of North African Moors crossed into Spain and quickly conquered most of it.
In the centuries that followed, Muslim or Moorish Spain became one of the great centers of Islamic civilization. Cordoba in Spain was ranked alongside Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo as centers of art, philosophy, and science. Moorish Spain was also one of the main paths by which Islamic ideas, and Arabic translations of ancient Greek ideas, influenced medieval civilization in Europe.
Gradually, however, Moorish Spain û or al-Andalus, as they called it û became politically weak and divided. The Christian kingdoms that had arisen in northern Spain following the incomplete Muslim conquest exploited these political and resulting military weaknesses, and gradually pushed back the borders of the fragmented Muslim states in Spain, a process that Christian Spaniards came to call the reconquista, "reconquest." At last, in 1492, the last independent Muslim state in Spain, Grenada, fell to Christian Spanish armies. The age of Moorish Spain was over.
The following discussion traces the mixture of peoples called Moors through a period of some two thousand years. However, the primary focus is on the civilization of Moorish Spain from 711 to 1492: its rise and fall, its civilization, and its cnntributions to both Islamic and Western civilization. It will first discuss the Moors in ancient times, then the influence of Islam and their spread into Spain, the development of Moorish or Islamic civilization in Spain, and its decline and final collapse.
The English word "Moor," and related words in other European...