Europeans and Generations of Spanish rulers have tried to expunge this era from the historical record, recent archeology and scholarship now shed fresh light on the Moors who flourished in Al-Andalus for more than 700 years – from 711 AD until 1492. The Moorish advances in mathematics, astronomy, art, and agriculture helped propel Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance.
Enormous large of blacks first invaded and settled down in Spain about 3,000 years ago after a devastating drought that the initial white European settlers found difficult to survive. After the drought era, the whites come back.
The second major intrusion of an African Army into Spain before the Moors, occurs sometime around 700 B.C. during the period of the 25th Dynasty in Egypt, when the Ethiopian Taharka was a young general, but before he was succeeded to the throne by his uncle Shabataka. Finally, movement of Africans into Europe in significantly large numbers and into positions of real power, occurred during the invasion of Spain in 711 A.D. African Moors boldly invaded white caucasion Europe and conquered the portuguese, Spanish Italian and Southern French. The Moors then ruled Europe in great wealth, power, dominance, prosperity and authority. Right from 711, the Moors had dominant grip and authority on Europe, especially the area today known as Gibraltar, most of Spain and Portugal, and parts of Southern France from where they ruled and influenced other parts of Europe. There was also a Moorish presence in what is now Southern Italy, primarily in Sicily. They occupied Mazara on Sicily in 827[2] and in 1224 were expelled to the settlement of Lucera, which was destroyed in 1300.
Author and historian Chancellor Williams said “the original Moors, like the original Egyptians, were black Africans.”
The 16th century English playwright William Shakespeare used the word Moor as a synonym for African. His contemporary Christopher Marlowe also used African and Moor interchangeably.
Arab writers further buttress the black identity of the Moors. The powerful Moorish Emperor Yusuf ben-Tachfin is described by an Arab chronicler as “a brown man with wooly hair.”
Black soldiers, specifically identified as Moors, were actively recruited by Rome, and served in Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. St. Maurice, patron saint of medieval Europe, was only one of many black soldiers and officers under the employ of the Roman Empire.
The Moors brought enormous learning to Spain that over centuries would percolate through the rest of Europe.
The intellectual achievements of the Moors in Spain had a lasting effect; education was universal in Moorish Spain, while in Christian Europe, 99 percent of the population was illiterate, and even kings could neither read nor write. At a time when Europe had only two universities, the Moors had seventeen, located in Almeria, Cordova, Granada, Juen, Malaga, Seville, and Toledo.
In the 10th and 11th centuries, public libraries in Europe were non-existent, while Moorish Spain could boast of more than 70, including one in Cordova that housed hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. Universities in Paris and Oxford were established after visits by scholars to Moorish Spain.
It was this system of education, taken to Europe by the Moors, that seeded the European Renaissance and brought the continent out of the 1,000 years of intellectual and physical gloom of the Middle Ages. I earnestly look forward to a united black race.
Africa UNITE!
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