Blackamoor/Moor

‘Moor’ and ‘blackamoor’ are two English words that were highly influenced by Iberian and Italian designations of Northern African peoples. Mouro (Portuguese) and moro (Castilian, Italian) derived from the Latin maurus, an inhabitant of Mauretania, the Roman designation for the region of Maghreb. The lengthy duration of the Iberian Reconquista, the reconquest of Muslim territories by local Christian kingdoms, and the increasing commercial exchanges between Christian Iberia and northern Europe contributed to the dissemination of the word in the Middle Ages, where ‘Moor’ remained a popular descriptor for the medieval Berber and Arab Muslim conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily. The accounts of the late medieval Portuguese travellers, explorers, and merchants often used ‘Moor’ for Muslim, although distinctions remained: despite such terms as ‘Arabian Moors’ or ‘Turkish Moors’, both were usually described as mouros brancos (‘white moors’), while Berber and sub-Saharan Muslims were frequently distinguished between mouros da terra (Portuguese for ‘moors from the land’) or mouros negros (‘black moors’). ¹ Mouro and moro also became associated with specific physical features, as the Portuguese and Spanish term moreno (literally ‘brunette’ or ‘swarthy’) suggests. ‘Morisco’, the Iberian category used to identify Christian converts from Islam, was another derivative from mouro/moro which sought to stigmatise and racialise the Arab and Berber descendants from the Muslim communities of Al-Andalus. ² This complex relation between ethnicity, geography and religion informed the evolution of ‘blackamoor’, often used alongside region-inflected words like ‘Niger’ or ‘Ethiop’. ³ English grammars and dictionaries of the time made similar associations: ‘a black More, or a man of Ethiope’; ‘The Negro's [sic], which we call the Black-mores’. ⁴