MOORS, a general term for tribes in North Africa descended from Arab and Berber stock; they were Christians for several centuries, but on their conquest by Arabs in 647 embraced Mohammedanism; the town Moors do not hold before European settlers, but the nomad tribes show more vitality; Moorish peoples seized and settled in Spain early in the 8th century, and, introducing a civilisation further advanced than that in Europe generally with respect to science, art, and industry alike, maintained a strong rule till the 11th century; then the Spaniards gradually recovered the peninsula; Toledo was taken in 1085, Saragossa in 1118, Valencia in 1238, Seville in 1248, Murcia in 1260, and Granada in 1492; Turkish successes in the East came too late to save the Moors, and the last were banished from the country in 1609.

MORAINES, masses of rock which become detached from the hill-side and find lodgment on a glacier are so called, and are further described as lateral, medial, terminal, or ground moraines, according as they lie along its edges, its middle, are piled up in mounds at its end, or falling down crevasses, are ground against the rock underneath.

MORALITIES, didactic dramas, following in order of time the miracle plays and mysteries, in which the places of saints and biblical personages in them were taken by characters representing different virtues and vices, and the story was of an allegorical nature; were the immediate precursors of the secular drama.

MORAVIA (2,277), a crownland in the N. of Austria, lying between the Moravian and the Carpathian Mountains, with Silesia on the N., Hungary on the E., Lower Austria on the S., and Bohemia on the W.; is mountainous, with lofty plains in the S., and is watered by the March, a tributary of the Danube; the valleys and plains are fertile; grain, beetroot, flax, hemp, and vines are grown; cattle and poultry rearing and bee-keeping occupy the peasantry; sugar, textiles, and tobacco are the chief manufactures; there are coal and iron mines, graphite and meerschaum are found; the capital is Bruenn (94), which has woollen and leather industries; associated with Bohemia in 1029, Moravia passed with that country to Austria in 1526, its association with Bohemia terminating in 1849; the inhabitants are two-thirds Slavs and one-third German, and are mostly Roman Catholic.

MORAVIANS, a sect of Protestant Christians who, followers of John Huss, formed themselves into a separate community in Bohemia in 1467 on the model of the primitive Church, in which the members regarded each other as brethren, and were hence called the United Brethren; like other heretics they suffered much persecution at the hands of the orthodox Church; they are known also as Herrnhuters.