Where did the Moors Live?

The Moors were a Muslim Berber population inhabiting northwestern Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and Malta during the Middle Ages. They inhabited much of the Iberian Peninsula during the early- to mid-Medieval Islamic period of Al-Andalus (from the early 8th to the late 15th centuries in most areas), after it came under the control of Arab and Berber Muslim invaders during the late 7th and early 8th centuries during the Umayyad conquest of Hispania. These lands comprised much of Spain and Portugal as well as small coastal and mountainous sections of southern France known as Septimania and Provence between the 8th and 11th centuries. There were an additional thirty years of military occupation on Hispania during the Umayyad caliphate and later in smaller parts of Spain after the collapse of the Moorish Almoravid and Almohad dynasties of northwest Africa and the final expulsion of the Muslims from all the kingdoms of Iberia except the Emirate of Granada, during the Christian Reconquista. It was only at the fall of Granada that the entire peninsula came under exclusively Christian rule in 1492, ending five centuries of Moorish influence on the peninsula.

During the Al-Andalus period in Iberia—particularly during the caliphates of Córdoba and the later taifas and Moorish petty kingdoms—some Muslims, especially Arabs but including Berbers, came to represent the Iberian-Islamic ruling and intellectual class and gradually absorbed much previous Visigothic, Roman, and Iberian culture over the several centuries of their rule, resulting in a large degree of cultural interaction in Al-Andalus between Muslims and Christians who inhabited various parts of Hispania during different political times, especially between Muslim Al-Hakam II's caliphate and the Moorish taifas.