• Macrinus, 164-218, a Berber officer, prefect of the Praetorian Guard under Caracalla. He became the first Roman emperor who was not a senator in 217-18.
• Estevanico, also referred to as "Stephen the Moor", explorer of what is now the southwest of the United States in the service of Spain.
• Gildo was a Berber chieftain who instigated a rebellion against the Roman Empire in 398.
• Lusius Quietus was a Roman general, governor of Iudaea in 117. Originally a Berber prince, his military ability won him the favor of Trajan, who even designated him as his successor. During the emperor's Parthian campaign, the numerous Jewish inhabitants of Babylonia revolted and were relentlessly suppressed by Quietus, who was rewarded by being appointed governor of Judea. Restlessness in Palestine caused Trajan to send his favorite, as a legate of consular rank, to Judea, where he continued his sanguinary course.
• Alessandro de' Medici (July 22, 1510 – January 6, 1537) called "il Moro" ("the Moor") by his contemporaries was the Duke of Penne and also Duke of Florence (from 1532) and ruler of Florence from 1530 until 1537). Though illegitimate, he was the last of the "senior" branch of the Medici to rule Florence and the first to be hereditary duke. Historians (such as Christopher Hibbert) believe he had been born to a black serving-woman in the Medici household, identified in documents as Simonetta da Collavechio. The nickname is said to derive from his features (Hibbert 1999: 236). Contemporary portraits depict his full lips and coppery skin - he still has descendants (via his own illegitimate children) among many European royal and noble families.
• Othello, the fictitious hero in the play by William Shakespeare of the same name, written in 1604. Othello is a mercenary that serves in the war between Venice and Cyprus. Othello being a Moor is important to the plot of the play because it drives Othello to believe that Desdemona who is white would never love him because he is a Moor. Othello marries a noblewoman, Desdemona but succumbs to corruption by the villain Iago and becomes fiercely jealous. He ends up killing his wife, and then kills himself when he realizes he was played for a fool.

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Religious relations

The initial rule of the Moors in the Iberian peninsula under this Caliphate of Cordoba is generally regarded as tolerant in its acceptance of Christians, Muslims and Jews living in the same territories. In some periods Jews were expelled and Christians relegated to a kind of second class status Dhimmis. The Caliphate of Córdoba collapsed in 1031 and the Islamic territory in Iberia came to be ruled by North African Moors of the Almoravid Dynasty. This second stage started an era of Moorish rulers guided by a version of Islam that left behind the tolerant practices of the past.

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Architecture

The arches of red-and-white stripes inside the "La Mezquita" in Córdoba, Spain represent some of the pinnacles of the Moorish architectures.

Moorish Iberia excelled in city planning; the sophistication of their cities was astonishing. According to one historian, Córdoba "had 471 mosques and 300 public baths … the number of houses of the great and noble were 63,000 and 200,077 of the common people. There were … upwards of 80,000 shops. Water from the mountain was distributed through every corner and quarter of the city by means of leaden pipes into basins of different shapes, made of the purest gold, the finest silver, or plated brass as well into vast lakes, curious tanks, amazing reservoirs and fountains of Grecian marble." The houses of Córdoba were air conditioned in the summer by "ingeniously arranged draughts of fresh air drawn from the garden over beds of flowers, chosen for their perfume, warmed in winter by hot air conveyed through pipes bedded in the walls." This list of impressive works includes lamp posts that lit their streets at night to grand palaces, such as the one called Azzahra with its 15,000 doors.^[9] During the height of the Caliphate of Córdoba, the city of Córdoba proper was one of the major capitals in Europe and one of the most cosmopolitan cities of its time.

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Population genetics

Dr. Shomarka Keita, a biological anthropologist from Howard University, has suggested that populations in Carthage circa 200 BC and northern Algeria 1500 BC were very diverse. As a group, they plotted closest to the populations of Northern Egypt and intermediate to Northern Europeans and tropical Africans. Keita stated “The data supported the comments from ancient authors observed by classicists: everything from “fair-skinned blonds to peoples who were dark skinned 'Ethiopian' or part Ethiopian in appearance.” Modern evidence showed a similar diversity among present North Africans. Moreover, this “diversity” of phenotypes and peoples was probably due to in situ differentiation, not foreign influxes. Of course foreign influxes certainly had an impact: Phoenician, Greek, Roman Vandal, Sub Saharan Africans, and Arab migration had some impact from 900 BC to 730 AD. But they did not replace the indigenous Berber population. Only about 4% of the North African DNA landscape is traceable to Europeans.

The Y chromosome p49a,f TaqI Haplotype V, which corresponds to Y haplogroup [[E3b1b] referred to as a "Berber marker", has been found among 68.9% of modern Berbers in North Africa and is indigenous to this area, as high as 80% in one group. It is believed to be about 6,000 years old, and arrived with the neolithic expansion from the near East. M81 is not seen in sub Saharan Africa. This haplotype has also been found as high as 40% of one small group of Andalusians tested, but generally at much lower frequencies among Iberian populations, and lower as distance from North Africa increases.^[10]

Y DNA Haplogroup E3b predominates among North African populations; its E3b1b subgroup (M81+) is identified especially with the Berber people. The Vb subtype of p49a,f Haplotype V, apparently corresponding to E3b1b, has been found to occur in two thirds of the Haplotype V Southern Iberians, that is, about a quarter of all Andalusians tested. The frequency of Vb is at its highest among Berbers, and was found to decline rapidly from West to East among North Africans sampled, and to be uncommon in France and Italy. ^[11]

A 2006 Mitochondrial DNA study of 12th-13th century Islamic remains from Priego de Cordoba, Spain, indicate a higher proportion (4%) of sub-Saharan African lineages attributed at least partially to Moorish occupation, in addition to more ancient migrations to Europe.^[12]

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See also

• Al-Andalus
• Almohad dynasty (1145–1269)
• Almoravid dynasty (1061–1147)
• Arab diaspora
• Barbary pirates
• Berber people: Origin
• Berber people: Libyans & Numidians
• Caliph of Córdoba (929–1031)
• Char Bouba war
• Moorish Revival
• Nasrid dynasty (1232–1492)
• Morisco
• Sahrawi
• Slavery in modern Africa
• Moorish Science Temple of America
• Moorish architecture
• History of Portugal
• History of Spain
• Ricote (Don Quixote)

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References

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Bibliography

This section's bibliographical information is not fully provided. If you know these sources and can provide full information, you can help Wikipedia by completing it.

• Jan Carew, Rape of Paradise
• David Brion Davis, "Slavery: Black, White, Muslim, Christian"
• Herodotus, The Histories
• Shomark O.Y. Keita, "Genetic Haplotyes in North Africa"
• Shomark O.Y. Keita, "Craniometric Data from North Africa
• Shomark O.Y. Keita, "Further Craniometric Data from North Africa"
• Shomark O.Y. Keita, "Bernal vs. Snowden"
• Bernard Lewis, "The Middle East"
• Bernard Lewis, "The Muslim Discovery of Europe"
• Bernard Lewis, "Race and Slavery in Islam"
• Stanley Lane-Poole, Turkey (1888)
• Stanley Lane-Poole, The Barbary Corsairs (1890)
• Stanley Lane-Poole, The History of the Moors in Spain
• J.A. Rogers, Nature Knows no Color Line
• Ronald Segal, "Islam's Black Slaves"
• Ivan Van Sertima, The Golden Age of the Moor
• Frank Snowdon, "Before Color Prejudice"
• Frank Snowdon, "Blacks in Antiquity"
• David M. Goldenberg, "The Curse of Ham"
• Lucotte and Mercier, various genetic studies

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External links

• Moorsgate.com
• Pbs.org
• [1]