by Matthew Carr
The Muslims gave the name al-Andalus, the land of the Vandals, to the territories they occupied. To Iberian Christians, their conquerors became known as moros, Moors, from the Latin mauri, or maurusci, as the Romans had called the Berbers of North Africa. From the perspective of Latin Christendom, the conquest of Visigothic Spain by infidels was a barely credible catastrophe. “Even if every limb were transformed into a tongue, it would be beyond human nature to express the ruin of Spain and its many and great evils,” lamented the anonymous Latin Chronicle Estoria de 754 (Chronicle of 754), written nearly half a century after the events it described.1
Some Christians saw the collapse of the Visigoths as a divine punishment for the moral depravity of Rodrigo and his court. Others found an explanation in the treachery of the Jews, who were alleged to have opened the gates of Toledo to the invaders. Some Christian chronicles blamed the mysterious Byzantine official Count Julian, the Great Traitor, who was said to have encouraged the Muslims to enter Spain and acted as their guide in revenge for the rape or seduction of his daughter by King Rodrigo. For a brief period, the Muslim advance looked set to continue beyond the Pyrenees, as Arab commanders in northern Spain launched a series of predatory raids into the Rhone Valley and Aquitaine regions of Gaul. Following the defeat of an Arab-Berber raiding expedition in a confused series of battles around Poitiers in 732 by the Frankish king Charles Martel, the Muslims consolidated their control over their territories south of the Pyrenees.
From Edward Gibbon onward, western historians have often cited Poitiers as a decisive what-if moment in European history, in which western civilization was saved for the first time from the Muslim hordes, but the raiders who crossed the Pyrenees were probably more interested in booty than conquest, and the Andalusians showed little interest in the Frankish kingdoms during the coming centuries. Removed from the main centers of Muslim and Christian power, al-Andalus evolved from a remote frontier province of the Islamic empire into a unique Moorish-Iberian civilization whose components included Syrian and Yemeni Arabs, North African Berbers, the Slavic “slave soldiers” known as Saqaliba, who came to Spain as servants of the caliphs and later formed their own fiefdoms, Visigothic and Hispano-Roman Christians, and the largest Jewish population in Europe. As the Muslim population expanded through immigration and conversion, Spain’s Roman and Visigothic cities were gradually orientalized and islamicized, with mosques and minarets, palaces, public bathhouses, gardens with ornamental ponds and palm trees, and the pungent smells and vivid colors of the North African souk.
The Moors also transformed the Iberian landscape. They brought new crops, such as sugar and rice, oranges, lemons, silk, and coffee. Expert farmers and horticulturalists, they introduced new techniques of irrigation and expanded already existing systems, from the fertile plains of the Granada vega and the Guadalquivir River valley to the foothills of the Sierra and the lush coastal littoral of Valencia. Agricultural production and trade links with both the Islamic and Christian worlds laid the economic foundations for a cosmopolitan urban culture that attracted scholars, musicians, and intellectuals from across the Islamic Empire. The most glittering period in the history of al-Andalus began in 755, when an exiled Umayyad aristocrat named Abd al-Rahman made his way from Baghdad to Spain, following the massacre of his family by the rival Abbasid dynasty. Abd al-Rahman founded a new Iberian Caliphate, with its capital in Córdoba, that rivaled Baghdad and Damascus in its opulence and splendor.
At its peak in the tenth century, Córdoba was a metropolis without parallel in the Christian world, boasting paved roads and streetlights, hospitals, schools, public baths, and libraries. At a time when the largest library in Christian Europe had no more than six hundred volumes, a cottage industry of Arabic calligraphers in Córdoba was churning out some sixty thousand handwritten books every year, and the libraries of the bibliophile Umayyad caliph al-Hakam, the “majestic, learned, and administrative,” were said to contain some four hundred thousand manuscripts on a variety of subjects from poetry and theology to philosophy, medicine, and agriculture.
This eclectic range of concerns was reflected in a number of outstanding Andalusian scholars and intellectuals, such as the Jewish philosopher and theologian Maimonides (1138–1204), the polymath Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), or Averroes, as he was more commonly known in Europe, where his commentaries on Aristotle were widely read. Lesser known figures included the fourteenth-century Granadan statesman and author Ibn al-Khatib, the author of more than fifty books on music, poetry, medicine, and travel, and Abbas Ibn Firnas, the ninth-century Córdoban music teacher, mathematician, and astronomer who once jumped off a mosque tower with a makeshift parachute to see if he could fly. The cultural world of al-Andalus drew inspiration from various traditions—Islamic, Jewish and Christian, and Greco-Roman—and the attempts of its principal protagonists to reconcile secular knowledge and philosophy with the rigid parameters of the sacred were not always viewed favorably by the religious authorities of any of its three faiths.
These concerns also had important repercussions outside Spain. Together with Muslim Sicily, al-Andalus became an intellectual conduit between European Christendom and the Arab world, which enabled Europe to reestablish its broken connections with its own classical heritage. Baggage trains from Baghdad and Damascus brought Arabic books and manuscripts from the libraries of Baghdad and Damascus into Spain, together with translations of classical Greek and Latin texts that had largely vanished from Europe since the collapse of Roman power. A succession of Christian scholars, such as Abelard of Bath, Robert of Chester, and Gerald of Cremona, made the arduous journey south of the Pyrenees to visit the libraries and translation schools that sprang up in Moorish and Christian Iberia and translated these texts into Latin, together with translations of Arabic works on chemistry, theology, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. These encounters formed part of what the historian Richard Bulliet has called the “massive transfer of culture, science and technology” from the Islamic world to Europe, a transfer that arguably helped lay the basis for the European Renaissance, even as al-Andalus was undergoing its long and painful decline.2
The cultural achievements of al-Andalus were always built on a fragile political structure that was prone to ethnic and tribal rivalries and eruptions of devastating violence. In the early eleventh century, the Córdoba Caliphate all but imploded following a series of Berber rebellions that reduced the sumptuous Umayyad pleasure palace, the Madinat al-Zahra, to a desolate, overgrown ruin. Successive rulers were unable to prevent the fragmentation of al-Andalus into a patchwork of petty principalities known as the taifa or “party” states, even as the independent Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia were becoming more powerful. Throughout the eleventh century, the taifa rulers came under increasing pressure from Christian warlords and rulers in Portugal, in the newly merged kingdom of Aragon and Catalonia, and above all in Castile and Leon, whose conquest of Toledo in 1085 under Alfonso VI of Castile, the self-styled Emperor of all Spain, marked a turning point in the process known as the Reconquista.
In the face of these Christian advances, the taifa rulers appealed for assistance from the Almoravid Berber empire in northwestern Africa, which ruled Islamic Spain from around 1090 till 1145. Over the next few centuries, Iberia was a complex mosaic of Muslim and Christian kingdoms, whose rulers were often more concerned with pursuing their own dynastic and territorial conflicts with each other than they were with their mutual struggle against the common enemy. Christian Spain was never as consistent or united in its commitment to the Reconquista as subsequent chroniclers would later claim. Long periods went by in which Christian rulers were content to exact tribute from Muslim kingdoms rather than conquer them, and truces were broken by sporadic warfare that had no significant impact on the prevailing balance of forces. Nevertheless the restoration of Christian rule in Iberia remained an aspirational ideal that was laid aside and then picked up again by successive Christian rulers, and the balance of power continued to drain slowly but in
exorably away from Muslim Spain.
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 mo
rning, 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.
