In 1145 the Almoravids were succeeded by another North African Berber dynasty, the Almohads, whose rulers tried and failed to unite the remaining
taifa
kingdoms in a counteroffensive against Castile and its allies. A turning point was reached at the battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212, when a coalition of Christian states, including Castile, Aragon, and Portugal, defeated a huge Muslim army and ended the attempts by the Almohads to halt the Christian advance. With the withdrawal of the Almohads from Iberia in 1223, the Reconquista entered its most dynamic and successful period. One by one the great Muslim cities of the south were conquered by Castile, culminating in the fall of Seville in 1248. In the same period, Portugal wrested the Algarve from Muslim control, and Aragon completed the conquest of Muslim Valencia under King James the Conqueror.
By the mid thirteenth century, Castile and Aragon were the dominant kingdoms in Christian Iberia, and only the emirate of Granada in the southeast corner of Spain remained in Muslim control. For more than two hundred fifty years, Granada was able to preserve a fragile independence under the Nasrid dynasty as a vassal state of Castile. Though the Nasrids were occasionally able to replicate the faded opulence of al-Andalus, most notably in the completion of the fabled Alhambra palace-fortress, their continued survival was always more dependent on internal divisions within Castile rather than their own strength.
With the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469, the emirate’s days were numbered. The union of the two most powerful Christian kingdoms in Spain coincided with a period in which Latin Christendom was reeling from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman Turkish Empire and feared for its survival. Inspired by the Papacy’s call for a new crusade and eager to unite their turbulent subjects after years of dynastic conflict and civil war, the newlyweds prepared to pick up the banner of the Reconquista and conquer the last remaining bastion of Islam on Spanish soil.
This was not an easy task. For all its political weakness, Granada did not lend itself easily to military conquest. Its walled towns and cities, fortified castles, and mountainous terrain presented formidable obstacles to an invading army. Determined to avoid failure, Ferdinand and Isabella slowly assembled their forces. It was not until December 1481 that a Muslim raid on the frontier town of Zahara was used as a pretext to invade the emirate. For the next decade, as many as sixty thousand cavalrymen and infantry fought their way across the river valleys, plains, and high sierras of Granada, supported by supply columns and irregular units whose sole purpose was to burn and destroy enemy crops. The Christian armies contained many foreign volunteers, attracted by the promise of papal absolution for their sins to those who made war on the infidel—and the prospect of plunder that such wars also provided. English archers and axemen, veterans of the Wars of the Roses, Swiss mercenaries, and lords and knights from across Europe all participated in a conflict that the Venetian diplomat Andrea Navagero later remembered as “a beautiful war” that was “won by love.”
The chivalry and spiritual fervor celebrated by Christian chroniclers was not always present in a grinding war of attrition whose outcome was determined by sieges, ambushes, and skirmishes rather than major battles. It was a war that combined the innovative use of gunpowder and artillery with the old rituals and traditions of medieval warfare, in which Isabella and the ladies of the court observed battles from silk marquees, rival knights challenged each other to single combat, cannons were used to shatter the walls of besieged cities and terrorize their inhabitants, and besieged populations were starved into submission.
Isabella personally oversaw the task of financing the Christian war effort, raising money through a range of means, from the imposition of special taxes on her Jewish subjects to the pawning of her own jewelry in one particularly fallow period. Military operations were directed by her husband, whose combination of ruthlessness and pragmatism led Machiavelli to hail Ferdinand as the model Renaissance prince. Towns and cities that surrendered were generally able to negotiate favorable terms or “Capitulations” that allowed them to preserve their lives, property, and freedom of religious worship. But populations who resisted could expect harsher treatment, from summary execution to slavery. At Málaga in 1487, the Muslim inhabitants resisted repeated assaults and artillery bombardments before hunger forced them to surrender. As a punishment for their defiance, virtually the entire population was sold into slavery or given as “gifts” to other Christian rulers.
Ordinary Muslims often resisted the invasion with a tenacity that impressed even their enemies. The Spanish chronicler Fernando de Pulgar expressed his admiration at the defiance shown by the population of Alhama, where “the Moors put all their strength and all their heart into the combat, as a courageous man is bound to do when defending his life, his wife, and his children from the threat of enslavement. Thus, in the hope of saving some of the survivors, they did not flinch from battling on over the corpses of their children, their brothers, and those near and dear to them.”
3
But the human and material resources available to the invading armies were always greater. One anonymous Granadan Muslim later recalled how “The Christians attacked us from all sides in a vast torrent, company after company / Smiting us with zeal and resolution like locusts in the multitude of their cavalry and weapons / . . . when we became weak, they camped in our territory and smote us, town after town / Bringing many large cannons that demolished the impregnable walls of the towns.”
4
The defence of the emirate was further undermined by a vacillating and collaborationist leadership that was often more concerned with securing its property and privileges than resisting the invader.
These weaknesses were epitomised by the Nasrid ruler Mohammed XII, known to the Spanish as Boabdil, who alternated between mostly ineffective bouts of defiance and secret intrigues with the Christian enemy. The absence of assistance from North Africa sealed the emirate’s fate. One by one its towns and cities fell before the Christian advance, until at last Ferdinand and Isabella’s armies stood at the gates of the fabled Nasrid capital of Granada itself.
By the summer of 1491, the city celebrated by Christian and Muslim poets alike was in desperate straits. From the Alhambra, Boabdil and his courtiers could see the tents, flags, and banners of the Christian armies camped out on the vega a few miles away. Within the city’s defensive walls, the population was swollen by soldiers and civilian refugees from the war-torn countryside, who continued to receive a dwindling supply of food from the valleys beyond the snow-tipped wall of the Sierra Nevada. Though Muslim knights made periodic sallies out of the city to challenge their Christian counterparts to single combat, and the two sides engaged in sporadic skirmishes, these demonstrations of knightly valor brought little more than psychological comfort to the besieged inhabitants of Granada.
In July the Christian armies gave a spectacular demonstration of their determination and their superior resources when their camp was nearly burned to the ground in an accidental fire. Within a few months, this encampment had been replaced with a makeshift town built in the shape of a cross, which they named Santa Fe (Holy Faith). With their positions secure, the Christians now opted to starve Granada into submission rather than carry out a costly assault. Throughout the summer and autumn, Ferdinand’s troops ravaged the Lecrín Valley in the Alpujarra Mountains, burning villages and destroying the crops and orchards that still brought food into the city. With the onset of winter, Muslims, Jews, Genoese merchants, African slaves, and Christian captives in Granada were reduced to eating horses, dogs, and rats. In November, Boabdil and his counselors began surrender negotiations with the Castilian royal secretary, Hernando de Zafra. The following month, the Nasrid king signed a secret agreement for the city to be handed over on January 6, 1492. When rumors of these negotiations provoked violent protests in the city’s Albaicín district, Boabdil requested the date to be brought forward by five days.
On the night of January 1, a contingent of Christian men-at-arms was discreetly ushered into the Alhambra, and the next morning, the startled residents of Granada awoke to find that the war was over, the banners of Castile and Saint James the Moorslayer, the iconic apostle of the Reconquista, flying from the towering red walls of Boabdil’s magnificent palace. From the highest tower, the Tower of the Winds, a large silver cross proclaimed the Christian triumph to Ferdinand and Isabella, who were watching from a short distance away, accompanied by their armies and an illustrious gathering of courtiers, grandees, and clergymen.
At the sight of the flag and cross, there were jubilant cheers of “Castile!” and acclaim for Isabella as the new “Queen of Granada.” Such was the intensity of emotion that hard-bitten soldiers wept openly and embraced each other. Isabella, the “great lioness” of Castile, knelt in prayer, and the entire army followed suit as the choir of the royal chapel sang a
Te Deum Laudamus
. Afterward, Cardinal Mendoza, the archbishop of Toledo and the highest cleric in the land, led a procession of soldiers, monks, and prelates toward the conquered city in an imposing display of pageantry and Castilian military might. From the opposite direction, Boabdil rode out of the Alhambra palace-fortress and descended the hill, accompanied by an entourage of knights, relatives, and a retinue of servants. On drawing alongside the royal couple,
el rey chico
, “the Little King,” as the Christians mockingly called him, gave Ferdinand the keys to the city, who passed them to his wife as a royal herald hailed “the very High and Puissant Lords Don Fernando and Doña Isabel who have won the city of Granada and its whole kingdom by force of arms from the Infidel Moors.”
This iconic moment has often been depicted and frequently embellished by historians, writers, and poets. Its most famous visual representation is the portrait by the nineteenth-century artist Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz, showing a turbaned Boabdil on his horse, with a barefoot black slave holding the reins and the Alhambra in the background. Facing him are Ferdinand and Isabella, draped in their finery and surrounded by courtiers and priests, amid a sea of banners, pikes, and flags. It is a romanticized portrait of what was essentially a staged piece of political theater, since the actual transfer of power had already taken place the night before, but it nevertheless captures the significance of the occasion from the point of view of its Christian protagonists.
The last ruler of al-Andalus then rode away to exile on his estates in the Alpujarras Mountains, pausing only for the legendary “last sigh” of regret for his lost kingdom that has found its way into so many accounts of the fall of Granada, from Washington Irving to Salman Rushdie. Behind him, his defeated subjects had withdrawn into their homes, and the city appeared to be abandoned “like a plague city,” as one chronicler later described it. Not a single Muslim was seen on the streets of Granada that day as the jubilant Christian troops took possession of the city. Ferdinand and Isabella went directly to the Alhambra, where they remained for the rest of the day. In the late afternoon, they descended into the city to receive the acclaim of their soldiers before returning to Santa Fe while the Alhambra was made ready to receive the court.
Thus ended what one contemporary called “the most distinguished and blessed day there has ever been in Spain.” To the priest and royal chronicler Andrés Bernáldez, the fall of Granada marked the glorious conclusion to a “holy and laudable conquest,” which proved that both Spain and its rulers were divinely blessed.
5
To Peter Martyr of Anghieri, an Italian scholar at the Castilian court, the end of Iberian Islam signified “the end of Spain’s calamities,” which had begun when “this barbarous people . . . came from Mauritania some 800 years ago and inflicted its cruel and arrogant oppression on conquered Spain.”
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Across Spain, news of the surrender was celebrated with popular feasts, religious processions, and special masses. In some cities, the festivities and games went on for days.
The conquest of Granada was greeted with equal enthusiasm throughout Europe. At a time when Christian victories against the infidels were few and far between, and church bells in Austria and Germany tolled three times daily to remind their populations of the existential threat from the “terrible Turk,” Ferdinand and Isabella were hailed as the heroes of Christendom and rewarded by the pope with the title
los reyes católicos
—the Catholic Monarchs. In England, Henry VII summoned the court to a special service at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, where the congregation was exhorted “to sing unto God a new song” and honor the “prowess and devotion of Fernandino and Isabella, Kings of Spain.”
The consequences of the fall of Granada in Spanish history have become the stuff of cliché: how a Genoese adventurer named Christopher Columbus, finally obtained permission from Ferdinand and Isabella to undertake his voyages of exploration that provided Spain with its vast overseas empire; how the military energies accumulated during centuries of holy war against the infidel were channeled into new conquests on behalf of the faith; how the impoverished Kingdom of Castile emerged from centuries of obscurity to become a world empire. But for both the victors and the defeated Muslims who now became their subjects in a unified Christian Spain, the end of the War of Granada ushered in a new kind of confrontation that neither of them had really expected or prepared for. And in order to understand how that struggle unfolded, we need to look further back at the world that came to an end on that momentous winter’s day in 1492.