Moorish History

Moorish History Celebrating The Moorish Art, History and Culture. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statutes that might otherwise be infringing. federal law 17 USC § 107.
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Murakush Society is a Moorish Historical Society, dedicated to preserving and celebrating the History, Heritage and Culture of the Moors. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976: Allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. We typically report all viewpoints on each topic. This oft

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MOORS DESCRIBED AS BLACK — ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, 7TH CENTURYLong before the Islamic conquest of Iberia in 711 CE, the term...
08/23/2026

MOORS DESCRIBED AS BLACK — ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, 7TH CENTURY

Long before the Islamic conquest of Iberia in 711 CE, the term Mauri — Moors — was already part of the Latin vocabulary of the western Mediterranean.

One important witness is Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636 CE), the influential scholar and bishop who lived in Visigothic Spain roughly a century before the Muslim conquest.

In his Etymologiae, Isidore contrasted the physical appearance of the Mauri with the Gauls, describing the Mauri in explicitly dark terms:

“The Moors have bodies black as night, while the skin of the Gauls is white.”
— Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, XIX.23.7

Historian Jonathan Conant, in Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), discusses the significance of this language and the association between Maurus/Mauri and darkness in Late Antiquity.

This matters historically because Isidore died in 636 CE — approximately 75 years before 711. His testimony belongs to pre-Islamic Iberia, demonstrating that Mauri/Moors was not a name invented after Muslims entered Spain. The terminology and the people associated with it were already known within the Roman and post-Roman Mediterranean world.

The larger historical picture connects Hispania and Mauretania across the Strait of Gibraltar centuries before the medieval Islamic period. Roman administration, commerce, military service and migration connected Iberia with Roman North Africa long before Tariq ibn Ziyad’s famous crossing.

📚 Sources:
Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, XIX.23.7
Jonathan Conant, Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

The history of the Moors in relation to Iberia did not begin in 711.

In a 1554 Jesuit letter from Porto Seguro, Antonio Blázquez wrote that his work was teaching Christian doctrine to “los ...
08/15/2026

In a 1554 Jesuit letter from Porto Seguro, Antonio Blázquez wrote that his work was teaching Christian doctrine to “los negros y negras.”

What makes this source especially important is that the editor of Monumenta Brasiliae II, Serafim Leite, identifies those people in footnote 8 as “Índios e índias” — Indigenous men and women.

So the terminology is explicit in the source itself:

“enseño la doctrina a los negros y negras”
Footnote 8: “Índios e índias”

This is a primary-source example showing that in sixteenth-century Brazil, Europeans could use negros for the local Indigenous population.

Source: Antonio Blázquez, Porto Seguro, 8 May 1554
Published in: Monumenta Brasiliae II, ed. Serafim Leite, S.J.

In 1554, Jesuit correspondence from Brazil used the word “negros” (Black people) for local Native Brazilians.Brás Louren...
08/15/2026

In 1554, Jesuit correspondence from Brazil used the word “negros” (Black people) for local Native Brazilians.

Brás Lourenço, writing from Espírito Santo on 26 March 1554, described the people he encountered as “aquellos negros” (those Black people). He wrote that they came out in canoes, carried the Jesuits to “su Aldeã” (their village), and later referred to the same local community again as “estos negros” (these Black people).

This matters because the source is not a modern racial reinterpretation. The wording appears in the sixteenth-century Jesuit record itself, preserved in Monumenta Brasiliae, edited by Serafim Leite.

The historical record shows that early European terminology in the Americas was more complex than later racial categories suggest. In Portuguese and Spanish colonial usage, negro (Black) could be applied directly to Indigenous people in Brazil, while other records separately specified people as “negros de Guiné” (Black people from Guinea / West Africa).

The point is not that every Native Brazilian was described the same way. The point is that primary sources document Native communities whom Europeans themselves called “negros” (Black people).

Source: Monumenta Brasiliae, Serafim Leite, S.J.
Brás Lourenço — Espírito Santo, Brazil — 26 March 1554

NativeAmericanHistory

“NEGRO-INDIANS IN REBELLION” — CHICKASAW NATION, 1894This is the language of the historical record itself.On September 2...
08/15/2026

“NEGRO-INDIANS IN REBELLION” — CHICKASAW NATION, 1894

This is the language of the historical record itself.

On September 20, 1894, The Leavenworth Times published an article under the striking headline:

“NEGRO-INDIANS IN REBELLION”

with the additional headings:

“KING BLUE’S FOLLOWERS ON A MARAUDING TOUR”
“TERROR IN THE CHICKASAW NATION.”

The report concerned King Blue and his followers in the Chickasaw Nation of Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. Most importantly for historical research, the newspaper itself used the compound expression “Negro-Indians.”

That terminology provides a valuable window into the complicated racial and political world of nineteenth-century Indian Territory, where Native people, African-descended people, Black Indians, Freedmen, and people of mixed African and Native ancestry lived within and around the Five Tribes.

The Chickasaw Nation had also been a slaveholding nation. After the Civil War, formerly enslaved people and their descendants remained deeply connected to Chickasaw society, while disputes concerning citizenship, political rights, land and racial classification continued for decades.

So this clipping should not simply be reduced to a modern racial category. The significance is that an 1894 primary source explicitly used “Negro-Indians” while reporting events occurring inside the Chickasaw Nation.

📜 Primary Source: The Leavenworth Times
📅 September 20, 1894
📍 Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory
📰 Original terminology: “Negro-Indians”

History becomes clearer when we read the terminology people actually used in their own time.

ARABS IN MEDIEVAL HISTORY — THE MANASSES CHRONICLEThis striking image comes from Miniature 47 of the Manasses Chronicle,...
08/15/2026

ARABS IN MEDIEVAL HISTORY — THE MANASSES CHRONICLE

This striking image comes from Miniature 47 of the Manasses Chronicle, preserved in the Vatican Library as MS Vat. slav. 2, an illustrated 14th-century Bulgarian/Byzantine chronicle tradition.

The miniature depicts the Arab attack on Constantinople during the reign of Emperor Leo III, corresponding to the great Umayyad siege of 717–718 CE. The campaign was led by Maslama ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, as Umayyad forces attempted to capture the Byzantine capital by land and sea.

What deserves attention is the manuscript imagery itself.

The Arabs are visibly represented with dark to black complexions. This is not a modern reconstruction, AI interpretation, or modern artist’s attempt to change their appearance. It is how these Arab figures appear in the surviving medieval manuscript.

That makes Miniature 47 an important piece of medieval visual history. Centuries before modern racial categories and modern debates over Arab identity, a Christian manuscript tradition could depict the Arab forces confronting Constantinople as dark-skinned people.

The point is not to redraw the manuscript through modern expectations. Look at the original source. Look at the people the medieval artist actually painted.

📜 Source: Manasses Chronicle
🖼️ Miniature 47
📚 Vatican Library: MS Vat. slav. 2
📅 Manuscript: 14th century
⚔️ Historical event depicted: Arab/Umayyad siege of Constantinople, 717–718 CE

The image is the evidence. Study the source—not the modern stereotype.

Cheddar Man challenges modern assumptions about what Britain’s earliest inhabitants looked like.Discovered in Gough’s Ca...
08/14/2026

Cheddar Man challenges modern assumptions about what Britain’s earliest inhabitants looked like.

Discovered in Gough’s Cave, Somerset, Cheddar Man lived roughly 10,000 years ago during the Mesolithic period. Ancient-DNA analysis indicates that he most likely had dark to very dark skin pigmentation, blue-green eyes, and dark curly hair. Researchers place him within the Western hunter-gatherer population of Mesolithic Europe. (nhm.ac.uk, ucl.ac.uk, reuters.com)

An important distinction: scientists did not directly measure melanin from his remains. His pigmentation was inferred from genetic variants associated with skin, eye, and hair color in living populations. So the most accurate wording is that his genome strongly supported dark pigmentation, rather than claiming an exact melanin percentage. (nhm.ac.uk, ucl.ac.uk)

There is also a remarkable local connection. In 1997, mitochondrial-DNA testing linked Somerset schoolteacher Adrian Targett to the same maternal lineage as Cheddar Man. That does not mean Targett inherited Cheddar Man’s appearance; pigmentation can change dramatically across thousands of years while a maternal lineage remains traceable. (scholar.lib.vt.edu, independent.co.uk)

Cheddar Man is therefore useful evidence for a broader point: very dark skin was present among Mesolithic Europeans long before the lighter pigmentation now common in northern Europe became widespread.

In 1845, during debate over the annexation of Texas, U.S. Congressman Charles J. Ingersoll described the boundary betwee...
08/14/2026

In 1845, during debate over the annexation of Texas, U.S. Congressman Charles J. Ingersoll described the boundary between the United States and Mexico in explicitly racial terms.

Speaking of the region between the Nueces and Río Bravo/Rio Grande, he called it the natural boundary between the “Anglo-Saxon and the Mauritanian races.” He then declared:

“There Mexico begins. Thence, beyond the Bravo, begin the Moorish people and their Indian associates, to whom Mexico properly belongs…”

This statement is significant because Mexico in 1845 was far larger than the modern nation-state. Mexican territory still extended across lands that are now California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Texas was separately contested, with the Republic of Texas claiming independence while Mexico continued to reject that independence.

So when Ingersoll referred to the “Mauritanian races” and the “Moorish people and their Indian associates,” he was speaking in the context of a Mexico that still encompassed much of what later became the American Southwest.

📜 Source: Charles J. Ingersoll, U.S. House of Representatives, debate concerning the annexation of Texas, Congressional Globe, February 3, 1845.

A Smithsonian-era source recorded something often left out of discussions about Black and Native American history in the...
08/14/2026

A Smithsonian-era source recorded something often left out of discussions about Black and Native American history in the South.

In Myths of the Cherokee, ethnologist James Mooney wrote that as some coastal Native tribes declined, their survivors increasingly “associate[d] and intermarried with the negroes” until they “lost their identity and were classed with that race.” He concluded that:

“a considerable proportion of the blood of the southern negroes is unquestionably Indian.”

📖 Source: James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, Bureau of American Ethnology, 19th Annual Report, p. 233, published 1902.

This is important because Mooney was not claiming that Africans and Indians were the same people. He was documenting a process by which Native descendants could become absorbed into Black communities and thereafter be socially classified as Negro, obscuring their separate tribal ancestry in later records.

The surrounding discussion also connects this intermixture to the colonial South, where enslaved Indians and enslaved Africans lived and labored in close proximity.

Historical racial labels do not always tell the complete story of ancestry.

ENSLAVED MOORS TRANSPORTED TO SPANISH AMERICAThe historical record shows that Moors were not only enslavers or Mediterra...
08/12/2026

ENSLAVED MOORS TRANSPORTED TO SPANISH AMERICA

The historical record shows that Moors were not only enslavers or Mediterranean corsairs—they were also enslaved and transported into Spain’s American colonies.

Historian Hernán G. H. Taboada, in El Moro en las Indias (2004), explains that in 16th–17th-century Spanish usage, “moro” could designate someone of Arabic culture or, more generally, a Muslim. His research documents Spanish restrictions specifically concerning Moors and Moorish slaves in the Americas.

📜 1506: Spanish authorities ordered the removal from America of esclavos berberiscos—Barbary/North African slaves—alongside negros paganos.

📜 1513: legislation addressed Moors already present in America.

📜 1531: the Crown regulated the arrival of “esclavos moros a América” — “Moorish slaves to America” through royal licensing.

The distinction between berberisco, moro, and negro is important: these terms did not always represent mutually exclusive modern “races.” In this period, Moro could function as a Muslim cultural/religious designation, while berberisco specifically connected captives with North Africa/Barbary.

Estebanico—“Esteban the Moor”—provides another famous example of an enslaved Moroccan/North African who entered Spanish America and traveled through territory now comprising parts of the United States.

📚 SOURCE: Hernán G. H. Taboada, “El Moro en las Indias,” Latinoamérica: Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos, No. 39 (2004), pp. 115–132.

MOORS WERE ENSLAVED. MOORISH SLAVES WERE TRANSPORTED TO AMERICA.

ENSLAVED MOORS IN SPANISH AMERICA | 16TH–17TH CENTURIESThe enslavement of Moors and North Africans by Europeans did not ...
08/12/2026

ENSLAVED MOORS IN SPANISH AMERICA | 16TH–17TH CENTURIES

The enslavement of Moors and North Africans by Europeans did not stop in Europe.

Historian Karoline P. Cook, in Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), documents North Africans, Moriscos and Muslims entering Spain’s American colonies—including as enslaved captives.

Cook records Moriscos captured by Spaniards off the North African coast, enslaved aboard royal galleys and transported toward the Caribbean. In 1623, the Morisco Francisco Martínez appears enslaved in Cartagena. In 1628, the Viceroy of Peru’s licensed household included Ana and Antonio, two enslaved berberiscos (North Africans).

Cook also discusses Diego Romero, whose mother María was an enslaved Morisca Muslim woman from Oran, Algeria. Witnesses described Diego as moreno (dark-complexioned) and crespo (curly-haired). He later crossed the Atlantic and became an encomendero in New Granada.

The accompanying 16th-century image from Christoph Weiditz’s Trachtenbuch (c. 1529–1540) independently illustrates a dark-skinned “Mohr” in chains, providing visual evidence for the contemporary European representation of enslaved Moors.

The record is clear on the larger point: Europeans captured and enslaved North Africans, and some of these captives were transported into Spain’s American colonial world.

📚 SOURCE: Karoline P. Cook, Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

University of Pennsylvania Press — Forbidden Passages⁠

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