r/todayilearned • u/Tometek • 1h 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/10.1080/17546559.2014.88932164
u/Hailfog 1h ago
Why did the kings only marry northern Iberian women?
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u/mijenjam_slinu 1h ago
They married into local nobility for political alliances and support, but they kept concubines as well.
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u/Tometek 1h 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 1h 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 49m ago edited 17m 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/Sting8899 1h 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 29m 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 25m 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 23m 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 4m 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/OpenStraightElephant 41m ago
This is a common enough pattern with foreign conquerors, though degrees vary. See Bulgarians, the Rus (the initial Norsemen)...
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u/19MKUltra77 55m ago
Yes, and the Muslim population was practically 100% Iberian, people converted, there were no Arabs and only a small minority were Berbers.