Moors, a vague ethnographical expression applied to people whose geographical frontiers have been constantly shifting. First given (Mauri) to the inhabitants of the kingdom and subsequent Roman province of Mauretania, comprising within variable limits the whole country west of Numidia, now called Algeria and Morocco, later on it included the inhabitants of the whole of Africa north of the Sahara and Atlas from Tripoli westwards. Here for some three centuries flourished the great African church of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine; in 429 the country was overrun by the Arian
Vandals from Spain, but was recovered for the Byzantine emperors by Belisarius (533–36); invaded by the Arabs in 647, it was speedily subdued, and the Moors embraced Mohammedanism as quickly as they had embraced Christianity, and have clung to it ever since. From 1830 these countries have been gradually occupied and colonised by the French, with the exception of Tripoli and Morocco. The Arab slave-dealers and mixed Arab and Negro clans to the south are sometimes called the Moors of the western Soudan. In early or prehistoric times it is possible that the inhabitants north of the Atlas and of southern Spain, the builders of the megalithic monuments, may have been of the same race in both continents.
Whether in Algeria or in Morocco the Moors cannot be considered as a pure race. Some authorities take them as nearly equivalent to the Berbers, even the nomad tribes; others restrict the name to an admixture of Arab blood, and call Moors only the more settled Arabic-speaking population of the towns. According to some the Arabic stock is the Semitic element, the Berber or native is the Hamitic element in the resultant Moor. Though still numerous, the town Moors seem destined to dwindle before the European colonists. The more nomad Berber or Kabyle tribes will probably maintain their ground.
In European history the term is applied in a general way to the inhabitants of the Barbary states under Turkish rule, and to the actual inhabitants of Morocco, but in a special sense to the Arab and Berber conquerors and occupants of Spain from 711 to 1492. Within twenty years from their first landing these tribes had overrun the whole of Spain except the Asturias, had got possession of the Narbonnais (719), had raided into France, till finally repulsed by Charles Martel near Tours in 732. For a short time one calif ruled the whole of Islam from beyond Bagdad to the Atlantic. When in 750 the Abbaside califs overthrew the Omniades (Califs), a descendant of the latter, Abdurrahman I., escaped and founded the califate of the West at Cordova in 755. His dynasty lasted till the degradation of Hashim III. in 1031. Then after a period of anarchy the Almoravides (Berbers) succeeded from 1086 to 1147; the Almohades followed from 1130 to 1232. The greater part of Spain had now been lost, but the Beni-Nasr held Granada from 1232 to 1492. The chief steps of the Spanish re-conquest are the taking of Toledo, 1085; Saragossa, 1118; Valencia, by Jaime I. of Aragon, 1238; Seville, 1248; Murcia, 1260; Granada, 1492. The first of these invasions of Spain were mainly of Arab blood, and brought with them capacities of civilisation. From the 8th to the close of the 11th centuries the Spanish Moors in architecture, literature, science, industry, manufacture, and agriculture were far in advance of any northern European race of that date; no other people in western Europe could have then built a cathedral like the mosque of Cordova (784–793); in philosophy and in the terms of mathematical and astronomical science they have left their impress on most of the languages of western Europe. Only in religion were they inferior, and even here their toleration of the Christians, though contemptuous, contrasts favourably with that of the Christians towards the Moors after the conquest. But after the 12th and 13th centuries the conditions were reversed. The Moors had no reserve of civilisation or of increasing resources to fall back upon in northern Africa; they were degenerating, while behind Christian Spain was a Europe ever growing more civilised and richer in resources of every kind. The conquest was retarded by the division and intestine struggles of the Christian kingdoms; but these same causes told far more fatally on the Moors.
There were never more than five or six separate Christian kingdoms; but the Moorish states were at times divided among over twenty little kings, and every dynasty in succession fell to pieces through intestine strife. The latest researches, especially in numismatics, are continually adding fresh proofs of this disunion, and augmenting the number of petty independent princes or chiefs. The advance of the Turks westward after the taking of Constantinople (1453) was too late to help their co-religionists in Spain. Barbarossa established himself in Barbary in 1518; but he failed at Malta in 1551 and 1565, and after the battle of Lepanto (1571), however much the Moors might harass Spain, there was no real danger of a reconquest. Their piratical efforts only served to raise a hatred between two chivalrous races who had once respected each other and to carry it to the bitterest fanaticism.
See the articles CALIFES, ALMORAVIDES, ALMAHADES, ALGERIA, ANDALUSIA, CORDOVA, GRANADA, MOROCCO, SPAIN, TUNIS; Los Berèberes en la Península, by F. M. Tubino (Madrid, 1876); The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, by P. de Gayangos (2 vols. Lond. 1840); Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne, by R. P. A. Dozy (4 vols. Leyden, 1861); Recherches sur l'Histoire et la Littérature de l'Espagne, by R. P. A. Dozy (2 vols. 3d ed. Leyden, 1881); De causis cur Mohammedanorum cultura, &c., by R. P. A. Dozy (1869); The Moors in Spain, by Stanley Lane-Poole (Lond. 1887); Libro de Agricultura, by Abou Zacaria (2 vols. Seville and Madrid. And see ARABIAN ARCHITECTURE.