Conquest of Granada

10 Key excerpts on "Conquest of Granada"

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  Events That Formed the Modern World

  From the European Renaissance through the War on Terror [5 volumes]

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  reconquista policies and techniques. The campaign was extremely popular and served as a unifying force for Spain. It acquired crusade status and was financed largely by percentages of ecclesiastical revenues. Participants received indulgences, and the popes published bulls supporting the campaign. What was novel about this campaign was the degree of royal control over battles and financing, the use of professional soldiers, the number of soldiers engaged in combat, and the extensive use of artillery. In these military details, the campaign against Granada took on the character of an early modern war. The war also took place in the context of a rejuvenated royal prestige and authority during a period when many early modern political institutions were being shaped. This meant that for Spain, the Conquest of Granada helped to create an important link between royal policy and divine mission, which in turn helped to shape the ideology of conquest in the New World.

  This relates to another important element of the campaign. Throughout the fifteenth century, the European imagination was increasingly captured by eschatology (ideas pertaining to the end times). In the late fifteenth century, prophecies pointing to Ferdinand as the key figure in the last events of world history circulated throughout Europe but were especially popular in Spain. The prophecies predicted that Ferdinand would expel the Muslims, conquer Granada, cross the sea and defeat all Islam, convert the Jews, recover Jerusalem, and create a new Christian world empire. As Ferdinand and Isabella experienced success, the prophecies multiplied and gained greater currency. Such prophecies emphasize the importance of the religious aspect of royal policy and help to explain many of the similar ideas expressed in the writings of Christopher Columbus. Ferdinand and Isabella repeatedly declared that they were not undertaking the campaign against Granada (and later the conquest of the Americas) simply for wealth and personal glory but for the expansion of Christendom and the glory of God. It was a holy cause. Thus, the reconquista generated many of the ideals that underlay the conquest of the New World.

  The signal importance of the Conquest of Granada is explained by its results. First of all, it concluded the reconquista . For the first time in 780 years, Christian rulers controlled the entire Iberian Peninsula. Initially, the Muslims of Granada were guaranteed property rights and religious freedoms if they chose to stay in Granada; they could also choose to receive assistance for emigration to North Africa. The first archbishop of Granada, Ferdinand of Talavera, was given the task of converting the Muslims of Granada, and he attempted to do this with sensitivity and patience, making distinctions between Moorish customs and Islamic beliefs. However, the attitude toward religious pluralism had changed in Spain and the rest of Europe, and, frustrated with the slow progress of conversion, the monarchs sent Archbishop Cisneros of Toledo to Granada to speed things up. His controversial mass baptisms provoked a series of rebellions. In 1500, worried about cooperation between North Africa and the Granadan Muslims, the monarchs gave the Muslims of Granada a choice between baptism or emigration on much less favorable terms than in 1492. Given that the Spanish Inquisition had been established in 1478 and that the Jews had been expelled in 1492, this decision was not surprising. Throughout the sixteenth century, increased attempts at creating a country with a uniform religion and culture were made, including decrees forbidding the speaking and writing of Arabic in Granada. Finally, in 1609, the Moriscos (baptized Muslims) were also expelled from the entire peninsula. The Conquest of Granada in 1492 marked not only the end of the reconquista but also of convivencia

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  Ferdinand and Isabella

  • J. Edwards(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5Diplomacy and Expansion

  Conquest

  Whatever ventures of conquest were to be undertaken by Ferdinand and Isabella outside their own kingdoms, after 1492, would inevitably have before them the precedent of their successful war in Granada. As was noted earlier, it was not entirely clear, in the earlier campaigns, that the aim had become conquest, rather than the traditional one of raiding Muslim territory (talas ) and demanding cash tribute (parias ). When the war began, no new places had been permanently captured by the Castilians since Jimena in 1456, but although Isabella’s half-brother Henry had largely restricted himself to the tala approach, she and her husband did have before them the Castilian and Aragonese precedents of the thirteenth century.1 Ferdinand and Isabella’s strategy for the conquest, and where appropriate the settlement, of the Nasrid emirate gradually emerged in the agreements (capitulaciones ), between Christians and Muslims, which normally ended each campaigning season. Such documents existed in various types, the first being, as Ladero puts it, ‘their very absence’ (su misma ausencia ).2 In such cases, towns and castles surrendered unconditionally, which meant that all the inhabitants went into captivity and all their property was confiscated. This was simply a development of the traditional practice, on both sides, of taking and ransoming prisoners and it reached its most extreme manifestation in the aftermath of the siege of Málaga, in which 11,000 Muslims were seized (see Chapter 3 ).

  Normally, however, some form of agreement was reached in which, in return for surrender, the existing inhabitants would have their lives guaranteed, as well as their property, which they could take with them if they were forced to leave. If they were allowed to remain, they would be guaranteed religious freedom and allowed to retain their existing social organization, their community tax regime, based on Islamic principles, and the ability to carry on their previous work, with proper remuneration. The generosity of the terms offered by Castile in such agreements varied as the war went on. In the earlier phase of Christian successes, from 1484 to 1487, the Muslim population normally had to leave captured towns, if it had put up armed resistance, taking whatever goods people could carry with them. They might be allowed by the Crown to emigrate to other parts of Castile, to North Africa or even, as in the case of the inhabitants of fortresses in the Vega of Granada in 1486, to the unconquered city of Granada itself. Initially, the wealthy and powerful among the Muslim population were encouraged to emigrate to North Africa, but later they had to pay a toll and give a proportion of their property for the privilege. Up to 1487 the new Castilian regime adopted the policy of re-employing existing local officials, in towns that had freely surrendered, and allowing them to retain their property. Pacts made in this period normally required the immediate and unconditional release of all Christian prisoners.

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  Latin Expansion in the Medieval Western Mediterranean

  • Eleanor A. Congdon(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  20

  Fernando’s decision to annex Granada broke drastically the limited war tradition that had evolved in Iberia after the last great Hispano-Maghrib campaigns ended in the 1360s.21 Since then, relations between Granada and the Christian kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre had aimed at containment rather than elimination of a player—“more parade than crusade.”22 After centuries of intense interaction, Hispano-Maghrib combat had developed a kind of predictability reflected in a commonality of tactics, arms, vocabulary, and even recruitment shared by Spaniard, Portuguese, and Arab.23 Offensives became seasonal cavalry raids over porous frontier borders, the low-level enterprise of raid, ravage, and plunder known in Castilian and Arabic as tala (from Arabic,

  talïʿa).24

  Usually, local landed nobles conducted these strikes, not kings sitting in distant capitals. Major campaigns forced rulers to tax, to conscript, and to bargain with hidalgo or shaykh nobles, towns, and other institutions eager to brake the absolutist pretensions of kings and emirs. Fifteenth century Hispano-Granadan warfare thus remained remarkably restrained in military (and economic) assets risked, social mobilization attempted, and territory exchanged—until King Fernando gradually turned a 1481 border incident into total war.

  The massive deployment of cannon to conquer Granada represented just as sharp and no less revolutionary a break with the timid use of artillery in previous fifteenth-century battles. The Hispano-Maghrib had been one of several late medieval laboratories for experiments in powder weapons and tactics, and some writers think firearms were virtually invented in Spain.25 Yet artillery played an inconclusive role in the Iberian theater of the Hundred Years’ War (1338-1453), which contrasted sharply with its importance in France and Hussite Bohemia. The Antequera War (1406-10) between Castile and Granada led to sieges in which artillery appeared in both armies but, except for being present and noisy, guns performed without distinction.26

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  Reconciliation and Resistance in Early Modern Spain

  Hernando de Baeza and the Catholic Monarchs

  • Teresa Tinsley(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  164 From propaganda to historiography

  The triumphalist narratives of the Christian monarchs ‘recovering’ land unjustly held by infidel invaders fed into later historiography and were repurposed by Catholic nationalist historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the Reconquista.165 But, although the Conquest of Granada was widely disseminated and celebrated throughout the Christian world as a major historical breakthrough, its repercussions were by no means certain at the time Baeza was writing, nor could they have felt clear to those whose task it would be to convert the extraordinary amount of news and propaganda surrounding the event into a matter of historical record. With the exception of the work of Andrés Bernáldez, who was not an official chronicler but, as chaplain to the Inquisitor General Diego de Deza, the purveyor of an extreme Scotist position in dealing with heresy and conversion, there was what I have called a ‘historiographical hiatus’ with the Conquest of Granada not emerging into mainstream or official historiography until the middle of the sixteenth century. 166

  It was in this hiatus – perhaps, indeed, as a response to it – that Hernando de Baeza wrote the version of his text which has been handed down in the extant manuscripts. In the interim, Granada underwent far-reaching social, religious and cultural change as the terms agreed in the Capitulaciones were replaced by a requirement for all to convert to Christianity. Some ascribe the change of approach to the declining influence of Isabel and her converso advisers after the death of Prince Juan, the heir to the thrones of Castile and Aragon, in 1497. In Castile, Isabel could be succeeded by a daughter, but in Aragon only male children could inherit. With the continuing unity of the two kingdoms in doubt, and Isabel’s power in decline, Fernando started to impose his own line and appoint Aragonese supporters to key positions previously occupied by Isabel’s converso courtiers.167 Talavera, who had been Isabel’s confessor until becoming Granada’s first archbishop, found his softly-softly approach towards converting the Muslims of Granada fall out of favour as the Archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, swept into the city with more aggressive methods designed to achieve more immediate results. Soon after Talavera’s death, a legend was spun around his figure painting him as a tireless preacher imbued with charismatic qualities and the virtues of the early Christian martyrs. His memory was invoked not only to denote a milder approach but also to register discreet opposition to Fernando and criticism of the methods used by the Inquisition.168 It would be easy to ascribe to Baeza the position of Talavera as opposed to the harder line taken by Cisneros, who presided over the forced baptisms of 1499–1500.169 However, Baeza’s line is at once more culturally aware and more politically sensitive than Talavera’s, with his well-meaning but overbearing admonitions to the moriscos (new Christians converts from Islam), such as shaving and adopting a ‘Christian’ diet.170

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  Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500

  • L. P. Harvey(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  The year 1490 thus was uneventful. The Granadans did not surrender. The Castilians did not launch a full-scale offensive. We must ask ourselves what Boabdil hoped to achieve. Was he now belatedly con-verted to the policy of making a last-ditch stand? Was he playing the game of acquiring as many counters as possible to use in eventual nego-tiations? Was he secredy entirely subservient to Castilian plans, and only acting as an agent provocateur in order the better to undermine Granadan resistance when the right moment came? It is likely that the second of these possibilities is nearest to the truth, but one wonders whether Boabdil and his ministers always understood what their long-range interests were. Long-range objectives are a luxury which the leader of a country in its death throes cannot always afford.

  We know a great deal about the events of the last year of campaigning, 1491, from the Christian side. The last battle of the long-drawn-out Reconquest was an event everybody wished to have recorded. We have long lists of the names of the men who took part, and day by day, sometimes hour by hour, we know how things happened. The campaign in the vega of Granada had some aspects in common with the sieges of the other major cities of the Granadan kingdom. A solid camp was constructed (after an unfortunate fire had burned down the tented camp) at a place called by the Granadansʿ Atqa (or perhapsʿ Utqo) and renamed Santa Fe. The queen and her ladies were again brought in to grace the heroic scene. Many Castilian heroes performed deeds which are still rightly remembered and celebrated. Knowing what we do now of what was going on behind the scenes, however, there was one major difference. At Malaga or at Alhama there was a real battle to win. At Granada, from the end of August onwards, the Castilian command knew that Granada was ready to surrender, and what was to be decided was when and how the city was to be taken over. The fighting and the bloodshed were, of course, no less real at the level of the men engaged, but there is little point in seeking to follow the tactical struggle when we know that the important developments were taking place round the negotiating table and in secret. On the Muslim side we have little more information than what the Nubdhat al-ʿ aṣ r tells us:

  The King of Castile returned to besiege Granada and pitched his camp at a hamlet calledʿ

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  Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614

  • L. P. Harvey(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  S I X Crisis and War: Granada, 1567–1571 In the closing period of the history of the Muslims of al-Andalus, there were three key crises, three times of suffering and bloodshed that stood out among the many others. The first, as we have seen, was the first revolt in the Alpujarras of 1500 (which was followed by the original forcible conversion of 1501); the last such crisis was, obviously enough, the trauma of the Expulsion of 1609 and after. Between these liminal dates, beyond any doubt the event of the greatest importance, not only for the Moriscos of Granada but for all of Spain’s crypto-Muslims, was the second revolt in the Alpujarras of 1568–70, sometimes referred to as the Second Granadan War (see map 2). The outcome of the fighting of 1568–70 was the elimination of all but a remnant of the Granadan Muslim community from the area where, up to then, the traditions and glories of the past of al-Andalus had survived best. Once the Granadan community had virtually ceased to exist, all over Spain the Christian majority and the crypto-Muslim minorities began to relate to each other differently. The whole peninsula felt the consequences of this war. After the military defeats inflicted on the Muslim rebels, the Granadan Muslims, whether they had taken up arms or not, were all scattered by decree over much of inland Spain in an endeavor to accelerate what in modern terms we might style their acculturation. Paradoxically, what came of this movement of populations of 1570 was not acculturation or the wiping out of sentiments of Islamic group solidarity but what (in equally modern terms) we might call a process of “consciousness-raising” among the hitherto politically inert Moriscos of the regions into which the Granadans were transferred.

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  Crusading in the Fifteenth Century

  Message and Impact

  • N. Housley(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  11 Reconquista and Crusade in Fifteenth-Century Spain John Edwards When Western European 'crusaders', mostly from France or Germany, set off towards Jerusalem in 1096, the Spanish Christian war against Islam had been in progress, often intermittently, for nearly four cen- turies. From the eighth century until the present day, controversy has raged over whether there was indeed, from the start, a coherent move- ment of Reconquista - reconquest - since it involved regaining for Christendom territory that had been captured and occupied by Muslim rulers. 1 What cannot be denied, though, is that over a period of nearly 800 years, between the occupation by Muslim forces in the years 710-20 of nearly the whole of the Iberian peninsula, and the fall of the emirate of Granada at the beginning of 1492, intermittent warfare took place between Christian and Muslim forces. It is equally undeniable that this warfare, in its latter stages, explicitly took on the character of a holy war waged by Christians against Muslims- a 'crusade'. This lengthy episode had begun in 711, when mixed Arab and Berber forces crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and rapidly gained control of the great bulk of the territory of the Christian Visigothic monarchy. Muslim supremacy in the penin- sula lasted until 1031, when the caliphate of Cordoba began to disinte- grate into a set of small kingdoms, known from the Arabic as taifas (pieces). Yet Cordoba, as the Spanish capital, was situated well to the south of its Visigothic predecessor, Toledo, and Muslims, who until the tenth century remained a fairly small minority of the peninsula's popu- lation, had little effective control over large stretches of the north. Thus it was possible, in that period, for a set of separate mini-states- Asturias, Leon, Castile, Navarre and Catalonia- to become viable units, and begin the southward expansion which would eventually create the political geography of late medieval Spain. 163

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  The History of Spain

  • Peter Pierson(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  For Fernando, his triumphant warriors, and their successors, the big task was to repopu- late and make the lands they had won productive. In the time it took, much of the long and arduous work of the Moors to irrigate the valley of the Gua- dalquivir and make it rich came undone. It was several centuries before western Andalusia again approached the population and prosperity of its Moorish days, and even then, its production focused on a few cash crops, such as olives, wine, and to a lesser extent, grains. The number of livestock using the land for grazing increased greatly. From the opening of the Duero valley to the conquest of western Andalu- sia, the repopulation of Christian Spain had centered on cities, towns, and Reconquest 39 villages. This was both in the Mediterranean tradition and necessary for se- curity on a shifting frontier. Isolated homesteads and hamlets were rare, save in the more secure far north. In the earlier years of the reconquest, peo- ple who migrated to newly conquered frontier regions insisted on their lib- erties and privileges (fueros). Towns and villages in Castile had became relatively self-governing under their councils, mostly elected by household- ers (vecinos), although the kings or senores retained ultimate jurisdiction over them. Spanish women, too, enjoyed specific rights in a land where fe- male succession to the crown or lordships was possible in the absence of brothers. Women did, in a rough and tumble world, need strong husbands. Marriage was the norm, and the only other option was the religious life. Widows succeeded husbands as heads of households while their children were minors, and women's dowries gave them rights. Fathers, whether from love, family pride, or both, remained concerned for their daughters even after they had married. El Cid's legendary pursuit of the Infantes who abused his daughters, their wives, is a case in point.

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  The Crusades: Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

  • Matti Moosa(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  54 O’Callaghan, History , 130, quoting Historia Silense , ed. J. Pérez de Urbel and A. González (Madrid: Ruiz-Zorrilla, 1959), 71; Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (New York: Holt and Company, 1992), 75. 55 Hitti, History , 533; Reinaud, trans. Sherwani, 173, n. 1; O’Callaghan, History , 126–130. 56 Tout, Empire , 4. 57 Lomax, Reconquest , 51. 58 Chapman, History , 58. 59 Lomax, Reconquest , 48, 51 180 T HE C RUSADES After a protracted civil war, Alfonso VI of Galicia (1065–1109), 60 called Adhfonsh by Arabic sources, succeeded in uniting the northern part of Spain, though he did not unify the Christians. His reign marks the real be-ginning of the reconquest of Spain. Taking advantage of the strife between the Muslims of Toledo and Seville (he took the daughter of Toledo’s amir as a concubine), Alfonso captured the upper valley of the Tagus and be-came the lord of Madrid. On May 6, 1085 he triumphantly entered Toledo, with the help of some Muslim traitors. The Muslim sources say that Al-fonso VI captured Toledo from its ruler Abd al-Qadir bi Allah ibn al-Ma’mun ibn Dhi al-Nun after a seven-year siege. 61 This was a major event in the history of medieval Spain. To the Muslims the loss of Toledo, “the greatest and most fortified of all the cities,” was so disastrous that they sought to stop the Christian threat and recover the land they had lost. 62 It rekindled the religious enthusiasm of Christians in Spain and throughout Western Europe to expel the Muslims from Spain. More significant, it al-lowed the Spanish to form the nucleus of the region later called New Cas-tile, which became the political center of the peninsula. Because of his con-quest and his subsequent success in making many Muslim districts pay him tribute and exacting advantageous treaties from them, Alfonso VI assumed the title of Imperator Toledanus et imperator Hispanie he used in his diplomas.

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  Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050–1614

  • Brian A. Catlos(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  By 1300 notarial registers and municipal archives yield valuable data for the Crown of Aragon. Material culture and archaeology have also provided clues, particularly to rural life in the kingdoms of Valencia, Aragon, and Cataluña. 3 “The Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile,” L. Charlo Brea, Crónica latina, p. 76. 4 Las Navas de Tolosa, a battle in which the Christian princes of the peninsula marched as Crusaders against the Almohads behind the banner (and shield) of that larger than life Archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, has been portrayed in Spanish histor- iography as a watershed event that heralded the irrevocable decline and demise of al- Andalus, and marked an era of Christian solidarity and unity of purpose. Much of this, however, is a product of religious idealism, historical hindsight and modern nationalistic impulse. One only need recall that of the princely heroes of the battle, in the previous years Alfonso VIII of Castile had been chided by the papacy for his philo-Muslim ways (see below, n. 43), Sancho VII of Navarre had gone on a diplomatic mission to Morocco courting Almohad aid against Castile (see N. Barbour, “The Relations of King A triumph of pragmatism 51 to conquest and – although an Almohad presence would persist in al-Andalus until 1229 – the battle effectively marked the end of that era of Andalusı ¯ history. It also marked the beginning of a half-century in which virtually every Christian campaign in the peninsula up to the defeat of al-Azraq in the 1250s was formally qualified as a Crusade. 5 Important as it was, historical hindsight has imbued the battle and the larger struggle between Castile and the Almohads with an exaggerated flavor of religious solidarity and political inevitability. In truth, throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Christian kingdoms remained rivals, and each was fractured by internal struggles.

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