Do Modern Spanish and Portuguese People have North African or Arab Blood?

the Iberian Peninsula has had one of the most tumultuous and volatile histories of any region in Europe and artifacts from that time period can be seen in the architecture language and even people that inhabit the modern-day countries today the area was ground zero for the largest and most successful full-scale invasion of the European continent by North African forces and this conquest in seven hundred year occupation was possibly the second most influential event to impact the European Mediterranean region after the rise of the Roman Empire the various invasions and migrations in the Iberian countries have had a huge impact on the countries of Spain and Portugal and in turn has had an even larger impact on many reasons of the globe that the two have invaded and colonized including two whole continents so it's important to learn about the root of the Spanish and Portuguese people the collapse of the Western Roman Empire around 400 AD there emerged a large power vacuum in the former Roman provinces in Iberia being filled shortly thereafter with groups like the Visigoths and the Germanic vandals who also went on to conquer parts of North Africa as well various European groups from all over Europe had been mixing and interacting in the Iberian Peninsula for about 300 years until one of the biggest shifts in European demography was initiated with the rising tide of Islamic expansion for reference on just how rapidly the Islamic faith spread after its birth and Arabia in the year 610 ad it would take only one hundred years for the Umayyad Caliphate the largest of the Islamic empires to completely sweep the Iberian Peninsula the last time mainland Europe had been invaded by Africans being the Punic Wars where the Empire of carthage attempted to conquer the Roman Republic the Iberian Moors remain in the region for the next seven hundred years and despite their name were not an ethnically homogenous group being comprised of various Muslim people groups from all over the Middle East in North Africa the bulk of the invading Moorish forces were comprised to the native North African converts to Islam such as the many uber peoples while a smaller number were either Egyptian Arab or other Semitic they were for the most part United in their use of the Arabic language and adherence to Islam as well as their objective of pushing Islam into the heart of Europe and an attempt to possibly convert the entire continent their seemingly unstoppable expansion was finally halted in the year 732 ad at the Battle of Tours which took place a meager 150 miles away from the city of Paris so it's very possible that if this battle had been lost Muslim forces would have converted the bulk of the population of southern France and to another Muslim nation although the North African Moors did have a very large impact on the genetics of the Iberian Peninsula they didn't change it entirely and a majority of the pre invasion Christian Latin speaking groups remained in the occupied area with some either converting to Islam to better integrate into the society while some retained their Christian and Latin heritage in the ensuing 700 years the various North African Middle Eastern italic Iberian and Germanic peoples coalesced into a new gene pool in the Iberian Peninsula being one of the largest genetic shifts of any European region the various European kingdoms on the fringe of the region put aside their differences to eventually start their slow march south to reclaim their Iberian homeland the last year of Moorish presence in 1492 coincidentally marked the same year that Christopher Columbus who was Italian by the way not Spanish first sailed to the American continents which kicked off the new wave of European exploration discovery and imperialism which we touched on in the last video similarly to the situation of the original Iberian people the Moorish population was not entirely expelled from Spain and Portugal but many were allowed to stay if they converted to Catholicism and integrated with the emerging Spanish population for this reason the populations of Spain Portugal today have overwhelmingly Western European DNA however on average Spaniards and Portuguese have anywhere from two to ten percent North African admixture with those in the north having virtually no admixture but increasing greatly the further south you travel in the peninsula many Iberian resemble other year and appearance well many others clearly have a bit more non-european admixture but this doesn't make them any less European than other groups on the continent the Iberian Peninsula today contains roughly 60 million people and is divided into the independent countries of Spain which dominates in both land area and population Portugal which is a bit smaller yet still very influential and Dora on the border with France one of the few remaining microstates in Europe and you broader which is a miniscule yet monumentally important territory which actually still belongs to the United Kingdom it's pretty universally known that Spanish and Portuguese are both Latin based languages meaning that they're descended from the old Latin language originally spoken in the Italian province of the Roman Empire with other members of the romance family being modern Italian French and Romanian however the linguistic and ethnic borders don't exactly correlate along modern political lines on the west coast of Spain lies the region of Galatia where the majority of the nearly 3 million residents speak Galician a Romance language more closely related to Portuguese than to Spanish with many wingless actually classifying it as a Portuguese dialect rather than a separate language the Spanish language can be fairly confusing at times as it has many dialects in both Spain and Latin America with the differences in Latin American and European Spanish being akin to the differences between American and British English and Spanish propers known as Castilian not all people in Spain speak Castilian though with there being many large Romance languages that are originally native to the country with Austrian being in the northwest corner near galicia and aragon ease along the border with France although comparatively very few people still speak these as a first language the largest minority language and people in Iberia today would have to be the Catalans who despite the Spanish government's best effort largely still speak their original dialects Catalan and Valencian and have a strong sense of nationalism with having many rallies for independence in recent years the Catalan inhabit the eastern coast of the peninsula opposite that of the Portuguese and Galicians as well as the Blair Islands and a very small Enclave on the Italian island of Sardinia the only non italic language native to the peninsula would be via the Basques and strangely enough no one really knows where they came from although various theory is a positive connection with the Celtic languages or perhaps even a pre indo-european people group and if you thought the Catalan people really wanted independence well the Basques are on a whole different level on a tangent although very little is known about this it might surprise some people to know that a branch of the romancer italic language family was once widely spoken in the north african Magreb or modern countries of Morocco Algeria and Tunisia this language was probably a late form of Latin from the Roman Empire most likely being closest to neighbouring Portuguese or Spanish or perhaps Sardinian but unfortunately following Islamic expansion around the Year 700 AD all traces of these romance-speaking peoples were wiped off the face of the continent being assimilated into the encroaching Arab wave if not for this vanquishing assimilation is very likely that this African Latin could have evolved into a modern Romance language and perhaps the people of the Magreb would be more similar in culture to Western European groups like the French Spanish or Italians the Canary Islands is one region in Spain that has a bit of a different genetic history of the rest of the country which should be glaringly obvious when you look at its position being less than a hundred miles off the coast of Africa while being nearly eight times that distance from mainland Spain even though the two million inhabitants of the Canary Islands today consider themselves an integral part of Spain the original inhabitants of the island were of North African Berber origin known as gotchas who had inhabited the islands for over 2,000 years before the arrival of the Spanish because of their isolation from the rest of North Africa the go inches were still animistic as compared to neighboring Muslim Morocco and the Spanish were able to conquer the islands fairly quickly and Spanish settlers from mainland Europe soon began arriving in large numbers and it wasn't long before the original God's people were completely assimilated into the Spanish culture the modern canarians today are probably the most swore Spanish people with ethnic canarians having anywhere from 10 to 40% native North African admixture main island chains of macaroni shows such as Madeira and the Azores actually did not have a native population when Portugal discovered them since they were bit farther from the African coast and it was extremely common for Portuguese and Spanish from this region to migrate to the American continent the conquering and subjugation of Iberia by the Islamic Moorish forces was a defining event in Spanish Portuguese history it had a large effect on the language culture and even the genetics on the modern Spaniards and Portuguese and as such had a large effect on all the dozens of countries conquered by the - as well such as Latin America and other regions of the planet and for this reason is very relevant to hundreds of millions of people with any degree of Hispanic ancestry the Reconquista was truly an impressive feat and depending on which way you look at it was either a very bright moment in European history or a sad chapter in Islamic history either way the racial makeup and attitude of the Spanish and Portuguese people were forever altered by their history and that makes them one of the most interesting people groups in Europe be sure to let me know your thoughts on the Spanish and Portuguese people and the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula as always there's been Mason thanks for watching everyone I'll see you next time hey guys quick announcement I've made a second channel called Mason the man yeah creative name I know but all the channel we're going to be discussing demography in geography and a bit of a less professional environment would make some live streams or podcasts in there feel free to subscribe and the first video will probably be out in at that day or so we're going to be talking about the US Census and how we could improve so again thanks for watching y'all have a good one

Channel: Masaman

Views: 1,533,247

Keywords: masaman, Spain, Portugal, Do Modern Spanish and Portuguese People have North African or Arab Blood, Spanish People, Portuguese People, Canary Islands, Italy, Italian People, Genetics, DNA, Race, Ethnicity, Genetics of Spanish People, 23 and me, 23andme, DNA Test, Catalan, Spanish, Arabs, North Africans, Iberia, Reconquista, History, Maghreb, Middle Easterners, Arabs in Europe, Islam, Muslims, Islam in Europe, Spaniards, Hispanic, Latinos, Latino American, Spanish History, Basques, Portuguese, EU

Id: wc51I9hswbc

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2017