Top Highlights

• Ethiopia and ancient Ghana were home to two of Africa’s most powerful early empires in the common era, both of which owed their wealth to robust trade.
• The spread of Islam by conquest extended from Africa into Europe, when Muslim North Africans—known as “Moors”—conquered Hispania (Spain and Portugal) in 711 CE. Al-Andalus, as it became known, thrived under their control until its conquest in 1492.
• The word “Moor” comes from Mauri, the Roman name for the inhabitants of the Berber kingdom of Mauretania (Morocco and Algeria).
• Christian powers had tried to drive the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula for almost as long as the Moors had ruled over Iberian territory. The Reconquista (Reconquest) was bloody and long, an 800-year struggle that ebbed and flowed. By the 13th century the tide was unstoppable—Córdoba fell to Christian forces in 1236, followed by Seville in 1248.
• 2nd century BCE Earliest evidence of private contacts and indirect trade between Africa and China.