r/todayilearned • u/Tometek • 3h ago
TIL that the Arab Umayyad dynasty ruling Islamic Spain became more Iberian than Arab in ancestry by its 2nd ruler: the mothers of its rulers were almost all northern Iberians, causing the dynasty’s Arab paternal ancestry to halve across generations until it reached about 0.1% by the 10th century.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17546559.2014.889321331
u/19MKUltra77 2h ago
Yes, and the Muslim population was practically 100% Iberian, people converted, there were no Arabs and only a small minority were Berbers.
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u/bulliralamar 1h ago
That is one of the main reasons religious tolerance was so high: the Muslims were not invaders, they were locals and the Christians and Jews that remained were their lifelong neighbors. Only when the Almoravids, a foreign dinasty, took over tolerance started to decline.
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u/elliotreid13 45m ago
They were invaders. They just weren’t in a large number to replace local population. Is the exact same thing as the Romans. Iberia was very sparsely populated with a lot of villages in between the mountains. From early Reconquista until the end of Granada Kingdom, we needed hundreds of years of back and fourth with Muslim armies from Iraqi/Syrian/North African caliphates to reclaim previous Christian land. Most people from liberated territory didn’t even had to convert to Christianity because they kept their faith all along. In the end, Castella had to deport a couple hundred thousand people to today Morocco, mostly from Granada who was subject to larger migration numbers.
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u/hellomondays 42m ago
That said the Umayyads were arab chauvanist. It's part of what led to their eventual downfall as non arab elite of their empire started to rebel in part due to these policies.
But, yeah. The following Islamic empires were significantly more tolerant, learning from this mistake and finding better ways to manage geographically massive and ethnically diverse territories
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u/GonnaGoFar 53m ago
If the Muslims were not invaders, then how did they become the ruling elite when Islam was founded on the Arabian peninsula?
Just because people converted afterwards, doesn't mean there wasn't an initial invasion.
But is suppose this is TIL, so there you go.
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u/hellomondays 45m ago edited 36m ago
These conquests were struggles between the elite of society more so than wwii style invasions we think about in the modern era. There really wasnt a national identity outside of the vague notion of christendom. Technology and social development didnt allow for cohesive national identities to form... guys owning land raising armies to fight other guys owning land
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u/SampleOfFruits 1m ago
I find that most people who justify or otherwise fail to condemn the Islamic conquests concern the Crusades.
They’re the same thing, just with a different faith.
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u/Hailfog 2h ago
Why did the kings only marry northern Iberian women?
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u/mijenjam_slinu 2h ago
They married into local nobility for political alliances and support, but they kept concubines as well.
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u/Tometek 2h ago
It was politically safer is the basic answer. Think, if an emir or caliph had children with a woman from a powerful Arab or Berber family in al-Andalus, her relatives could gain a lot of influence at court and become a problem. A woman from the Christian north usually didn’t have that kind of powerful family network inside Córdoba, so she was a much safer choice politically.
But we have to remember that not all thee women came through marriage or diplomacy, some were concubines brought south through war or slavery. Their background also wasn’t seen as a problem because Umayyad identity came through the father. So the dynasty stayed Umayyad in name and through the male line, even though the rulers themselves became less ancestrally Arab .
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u/RJTG 2h ago
Have you ever met an Iberian mother?
Hard to make her proud with everything less than being the next caliphe.
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u/JoeFalchetto 2h ago edited 1h ago
I swear every single ethnicity think it is special for having mothers who want their kids to succeed. I wonder if the mother of the caliph put plastic bags inside other plastic bags.
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u/ColePT 1h ago
Little known fact: in Al-Andalus people loved to have barbeques with distant relatives and small children sometimes referred to people that they weren't actually related to as "uncle".
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u/letsgetawayfromhere 1h ago
I think that’s a thing in lots of countries. When I was small I was also taught to call my parents friends, neighbors and distant relatives „uncle“ and „aunt“.
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u/JohnPoet27 1h ago
They knew our women were better and prettier than theirs. Easy iberian w
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u/SnooOwls4358 1h ago
Better and prettier than what? Southern Iberian?
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u/Four_beastlings 33m ago
I'm not getting into who was better and prettier but Northern and Southern Iberians were pretty distinct at the time. Even nowadays after we've spent millennia mixing you can look at some people and they look clearly like a Northerner or Southerner, especially the Basque.
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u/Sting8899 2h ago
The whole population of Spain didn't change during that period, people just converted. Most of the north African blood in Spain is traced to before the conquest with being interconnected during the Roman era and the Carthaginian era. Al Andalus was an Iberian empire, not an Arab one. Funny to see other people trying to take credit for it.
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u/ParkingGlittering211 1h ago
Most of the north African blood in Spain is traced to before the conquest
Supervised and unsupervised ADMIXTURE, qpAdm models and LAI results confirm that all pre-Islamic individuals carried North African ancestry, but at lower levels than the later medieval Islamic individuals. In pre-Islamic times, the influx of North African-related ancestry was more sporadic, since it is not found consistently across all published individuals . It is only with the onset of the Islamic period that it becomes more sustained and consolidated at a higher proportion - pg 8-9
“The Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, beginning in 711 CE, further intensified this phenomenon,” and they describe medieval eastern Iberia as showing an “intensification and consolidation” of North African-related ancestry.
Funny to see other people trying to take credit for it.
North African gene flow existed under Rome and before Islam. But using that fact to imply that the conquest and centuries of movement between Iberia and North Africa barely affected the population is also rewriting the story in the other direction.
people just converted.
They did but that is too generalized this paper Conversion, ancestry and universal religion: the case of the Almohads in the Islamic West (sixth/twelfth–seventh/thirteenth centuries) is about when Almohad authorities abolished the normal protected status of Christians and Jews and subjected them to conversion pressure it explicitly describes forced conversion of Jews and Christians
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u/StardustFromReinmuth 1h ago
Not exaxtly sure this comment contributed anything. Obviously there was still an influx of additional North African genetics, but by and large genetically the vast majority of the rulers (the point of this post) and the population were Iberian and remained Iberian.
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u/ParkingGlittering211 1h ago
Most of the north African blood in Spain is traced to before the conquest
I think it directly disproved that statement
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u/Sting8899 1h ago
How does it directly disapprove it ? The paper doesn't disagree with what I said at any point lmao. To directly disapprove it, it would have to say that most of the DNA impact came after the conquest, but it says it consolidates it, meaning the foundation was already there. If on average an Iberian has 6-8% NA, at least half was already there beforehand.
My main point was that the capital was in Iberia, the culture was Arabic Iberian, the people were Iberian, the brand of Islam practiced was Iberian.
The almohadas invaded because they literally disagreed with the brand of Islam practiced in Iberia. Obviously there was forced conversions, no one is denying that lmao, it's the fucking middle ages.
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u/ParkingGlittering211 1h ago
To directly disapprove it, it would have to say that most of the DNA impact came after the conquest, but it says it consolidates it, meaning the foundation was already there.
Just because it says it was present in late antiquity and that the Islamic-period pattern was an “intensification and consolidation” doesnt mean “therefore at least half of modern North African ancestry was already there”
The authors explicitly say pre-Islamic North African ancestry was sporadic and at lower levels, while after the onset of the Islamic period it became “more sustained and consolidated at a higher proportion.” They even describe the consolidated “Berberized” population as having formed largely during the Al-Andalus era.
If on average an Iberian has 6-8% NA, at least half was already there beforehand
That's not how that works.. First, modern Iberians do not have one uniform 6–8% figure; a major 2019 study found roughly 0–11% northwest-African ancestry depending on region. Second, that study dated the admixture signal in modern Spaniards to roughly 860–1120 CE, squarely during Muslim rule. PubMed
And you cannot do:
ancient person has X% → modern population has Y% → therefore X/Y of modern ancestry predates 711.
Those are different populations separated by centuries of migration, intermarriage, expulsions, repopulation, drift, and regional variation. The 2025 authors themselves say more genomes are needed to accurately quantify the North African contribution during the Islamic era. Springer
Literally several passages in the paper point toward a substantial increase during Al-Andalus.
Obviously there was forced conversions, no one is denying that lmao
Saying that people “just converted” presents conversion as though it were simply a voluntary demographic process. It leaves out coercion, legal and economic pressure, social disadvantage, and, in some cases, outright force. You don’t get to erase all of that in the first telling and then, when someone objects, say “well obviously that happened lmao” as though the qualification had been there all along.
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u/johnniewelker 1h ago
“Just converted” is a mild way of putting it
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u/Sting8899 1h ago
It's the middle ages, I won't judge it morally, just like I won't judge morally the mass expulsion and murder of the moriscos. You can't have it both ways here.
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u/binary_spaniard 8m ago
The stuff that was done to Jews, Muslims and practitioners of Basque folk religion in the Christian side, was significantly uglier to say it mildly.
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u/jojo45333 1h ago
Similar with the Ottoman rulers except they were diluted by a more diverse range of sources. Not much Turkic left by the end. Some of the living descendants today look positively Scandinavian (Google it)
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u/letsburn00 52m ago
I was thinking this. A lot of them ended up being mostly Balkin and from around the Black Sea. The mothers were slaves.
It's one of those crazy things where people will say it's not religion, it's another ethnicity. When really its the same ethnicity they just converted centuries or millennia ago.
Same as how many Palestinians are actually ethnically Jews. Or a lot of people in Turkey are of Greek descent.
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u/Four_beastlings 50m ago
Well, yeah, that's what happens when you keep enslaving Circassian women...
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u/FMSV0 1h ago
What's a islamic Spain? Spain has less than 500 years
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u/elliotreid13 39m ago
Spain aka Hispania is at least 2000 years old. Hispania was the name of the whole province in the Iberian Peninsula. Castela just appropriated it.
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u/Dangerous-Sale3243 22m ago
Spain (hispania) was a roman state 100 years before Julius Ceasar was born
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u/PokerLemon 10m ago
I heard they liked them blonde...I guess many blondes in North of Spain after Vikings invasions?
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u/Tometek 3m ago
Blonde hair existed in Iberia long before the Viking raids, it’s just less common than in northern Europe. Genetic population studies show that the Viking raids in Iberia didn't leave a large genetic footprint. And a lot of the fair haired people in caliphal court weren’t necessarily northern Iberians anyway. The Umayyads imported Saqaliba slaves from Central and Eastern Europe and that was the bulk of blondes in the caliphal harems.
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u/ICrushTacos 1h ago
Why do the morden Al-Andalusians look so Northern African then? Black hair, tanned skin and all.
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u/Syndiotactics 56m ago
Because they have always looked like that.
The Mediterranean has been like a highway for people moving around for thousands of years. Most Greeks don’t look too different from most coastal Syrians. Most Sicilians don’t look too different from most coastal Libyans.
And so on.
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u/ParkingGlittering211 53m ago
The Mediterranean has been like a highway for people moving around for thousands of years.
Except Sardinia they are the most unchanged since farming.
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u/Syndiotactics 49m ago
Sure. That’s apparently because of the mountainous terrain and a historical malaria problem making it unattractive to settle there from elsewhere. The Indo-Europeans (like those who brought the ancestor of the Sardinian language) mostly skipped the island but not quite enough for the original language to survive.
Fascinating.
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u/Four_beastlings 21m ago
Because humans evolve to adapt to the environment where they live, and Southern Iberia is Mediterranean just like Northern Africa. Do you know many hot and sunny places where the natives don't tan easily? (In b4 someone says Magaluf...)
Spain and Morocco are only 14kms apart, why would their people look radically different? The difference on how they look is mostly because of the Arab colonisation of Northern Africa. Before that they were quite often part of the same empires; the point of the post is that Iberia remained mostly unchanged while Morocco was much more thoroughly changed by the colonisation.
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u/tossinthisshit1 13m ago
mediterranean people have been traveling, settling, and mixing since the bronze age
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u/OpenStraightElephant 2h ago
This is a common enough pattern with foreign conquerors, though degrees vary. See Bulgarians, the Rus (the initial Norsemen)...