The Emirate of Granada had been the last Muslim state in Iberia for more than two centuries by the time of the Granada War. The other remnant al-Andalus states (the taifas) of the once powerful Caliphate of Córdoba had long been conquered by the Christians. Pessimism for Granada's future existed before its ultimate fall; in 1400, Ibn Hudayl wrote "Is Granada not enclosed between a violent sea and an enemy terrible in arms, both of which press on its people day and night?" Still, Granada was wealthy and powerful, and the Christian kingdoms were divided and fought amongst themselves. Granada's problems began to worsen after Emir Yusuf III's death in 1417. Succession struggles ensured that Granada was in an almost constant low-level civil war. Clan loyalties were stronger than allegiance to the Emir, making consolidation of power difficult. Often, the only territory the Emir really controlled was the city of Granada. At times, the emir did not even control all the city, but rather one rival emir would control the Alhambra, and another the Albayzín, the most important district of Granada.
This internal fighting greatly weakened the state. The economy declined, with Granada's once world-famous porcelain manufacture disrupted and challenged by the Christian town of Manises near Valencia, in Aragon. Despite the weakening economy, taxes were still imposed at their earlier high rates to support Granada's extensive defenses and large army. Ordinary Granadans paid triple the taxes of (non-tax-exempt) Castilians. The heavy taxes that Emir Abu-l-Hasan Ali imposed contributed greatly to his unpopularity. These taxes did at least support a respected army; Hasan was successful in putting down Christian revolts in his lands, and some observers estimated he could muster as many as 7,000 horsemen.
The frontier between Granada and the Castilian lands of Andalusia was in a constant state of flux, "neither in peace nor in war." Raids across the border were common, as were intermixing alliances between local nobles on both sides of the frontier. Relations were governed by occasional truces and demands for tribute should one side have been seen to overstep their bounds. Neither country's central government intervened or controlled the warfare much.
King Henry IV of Castile died in December 1474, setting off the War of the Castilian Succession between Henry's daughter Joanna la Beltraneja and Henry's half-sister Isabella. The war raged from 1475–1479, setting Isabella's supporters and the Crown of Aragon against Joanna's supporters, Portugal, and France. During this time, the frontier with Granada was practically ignored; the Castilians did not even bother to ask for or obtain reparation for a raid in 1477. Truces were agreed upon in 1475, 1476, and 1478. In 1479, the Succession War concluded with Isabella victorious. As Isabella had married Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469, this meant that the two powerful kingdoms of Castile and Aragon would stand united, free from inter-Christian war which had helped Granada survive
The ten-year Granada War was not a continuous effort but a series of seasonal campaigns launched in spring and broken off in winter. The Granadans were crippled by internal conflict and civil war, while the Christians were generally unified. The Granadans were also bled economically by Castile, with the tribute (Old Spanish: paria) they had to pay to avoid being attacked and conquered. The war also saw the effective use of artillery by the Christians to rapidly conquer towns that would otherwise have required long sieges. On January 2, 1492, Muhammad XII of Granada (King Boabdil) surrendered the Emirate of Granada, the city of Granada, and the Alhambra palace to the Castilian forces.
The war was a joint project between Isabella's Crown of Castile and Ferdinand's Crown of Aragon. The bulk of the troops and funds for the war came from Castile, and Granada was annexed into Castile's lands. The Crown of Aragon was less important: apart from the presence of King Ferdinand himself, Aragon provided naval collaboration, guns, and some financial loans. Aristocrats were offered the allure of new lands, while Ferdinand and Isabella centralized and consolidated power.
The aftermath of the war ended convivencia ("live and let live") between religions In the Iberian peninsula: the Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or be exiled in 1492, and by 1501, all of Granada's Muslims were obliged to convert to Christianity, become slaves, or be exiled; by 1526 this prohibition spread to the rest of Spain.
"New Christians" (conversos) came to be accused of crypto-Islam and crypto-Judaism. Spain would go on to model its national aspirations as the guardian of Christianity and Catholicism. The fall of the Alhambra is still celebrated every year by the City Council of Granada, and the Granada War is considered in traditional Spanish historiography as the final war of the Reconquista.
From Reconquista to Conquista
The Reconquista (Spanish and Portuguese for "reconquest") is a name used in English to describe the period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula of about 780 years between the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in 711 and the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada to the expanding Christian kingdoms in 1492. The completed conquest of Granada was the context of the Spanish voyages of discovery and conquest (Columbus got royal support in Granada in 1492, months after its conquest), and the Americas—the "New World"—ushered in the era of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires.
Traditional historiography has marked the beginning of the Reconquista with the Battle of Covadonga (718 or 722), the first known victory in Iberia by Christian military forces since the 711 military invasion of Iberia by combined Arab-Berber forces. In that small battle, a group led by the nobleman Pelagius defeated a Muslim patrol in the mountains of northern Iberia and established the independent Christian Kingdom of Asturias.
In the late 10th century, the Umayyad vizier Almanzor waged military campaigns for 30 years to subjugate the northern Christian kingdoms. His armies, mostly composed of Slavic and African Mamluks (slave soldiers), ravaged the north, even sacking the great shrine of Santiago de Compostela.
When the government of Córdoba disintegrated in the early 11th century, a series of petty successor states known as taifas emerged. The northern kingdoms took advantage of this situation and struck deep into Al-Andalus; they fostered civil war, intimidated the weakened taifas, and made them pay large tributes (parias) for protection.
After a Muslim resurgence in the 12th century the great Moorish strongholds in the south fell to Christian forces in the 13th century—Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248—leaving only the Muslim enclave of Granada as a tributary state in the south.
After 1491, the entire peninsula was controlled by Christian rulers. The conquest was followed by the Alhambra Decree (1492) which expelled Jews who would not convert to Christianity from Castile and Aragon, and a series of edicts (1499–1526) which forced the conversions of the Muslims in Spain, although later a significant part of them was expelled from the Iberian Peninsula.
The concept of Reconquista, consolidated in Spanish historiography in the second half of the 19th century, was associated with the development of a Spanish national identity, emphasizing nationalistic and romantic, and occasionally, colonialist, aspects.
The Día de la Toma de Granada is a civic and religious festival held each year in Granada on the anniversary of the city's conquest, January 2, and has become a focus for celebration by right wing nationalist and extremist political parties.
Spanish politician unleashes storm on anniversary of Muslim defeat
Senior member of governing Popular Party tweeted ‘With Islam we would not be free’
Tue, Jan 3, 2017, 16:00
Guy Hedgecoe Madrid
A senior politician has unleashed a fierce debate about Spain’s relationship with its Islamic past and drawn accusations of racism after celebrating the Christian re-conquest of the country from Muslim rule in the Middle Ages.
January 2nd is the anniversary of the 1492 Catholic victory over Muslim forces defending the prized southern city of Granada for a decade. It is considered a turning point in ending eight centuries of Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula.
Esperanza Aguirre, leader of the conservative Popular Party (PP) in Madrid and a former mayor of the capital, marked the date by posting a comment on Twitter: “Today marks 525 years since the taking of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs. A day of glory for Spaniards. With Islam we would not be free.”
Ms Aguirre completed the tweet with the image of a Spanish flag.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, together known as the Catholic Monarchs, remain divisive figures for Spaniards. Many, like Ms Aguirre, see them as the country’s saviours; others are troubled by their militaristic and often oppressive rule, which saw Jews and Muslims expelled from Spain if they did not convert to Christianity.
Pablo Iglesias, leader of the leftist Podemos, described Ms Aguirre’s views as a “rancid, uncultured and reactionary” version of patriotism.
“I hope Esperanza Aguirre doesn’t also admire the hygienic habits of the Catholic Monarchs,” he added, apparently in reference to their policy towards those of other faiths.
The tweet provoked a lengthy thread. While some of it contained supportive comments, most responses expressed outrage.
“Let’s study the history of our country a bit and put aside racism, Islamophobia, exclusion,” said one user, while others pointed to the oppressive policies of the Catholic Monarchs themselves. The brutality of their chief inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada, and his acolytes was “fantastic for women,” noted one sarcasm-laced post.
Conquista
From the proceedings of the British Academy, 81, 5-36
The Nature of the Conquest and the Conquistadors
by Alistair Hennessy Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick
The values underpinning the Reconquista and the conquest of the Canary Islands (Fernandez Armesto Before Colurnbus: exploration and colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492. Macmillan, Basingstoke 1987), and also their organizational forms, were to be replicated in the Indies during the early decades of the Conquest.
The history of the Conquest is that of the gradual replacement of the habits and traditions bequeathed by the hit-and-run plundering frontier raids of the Reconquista, by the conquest and “civilizing” of conquered tribes in long term settlement of vast tracts of territory, some of it virtually uninhabited. For genuine conquest there must be settlement and, although the Reconquista involved settling lands from which the Moors had been cleared, the traditions of frontier warfare (recalled in ballads), still exercised a potent fascination during the first years of the Conquest.
The unforeseen discovery of gold in Hispaniola subverted Columbus’s original Genoese/Portuguese conception of trading entrepots which underpinned Portuguese expansion to the Far East.
Gold and its labour needs dominated the Caribbean phase of the Conquest, in which considerations of settlement and colonisation were subordinated to quick profit from gold- panning using Indian slaves (Sauer C. O. The early Spanish Main. University of California Press, Berkeley. 1966). The need for slaves provided the major impetus for exploratory expeditions to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Florida and Central America. Cuba and Hispaniola provided the springboards for two major thrusts to the mainland.
The first of these, to Panama and Central America, and later to Peru, retained many of the plundering characteristics of the Caribbean phase. The second, the expedition to Mexico in 1519, was conditioned by Cortés’ view, based on his reaction to the predatory nature of the Caribbean experience, that there could be no conquest without settlement. It was this wider more positive view of conquest which led Cortés to break with Diego de Velasquez, governor of Cuba (and also his superior) who had supported the Mexico expedition for purposes of trade. To justify his disobedience he appealed over Velasquez’s head directly to the Emperor, with a grandiose vision of Empire in his famous Five Letters moving swiftly in order to preempt Velasquez himself being granted the right of conquest (Cortés Letters from Mexico. Translated and edited by A. Pagden with an Introduction by J. H. Elliott. Yale University Press, New Haven. 1986; Elliott J. H. The Spanish Conquest and Settlement of America. In The Cambridge History of Latin America, edited by L. Bethell, Vol. 1, pp. 149-207. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1984).
There was little comparable to the Spanish view of “imperium” in the experience of other European powers. It has been argued that the conquest of Ireland provided a precedent in the English case (Andrews, K. R., H. P. Canny, and P. C. H. Hair (editors) The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480-1650. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool 1978), and that attitudes towards conquered peoples were carried over from Ireland by the English, and later in the eighteenth century by Ulstermen, who acquired a fearsome reputation as frontiersmen.
In the case of the Portuguese the Moors had been expelled much earlier and so the crusading alliance between a military and clerical aristocracy had been blunted, or rather canalized into African expeditions (Boxer C. R. The Portuguese seaborne Empire. Hutchinson, London 1969).
"Preste Iuan de las Indias" (Prester John of the Indies) positioned in East Africa on a 16th-century Spanish Portolan chart
The capture of Ceuta in 1415 presaged the search for the land of Prester John as well as for the source of African gold around Timbuctoo, but overland expeditions were frustrated by geographical intractability. The thalassocratic thrust of Portuguese expansion was to the East, opening up the Indian ocean, Southern Asia and the Far East-other “new worlds” but not in that particular sense of strangeness and novelty engendered by the Americas. Until the discovery of gold in the late seventeenth century, Brazil was not central to Portuguese colonial thinking, nor in the case of France is there anything comparable to the Spanish experience.pp. 8 - 9 proceedings of the British Academy, 81, 5-36 The Nature of the Conquest and the Conquistadors ALISTAIR HENNESSY Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick
Update
The party posted a video on its official Twitter account Wednesday depicting the surrender of Islamic forces by Muhammad XII in Grenada in 1492 to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand and wrote, “We should not forget, that today 527 years ago, the liberation of Granada by the Spanish troops of the Catholic monarchs, ending eight long centuries of reconquest against the Muslim invader.”
A longer version of the clip used can be found on YouTube
A video clip posted by المسلمون في الأندلس Muslims in Andalucia
VOX (Latin for "voice") is a political party in Spain founded on 17 December 2013, by former members of the People's Party (PP). The party is described variously as right-wing, right-wing populist, or far-right.
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