Dna from Muslim burial in early Medieval France

The emirs of Sicily the Kalbids were known to be tolerants with local christians said Michele Amari.

I'm sure that had a lot to do with it, but it also dropped because of a decline in agriculture and commerce.
It is interesting that the first muslims who left when christians rule returned were likely people of science, literature etc before farmers.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ballanūbī
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Hamdis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Maziri
 
The emirs of Sicily the Kalbids were known to be tolerants with local christians said Michele Amari.


It is interesting that the first muslims who left when christians rule returned were likely people of science, literature etc before farmers.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ballanūbī
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Hamdis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Maziri

I think this could be called "The Exile's Lament" by Ibn Hamdis, yes?

"When Sicily fills my memory,
Ah what pain I feel,
Upon remembering my youth, my glory,
My delirious love!"

I've been interested since my university days in the impact of Arabic lyric poetry on the development of poetry in the west, on the troubadours of southern France, on the Sicilian School of Poetry and then to Petracco and Dante and from there to Shakespeare. I believe it was only the shift in geo-politics that led to Dante's Tuscan becoming the template for Italian instead of the Sicilian of the Sicilian school.
http://www.webexhibits.org/poetry/home_movements.html
The more well to do had more resources and somewhere to go, perhaps. The poorer people probably tried to hang on, only to eventually be forcibly ejected. Given the low level of E-M81 in Sicily, some converted, or some of their children remained, but the percentage is too small for most of the settlers to have stayed, even if one hypothetically includes some of the other "E" clades or "J1" clades.

@Bicicleur,

I don't see why the Muslim kingdoms should have standards applied to them which aren't applied to the Christian world. By the standards of the day, the Ottomans were tolerant of other religions.
 
Unfortunately, no autosomal dna was tested, although the authors say that might be forthcoming. That would help to clarify if there had already been admixture with European women in Spain, although the time line is a bit tight for that.

The other thing that's interesting about all of this is what might have been the impact on modern French genetics. I've always thought, given the short time period, that it must have been minimal. We're talking only about the period from 720 to about 760, after all, roughly the same amount of time that they spent in pockets of mainland southern Italy. No matter how many women were in their harems it's hard to fathom how this could have led to much impact autosomally. Of course, the state of French genetics being what it is, we don't have much to go on. In Italy, we have some 23andme results showing about a 1-3% figure for some southern Italians. I don't put much stock in the Busby, Hellenthal papers, which bizarrely show no recent North African admixture anywhere except Sardinia, but show West African admixture. It seems to me that any West African influx in Spain and southern Italy would have had to have been mediated by North Africans, and even if not, how could the West African influx have been larger than the North African one. It doesn't make sense, but then neither does a recent admixture of 20% or more "Near Eastern" in the France of that time. We certainly can't attribute it to any massive phantom movement of "Byzantines" after the Muslim invasions as some people have tried to do for Italy. There's absolutely no historical evidence for it at all.

Busby_Fig_4A.png





That's one of my problems with that study. I know that genetics trumps history to some degree, but before I accept a genetics study that totally contradicts a common sense understanding of history, I want to be assured that they're getting it right, particularly in terms of the dating for these admixtures. Just to bring up Italy again, how can you also find this admixture with "Levantines",which from the map is probably just generally "Near Eastern", even if perhaps 10%, in Toscana, but no recent admixture with the Lombards for whose invasion in larger numbers in that area we have so much evidence?

Anyway, I don't want to derail the thread.

Oh, there's one other source for this ancestry in France, the Fraxinetum of Provence in a later period.
https://www.academia.edu/3537846/Fraxinetum_An_Islamic_Frontier_State_in_Tenth_Century_Provence

It's not clear to me how many in this group were converts versus men with North African or Near Eastern roots. I would think it was a mixed bag.
 
Yes Ibn Hamdis became famous for singing his despair after being forced to abandon his homeland.
Sicilia mia. Disperato dolore
si rinnova per te nella memoria
Giovinezza. Rivedo le felici follie perdute
e gli amici splendidi
 
The Umayyads (756-1031) ruled Al Andalus divided into various racial and religious groups. Among the Muslims were the Arabs, Syrians, Yemenis, Berbers and Muladis (Christian converts to Islam); after the Christians, called Mozarabs, who could be of Gothic or Hispanic origin, the Jews and the Slavs, who used to be slaves and freedmen.

The lowest position on the social ladder was that of Christians and Jews (although many of these had collaborated with the invaders in the eighth century due to the persecutions they suffered from several Gothic kings).

Maíllo emphasizes that traditional Islam does not grant equality to Muslims to monotheists living in Dar-el-Islam, nor does it claim it, because it cannot allow true believers to be confused with Christians and Jews.


When the Muslims seized Spain, they moved the legislation that the caliphs already applied to the Christians and Jews of Egypt and Asia Minor.

In Islamic legal-theological schools only the community of the faithful is the only legitimate beneficiary of the assets created by Allah and "jihad is the means by which the restitution to their legitimate owners of the goods that the infidels possess illegally

Through dimma, the Christian or Jew recovered a part of the rights denied. This non-Muslim was obliged to pay two taxes. One was the jarach, on the ground, which could reach half of the harvest, and without reductions (above, the debt accumulated in the heirs), while the Muslim paid between 5% and 10%. The other was the jizya, which was personal, in exchange for the Islamic community forgiving him his life. Their amount varied and their payment was made in public and under humiliation; in the reign of Abderramán III it was paid four times a year.

As Christians were the majority of the population of Al Andalus until the 10th century, we are faced with a colonial system, in which an armed and wild minority lives in opulence through the legal plundering of the subjugated majority. Another economic and social pillar of Al Andalus were the expeditions to catch slaves, in which Almanzor highlighted.

Although they were unarmed and demoralized, the Mozarabs staged abundant rebellions and protests while they were the majority. In the eighth century they highlighted the martyrial movement of Córdoba (850-859), in which several dozen Christians, of which the best known is San Eulogio (who called the domination of Muslims "foreigners), appeared before the authorities to confess that they did not believe in Muhammad and submit to the death penalty; and the uprising of Omar ibn Hafsún, a muladi who was baptized as Samuel, in a territory between Córdoba and the Mediterranean, with capital in Bobastro, which the Umayyad cost almost fifty years to crush (880-929). Such reactions from Christians demonstrate the inability of Muslims to build a society in which there is minimal unity and respect among its elements.

https://www.libertaddigital.com/cul...mo-vivian-los-cristianos-en-al-andalus-79793/

In the excerpt I have taken from this interesting article you can see from the conditions that life in Al-Andalus must have been very complicated, a pressure cooker that had another option to exploit.
 
if that were true . how can they retain power for eight centuries?

Many Taifas, many brawls fighting each other, must be a matter of physics. As soon as everything was reduced to one kingdom the one in Granada, the end came.
 
They didn't retain power for 8 centuries. With pressure, they got many people converted to Islam under Ebro and Tajo rivers. In XI century Muslims lost the initiative, so their taifas began to pay taxes to the northern christian kingdoms. With Navas de Tolosa Battle in 1212, one of the most important battles in Europe Middle Ages, Muslims lost every chance. They retained the Granada Kingdom until 1492 because Christian kings were occupied with other issues, but they payed many taxes to Christian Kingdoms as well.
Almohades and Almorávides were fundamentalist Muslims from Magreb who tried to gain terrain to Christian Kingdoms, but they lost.
The only positive Muslim kingdom in Iberia was the Cordoba's Califate. They got the independence from Damascus and they flourished. The situation of Christians inside the Califate was bad always, they were the last shit. During the conquest, population of cities who resisted, were destroyed, every man killed and women and children enslavered.
The sort of society out of this situation during the Middle Ages in Iberia, with generations and generations of warriors, was the birth of the best armies of XVI and XVII centuries in Europe and the conquest of the New World, rounding the world for the first time, discovered more than half of the world, etc, etc, etc... and they (Spain and Portugal) did all this with a population much minor of other European Kingdoms of their time, like France who was allied the Ottoman Empire against all the rest of Europe. Today I still can not understand how Spaniard and Portugueses could do such things: "There is not land in the world without an Spaniard tomb".
 
No, they werent.Muslim worlds of the Middle Ages had many advancements within medicine and hospitals, and even gave rise to things such as syringes and caesareans. Christian worlds of the Middle Ages had things like hospitals, but they were more caring than curing. They relied on prayer a lot, and didnt look for physical advancements, whereas the Muslims relied on not only prayer but science and physical advancements.
 
Just remember that the Byzantine Emperors forcibly converted everybody to Christianity and there were few if any intellectual achievements under their rule for about 1000 years. The Crusades totally weakened the Byzantine Empire. At least under the Ottomans, the Christians and Jews could keep their religions, albeit under some difficult conditions.
 
for studyng ancient euroepan moorish DNa this study is the best one: science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6432/1230
 
No, they werent.Muslim worlds of the Middle Ages had many advancements within medicine and hospitals, and even gave rise to things such as syringes and caesareans. Christian worlds of the Middle Ages had things like hospitals, but they were more caring than curing. They relied on prayer a lot, and didnt look for physical advancements, whereas the Muslims relied on not only prayer but science and physical advancements.
 
No, they werent.Muslim worlds of the Middle Ages had many advancements within medicine and hospitals, and even gave rise to things such as syringes and caesareans. Christian worlds of the Middle Ages had things like hospitals, but they were more caring than curing. They relied on prayer a lot, and didnt look for physical advancements, whereas the Muslims relied on not only prayer but science and physical advancements.

None of the countries with enough noble prizes in the sciences are Muslim majority. The Industrial Revolution certainly didn't happen in Arabia. And the likes of Isaac Newton both saw themselves as Christian and their theologies deeply impacted their studies.


Just remember that the Byzantine Emperors forcibly converted everybody to Christianity and there were few if any intellectual achievements under their rule for about 1000 years. The Crusades totally weakened the Byzantine Empire. At least under the Ottomans, the Christians and Jews could keep their religions, albeit under some difficult conditions.

The Middle-East has been purged of Christianity.
 
You're back projecting today's situation into the past.

They weren't the Huns, for goodness sakes. Was there raiding along the coasts for slaves and booty? Yes, there was, and it was terrible. There are "Saracen Towers" all along my coast where look outs were posted. Many coastal Italian towns were abandoned and new towns established inland.

However, many of the invaders came to settle, particularly the Berbers. We have evidence of that in Iberia and Sicily. Do I approve of the discrimination practiced against non-Muslims in the Muslim domains in times of greater persecution in terms of higher taxes etc.? No, of course not. The fact remains that they were good stewards of the land, far better than their predecessors, and built thriving cultures far more advanced in every way than most of the Christian west of their time.

Muslim Spain was a marvel, as was Muslim Era Sicily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Andalus

As for southern France, as I mentioned, the Muslim states of Iberia were often allied with the Occitan nobility and populace. The extermination came from the Franks.

See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade

History is much more complicated than Christianity good, Muslim evil, or Near East evil, Europe good. Take a look at the establishment of the Crusader kingdoms in the east.

I will say that unlike in large parts of Anatolia, the Cacasusus and Central Asia the native language/ethnicity still survived even if the Islamic rulers were not the best.
 

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