Vincent Reifer

There are moments in history that we rarely confront, mostly because they were never fully told to us. But Columbus didn’t just sail the ocean blue in 1492 but something devastating happened. These events are tantamount to the fall of Rome and the Roman destruction of Carthage. This is the brief story of the compulsion of the Moors or commonly known as the Reconquista.

First some context, what exactly a Moor? The word itself was of European origin to describe a people and culture that was made up of Africans living in the area of modern day Mariutania, North Senegal, Mali and many Berber tribes. 

Now lets set the scene, the year is 711 and the Africans are ready to walk into Europe. Under the command of the great leader Tariq Ibn-Ziyad (which whom the rock of Gibraltar is named after-Jabal Tariq) the army of the Umayyad Caliphate which was dominantly African, destroyed this Visigothic Kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula and like like how Basil Davidson Puts it “A rich African civilization which took shape in Spain”

By 719 the Moors had gotten all the way into France after being fought by Chareles Martel, whom is grandfather to Charlemagne. At this point they saw nothing up north so they settled and created Al-Andalusa. 837 the Moors now have Sicily  and by 846 the Moors have conquered Italy. Now we can understand that Sicilian scene in True Romance. 

A Tropical Dependency by Flora S. Lugard tells us that at its zenith Al-Analus was the most sophisticated civilization in the western world, at this point Europe was in its self-inflicted so-called “dark age”. Education was universal and had 17 great universities in Almeria, Córdoba, Granada, Toledo and more! While in Europe 90% of the population was illiterate, not even kings could read or write. 

There were libraries attached to mosques that had thousands of manuscripts on philosophy and spirituality to mathematics and history. They had running water and streetlamps, with roads with raised sidewalks. Why was Moorish Spain so great? One note on African civilization is that they are territorial and are socially, culturally and financially fertilized by the other states coexisting around it. In this case the Kingdoms of Mali, Songhai and the Hausa City-states to name a few. 

Stanley Lane-Pooles 1886 book The Moors in Spain is a masterwork in Moorish Spain. This book can be cited as saying that Spain had women philosophers,heads of state, physicians and poets. Their poetry gives us a glimpse of their day and shows proof that women in this culture had more freedom than in Western Asia. While in medieval Europe they were burning women, calling them witches, debating if they had souls and locking them in convents.  

In Cordoba alone there were 900 public bathhouses, hot and cold rooms, underground water ways to dispose of waste. Each bathhouse would have a staff who would scrub and massage bathers. The bathhouse was not a luxury, it was an element of philosophy and theology of Moorish culture. With the Africans intrinsic all-natural, clean and organic way of life mixed with the Islamic tradition of constant purification not as a cleanliness act but as a spiritual one. 

Lets now compare this to the contemporary world at that time. Europeans at this point are burying its dead in the streets and blaming God for the plague. The Church decreed that too much attention to our own flesh was sinful. The streets of Paris were open sewers. London’s Thames was a slow-moving toilet.

It is now 1469 the date, October 19th and before the marriage altar is Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. This was a more strategic marriage than a love story and they were second cousins. When in 1474 Henry the IV died, Isabella claimed the Castilian throne which sparked a war. With Ferdianand military Isabella locked in her victory. 

Now at this time the Moors did something that no European power would or could do, that is letting everybody live. Muslims, Christians and Jews all living together in one area, of course thought there were small skirmishes brought on by the Christian Europeans.

The Christian kingdoms in the north never declared a formal war on the Moors. But for most of the 800 years they were neighbors whom traded, borrowed, intermarried and occasionally fought. Christians and Jews adopted the architectural style, and select European sons would be sent to Moorish universities. This proves as another example of how Africans can amalgamate themselves into any culture without one hint of a war. 

Then came Isabella. She was a queen who had unified two kingdoms through a forged papal document and was in teenage incest marriage, won a civil war, reformed the treasury, and built the strong military, the reconquista is about to start. 

Catholic Monarchs created a deliberate campaign to build a uniform Christian identity. Now this new Identity was born out of Christendom, which is void of spirituality and is a political strategy. This new form of weapon was designed to do one thing: Manufacturing a uniform identity for a new world by destroying every trace of the civilizations that came before it. 

By this point the peace began to break down not because of Moorish aggression but because of the stress of the Spanish Inquisition. Isabella wanted blood, not because the Moors were trouble but because just like now any unified empire must have a unified enemy.

As we know at this point Europe was in their dark age and they had forgotten maritime science, at this point Europe was telling old wives tales that the “World was Flat”. But because of the challenge of the Africans and the information they were able to preserve, Europe was able to unlock itself from their self imposed. technological developments in shipbuilding, cartography and navigation were directly stolen knowledge. 

The maps and knowledge came from the Moors, the astroglobe came from Western Asia and the compass came from Asia. Europe did not pull itself out of the Dark Ages through innovation and genius but they pulled themselves out through proximity.

In the background there is this italian sailor named Cristoforo Colombo. It’s generally thought that Cristoforo changed his name to Crisóbal Colón once he immigrated to Spain. He was a man who remade his identity to fit whoever was paying him.  Just in 2024, Spain’s own national broadcast had brought an answer question that has always been circling.

Exactly who is Christopher Colombus? Well based on 21 years of DNA research, concluded that Columbus was a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe. During Columbus’s time there were only about 10,000 to 15,000 Jewish people living on the Italian peninsula. Conversely there were about 200,000 Jewish people living in Al-Andalusia, but by this time tens of thousands of whom had already converted to Catholicism.

1482 had come around at this time Columbus was trading along the coast of West Africa and was making frequent visits to Elmina which was a Portuguese slave castle and trade post. What Columbus saw at Elmina was a conquered template. It was a fort built on African land, staffed by Europeans, extracting African wealth and life force. 

Back in Al-Andalusia battle by battle when the Reconquista swept through the land and bathhouses, libraries,school and homes were sacked and destroyed. Europe just lost its most advanced public health infrastructure and as the Moors in Spain put it we were set back 500 years technological advancement. 

 For the next 10 years Isabella’s army is fighting hard and is  besieging Alhambra and launching the final war against the last Moorish kingdom. Columbus is standing on the Gold Coast of Africa watching the first European slave fort go up. The pope authorized the enslavement of all non Christian peoples. 

Now we arrive at the climax point of Western history, 1492, and events are happening fast. January 2nd: Isabella takes Granada, The last African kingdom in Europe falls. March 31st The Alhambra Decree: Jews and Muslims expelled. August 3rd: Columbus sails west using Moorish navigational tools, African wind knowledge, and a papal mandate to claim everything he finds. October 12th: He landed in the New World. This grifting Jewish convert hiding behind a new name and a new identity persuaded a queen who was expelling his people to fund an ocean voyage.

All these events were carefully connected, 1492 is not an endpoint but merely a starting line. This moment is when hate, greed and power converged setting into motion the reshaping of the whole world. Columbus was not moving blindly into the unknown. He sailed in an era shaped by accumulated knowledge by the Moors, some historians maintain that they came before Columbus. But that is just another part of history.