In Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, who were the Moors who had invaded Spain?

On pages
twenty-six and twenty-seven of 's , several times the boy mentions the
Moors. First he notes:

From [the ramp], he could see
Africa in the distance. Someone had once told him that it was from there that the Moors had
come, to occupy all of Spain.

Later, as the boy studies
the city before him and ponders the situation he finds himself in, he mentions the Moors
again:

The wind began to pick up. He knew that wind:
people called it the levanter, because on it the Moors had come from the Levant at the eastern
end of the Mediterranean.

Sources identify the
"levanter" as a common sea term in Spain which indicates a wind coming from the east
"while at sea."

So the Moors came from the east to infiltrate
Spain. However, the term "moor" does not refer to a distinct cultural group. It can
include "historic and modern populations of Berbers, Black Africans and Arab descent"
coming from the northern part of Africa, arriving in Spain as conquerors. They invaded and
settled on the Iberian Peninsula, where they remained for eight hundred yearsthey were mostly
Muslim.

Mainstream scholars observed in 1911 that
"The term 'Moors' has no real ethnological value."

There does not seem to be a significant co-relation between Santiago's situation and
the choices he must make. Perhaps he feels the wind, associated with the invasion of the Moors,
as a sweeping change he feels he is going through, having left his life as a shepherd. Or it may
beon the part of Coelho to indicate the way new knowledge and a new understanding will come over
his life, much the way the Moors invaded, changing the "landscape" of Santiago's life
forever.