The game was taken up by the Muslim world after the Islamic conquest of Persia, with the pieces largely keeping their Persian names. The Moors of North Africa rendered Persian ""shatranj"" as "shaṭerej", which gave rise to the Spanish "acedrex", "axedrez" and "ajedrez"; in Portuguese it became , and in Greek , but in the rest of Europe it was replaced by versions of the Persian ("king"). Thus, the game came to be called or in Latin, in Italian, in Catalan, in French (Old French ); in Dutch, in German, in Polish, in Latvian, in Danish, in Norwegian, in Swedish, in Finnish, in South Slavic languages, in Hungarian and in Romanian; there are two theories about why this change happened: