The Granada War 1482–1492

I. The Nasrid Kingdom

The emirate of Granada was founded by Muhammad ibn Yusuf ibn Nasr, known as Ibn al-Ahmar, who established his rule in the 1230s and became a vassal of Ferdinand III of Castile by the Pact of Jaén in 1246, as described in Ferdinand III and the Fall of Córdoba and Seville. His dynasty, the Nasrids, ruled for two and a half centuries over a territory that stretched from Almería in the east to the region of Ronda and Gibraltar in the west, bounded on the north by the Castilian frontier and on the south by the Mediterranean.

The kingdom was mountainous and densely populated. Its population in the fifteenth century has been estimated at between three hundred thousand and half a million, swelled over the centuries by Muslim refugees from the Christian conquests. The fertile plain of Granada, the Vega, and the coastal valleys produced cereals, fruit, sugar and silk, and the ports of Málaga and Almería traded with Genoa, North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Genoese merchants dominated much of the trade of the kingdom.

The Nasrid emirs built the palace-city of the Alhambra on a hill overlooking Granada. The Court of the Myrtles and the Court of the Lions, built under Yusuf I and Muhammad V in the fourteenth century, are among the finest achievements of Islamic architecture. Their walls bear the poems of Ibn Zamrak and other court poets, and the dynastic motto, there is no victor but God, is repeated thousands of times in the stucco decoration.

The kingdom survived by a combination of diplomacy and military strength. It paid tribute to Castile when necessary, sought help from the Marinids of Morocco, and exploited the civil wars of Castile. Its armies included the Volunteers of the Faith, North African warriors who had come to fight on the frontier. Yet the kingdom was also weakened by repeated dynastic conflicts, in which rival members of the Nasrid family, supported by factions of the nobility such as the Banu Sarraj, the Abencerrajes of Castilian legend, competed for the throne.

II. The Frontier in the Fifteenth Century

The frontier between Castile and Granada was a zone of fortified towns, raids and truces. Castilian frontier lords, such as the Ponce de León family of Arcos and Cádiz and the Guzmán dukes of Medina Sidonia, led raids into Nasrid territory, and the Nasrids raided Castilian lands in turn. Prisoners were taken on both sides and ransomed through specialist intermediaries, the alfaqueques. The frontier produced a rich literature of ballads, the romances fronterizos, which described the deeds of Christian and Muslim knights with mutual respect.

Castile made several gains in the fifteenth century. Antequera was taken in 1410 by the regent Ferdinand of Antequera, the future king of Aragon, and Gibraltar was taken in 1462 by the forces of the count of Niebla and the frontier lords. But the civil wars of the reign of Henry IV of Castile, between 1454 and 1474, and the war of succession that followed his death, prevented any sustained offensive. Granada paid tribute irregularly and occasionally refused it.

The marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 and their victory in the War of the Castilian Succession, which ended in 1479, created the conditions for a renewed war. The two monarchs, known as the Catholic Monarchs from the title granted by Alexander VI in 1496, united the crowns of Castile and Aragon in their persons, though the kingdoms kept their own institutions. Ferdinand had the military experience, while Isabella controlled the resources of Castile, which bore almost the whole cost of the war.

III. Alhama 1482

The war began with an event on the frontier. In December 1481 the forces of the emir Abu'l-Hasan Ali took the Castilian frontier town of Zahara by surprise. In response, Rodrigo Ponce de León, marquis of Cádiz, led a force of several thousand men in a night march deep into Nasrid territory and on 28 February 1482 took the town of Alhama, which commanded the road from Málaga to Granada and stood less than forty kilometres from the capital.

The capture of Alhama, with its rich baths and its position at the heart of the kingdom, caused consternation in Granada. A Castilian ballad, the romance of the loss of Alhama, which begins with the refrain ay de mi Alhama, preserves the memory of the event. Abu'l-Hasan besieged the town several times without success, and Ferdinand and Isabella decided to support the marquis of Cádiz and to turn the frontier skirmish into a war of conquest. Ferdinand led an army to relieve Alhama in May 1482, and the town was held throughout the war.

In July 1482 Ferdinand attempted to besiege Loja, which guarded the western approaches to the Vega, but the Castilian army was defeated and forced to withdraw. In March 1483 a Castilian raiding force under the marquis of Cádiz, the master of Santiago and other nobles was ambushed and destroyed in the mountains of the Ajarquía near Málaga. These early defeats showed that the Nasrid kingdom could not be conquered by raids and that a methodical campaign of sieges would be required.

IV. The Nasrid Civil War

The Castilian war coincided with a civil war in Granada. The emir Abu'l-Hasan had married a Christian captive, Isabel de Solís, who took the name Zoraya, and the rivalry between her and his first wife, Aisha, divided the court. In July 1482 Aisha's son Muhammad, known to the Castilians as Boabdil, rebelled against his father and seized the Alhambra, while Abu'l-Hasan held Málaga. The kingdom was thus divided between father and son.

In April 1483 Boabdil led a raid against the Castilian town of Lucena and was defeated and captured. Ferdinand and Isabella released him in return for a promise of vassalage and tribute, and the promise of free passage for Castilian armies through the territories under his control. Boabdil thus became an instrument of Castilian policy, and the civil war continued. Abu'l-Hasan, who was ill, abdicated in favour of his brother Muhammad, known as al-Zagal, the valiant, who continued the war against both Castile and Boabdil.

For the rest of the war the Nasrid kingdom was divided. Boabdil held Granada and its region for most of the time, while al-Zagal controlled the eastern part of the kingdom, centred on Guadix, Baza and Almería. Ferdinand exploited the division skilfully, making truces with one ruler while attacking the territories of the other. The Castilian chroniclers, Hernando del Pulgar and Andrés Bernáldez, describe the divisions of the Nasrids as a cause of their downfall.

V. Artillery and Siege Warfare

The Granada War was the first war in the peninsula in which artillery played a decisive role. Ferdinand and Isabella assembled a large train of siege guns, the bombards, manufactured in Castile, imported from Burgundy, Italy and Germany, and served by foreign gunners. The largest guns could fire stone balls weighing more than a hundred kilograms. The royal artillery was organised under a captain general, Francisco Ramírez de Madrid, who developed techniques for moving the guns over mountainous terrain.

The Nasrid towns, with their walls built for medieval warfare, were vulnerable to artillery. The Castilians built roads through the mountains to transport the guns, sometimes employing thousands of labourers. Once the guns were in position, the walls could be breached in days. Ronda, one of the strongest fortresses of the kingdom, fell in May 1485 after a bombardment of about two weeks. Its fall, and that of the towns of the western region, gave the Castilians control of the Serranía de Ronda.

The war also required large armies and complex logistics. The Castilian armies reached fifty thousand or more in the later campaigns, including cavalry, infantry, pioneers and artillerymen. Isabella organised the supply of food and equipment from Castile and Andalusia, and she established a field hospital, the hospital de la reina, which is sometimes described as the first military hospital in Europe. The cost of the war was met by royal revenues, contributions from the nobility and towns, the crusade bull granted by Sixtus IV, and loans from Jewish and converso financiers such as Abraham Seneor and Isaac Abravanel.

VI. The Santa Hermandad and the Castilian Army

The army that conquered Granada was raised from several sources. The royal guard and the men-at-arms of the royal household formed its core. The great nobles of Andalusia and Castile, such as the marquis of Cádiz, the duke of Medina Sidonia, the count of Cabra and the duke of Infantado, brought their own retinues, often numbering hundreds or thousands of men. The military orders of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcántara contributed their knights, and Ferdinand obtained papal permission to assume the administration of the masterships, which came under royal control during and after the war.

The towns of Castile supplied militias and, through the Santa Hermandad, the brotherhood established by the Cortes of Madrigal in 1476 to maintain order in the kingdom, they contributed contingents of infantry and money for pay and supplies. The Hermandad also provided thousands of pack animals and the labourers who built roads for the artillery. Foreign volunteers came from England, France, Switzerland and Germany. Among them was the English lord Edward Woodville, who fought at Loja in 1486 and lost his front teeth in the assault.

The light cavalry of the frontier, the jinetes, who rode with short stirrups in the manner of the Nasrid horsemen and fought with lance and shield, were particularly valued. The infantry included crossbowmen and an increasing number of men armed with handguns, the espingardas. The experience of combining these different forces in sieges and field operations prepared the infantry for the Italian wars of the following decades.

VII. The Western Campaigns 1484–1486

From 1484 the Castilians conducted annual campaigns aimed at the methodical reduction of the western part of the kingdom. In 1484 they took Álora and Setenil. In 1485 they took Ronda, Marbella and the towns of the Serranía, and the Muslim inhabitants were allowed to leave or, in some cases, to remain as Mudéjars under Castilian rule. In 1486 Ferdinand took Loja, which had resisted him in 1482, and the surrounding towns of Íllora, Moclín and Montefrío, which guarded the approaches to the Vega.

At Loja Boabdil, who had been reconciled with al-Zagal and was fighting alongside the defenders, was captured a second time. He was again released on terms, promising to hand over Granada in return for a lordship in the eastern part of the kingdom once the Castilians had conquered it. The agreement shows the complexity of the relationship between the Nasrid prince and the Catholic Monarchs, who used him to divide the defenders of the kingdom.

The capture of the western towns cut Granada off from Málaga and the western coast. The kingdom was now reduced to three regions: the capital and the Vega under Boabdil, the region of Málaga and Vélez, and the eastern region of Guadix, Baza and Almería, both of which were held by al-Zagal. The next objective was Málaga, the principal port of the kingdom and its link with North Africa.

VIII. The Siege of Malaga 1487

In April 1487 Ferdinand took Vélez-Málaga, east of Málaga, after defeating a relief army led by al-Zagal. While al-Zagal was away, Boabdil seized the Alhambra, and al-Zagal withdrew to Guadix. In May the Castilian army, perhaps fifty thousand strong with a large artillery train, laid siege to Málaga by land, while a Castilian and Aragonese fleet blockaded the port.

The defence of Málaga was led by Hamid al-Zegrí, a commander from North Africa who had the support of the Volunteers of the Faith and refused all offers of surrender. The siege lasted from May to August. The city was bombarded and its outer fortifications were taken one by one, and the population suffered from famine. A Muslim ascetic attempted to assassinate Ferdinand and Isabella in their camp, but struck down a Portuguese noble and a lady of the court by mistake before being killed.

When the city surrendered on 18 August 1487, Ferdinand refused to grant the terms that had been given to other towns. Because the inhabitants had resisted to the end, almost the entire Muslim population, about eleven thousand to fifteen thousand people, was enslaved. A portion was distributed among the nobles and towns of Castile, some were sent as gifts to the pope and to the queen of Naples, and others were permitted to ransom themselves by paying a heavy sum, which most could not raise. Christian captives found in the city were freed. The Jews of Málaga, about four hundred and fifty in number, were ransomed by the Jewish communities of Castile through a collection organised by Abraham Seneor.

The treatment of Málaga was the harshest episode of the war and was intended as a warning to other towns. It is recorded in detail in the chronicles of Pulgar and Bernáldez, and in the letters of the Italian humanist Peter Martyr of Anghiera, who served at the Castilian court. After Málaga the remaining Nasrid towns of the west surrendered without resistance.

IX. Baza and the Eastern Kingdom 1488–1489

In 1488 Ferdinand campaigned in the east, but the army was weakened by an epidemic and achieved little. In 1489 the Castilians laid siege to Baza, the principal fortress of al-Zagal in the eastern region. Baza was protected by its walls, a citadel and an extensive belt of orchards and gardens, which made the approach of the artillery difficult. The siege lasted from June to December 1489 and was one of the longest and most difficult of the war.

The Castilian army cut down the orchards and built a line of siege works around the city. The defenders under Sidi Yahya al-Nayyar, a relative of al-Zagal, resisted throughout the summer and autumn. Isabella joined the army in November, and her presence was credited by the chroniclers with sustaining the morale of the troops through the winter rains. On 4 December 1489 Baza surrendered on terms. Sidi Yahya converted to Christianity, took the name Pedro de Granada, and entered Castilian service.

The fall of Baza led to the surrender of al-Zagal. He handed over Guadix and Almería to the Catholic Monarchs in December 1489 in return for a lordship in the Alpujarras and a substantial pension. In 1491 he sold his lordship and emigrated to North Africa, where, according to later accounts, he was imprisoned and blinded by the ruler of Fez. Granada was now the only city of the kingdom that had not been conquered.

X. The Last Campaign 1490–1491

With the east conquered, Ferdinand and Isabella called on Boabdil to surrender Granada in accordance with his earlier agreements. Boabdil refused, claiming that the people of the city would not allow him to do so, and the war resumed. In 1490 the Castilians devastated the Vega to cut off the city's food supply. Boabdil, now fighting for survival, attempted to retake towns in the Alpujarras and on the coast, and there were Mudéjar revolts in some of the conquered towns.

In April 1491 the Castilian army camped in the Vega and began a blockade of Granada. When a fire destroyed the camp in July, the monarchs ordered the construction of a permanent town, built in stone in about eighty days and laid out on a grid plan, which was named Santa Fe, the Holy Faith. The building of Santa Fe showed that the Castilians intended to remain until the city surrendered.

The blockade of Granada lasted through the summer and autumn of 1491. The city was crowded with refugees, and food was scarce. There were skirmishes and single combats before the walls, which became the subject of later ballads and romances, such as the stories of Hernán Pérez del Pulgar, who was said to have entered the city at night and fixed a parchment bearing the words of the Ave Maria to the door of the great mosque. The historical basis of such stories is uncertain.

XI. The Capitulations of Granada

Secret negotiations between Boabdil's officials and the Castilian secretary Hernando de Zafra began in the autumn of 1491. On 25 November 1491 the capitulations were signed at Santa Fe. They provided for the surrender of the city and the Alhambra within sixty days and set out the conditions under which the Muslim population would live under Castilian rule.

The terms were generous. The Muslims were to keep their religion, mosques, property, laws and judges. They were not to be forced to convert, and Christians who had converted to Islam were not to be forced to return to Christianity. They would pay the same taxes as under the Nasrids for three years. Muslims who wished to emigrate to North Africa could do so with their property, and the monarchs would provide ships. Jews of Granada were to be included in the terms. Boabdil was granted a lordship in the Alpujarras and a large sum of money.

The capitulations were among the most detailed surrender agreements of the period. They reflected the long tradition of Mudéjar status in Castile and Aragon, and the desire of the monarchs to obtain a peaceful surrender of a large city. The question of whether and how the terms would be observed became central to the history of the Muslims of Granada in the following decade.

XII. The Surrender 2 January 1492

Fearing unrest in the city, Boabdil asked for the surrender to be brought forward. On the night of 1 January 1492 a Castilian force under Gutierre de Cárdenas entered the Alhambra secretly, and on the morning of 2 January Boabdil handed over the keys of the city to Ferdinand and Isabella outside the walls. The cross and the royal standards were raised on the Tower of the Watch, the Torre de la Vela, and the monarchs entered the Alhambra on 6 January, the feast of the Epiphany.

Boabdil left for his lordship in the Alpujarras. According to a story first recorded in the sixteenth century, as he looked back at the city from a pass on the road south he wept, and his mother reproached him for weeping like a woman for what he had not defended like a man. The pass is known as the Suspiro del Moro, the Moor's sigh. The story is almost certainly a later invention. In 1493 Boabdil sold his lordship to the Catholic Monarchs and emigrated to Fez, where he died, probably in the 1530s.

The fall of Granada was celebrated throughout Latin Christendom. In Rome Innocent VIII held processions and a bullfight, and the Spanish cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, soon to become Alexander VI, staged celebrations. In England Henry VII ordered a Te Deum at St Paul's. The victory was seen as compensation for the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453.

XIII. The Jews of Granada and the Edict of Expulsion

Less than three months after the surrender of Granada, on 31 March 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella signed at Granada the edict expelling the Jews from their kingdoms. The edict gave the Jews until the end of July to convert or leave. Its stated reason was the danger that Jews posed to the faith of the conversos, the descendants of Jews who had converted in the previous century, whom the Inquisition, established in Castile in 1478, accused of secretly practising Judaism.

The connection between the fall of Granada and the expulsion has been much discussed by historians. The completion of the conquest removed the last Muslim state in the peninsula and freed the monarchs from the need for Jewish financial support for the war. It also strengthened the ideal of a kingdom united in one faith. Abraham Seneor, who had raised funds for the war and the ransom of the Jews of Málaga, converted to Christianity, while Isaac Abravanel, who had also served the monarchs, chose exile and went to Naples.

The Jews of Granada, a community with a long history going back to the period of the Zirid kings and the viziers Samuel ibn Naghrela and his son Joseph, were included in the expulsion despite the capitulations. Their history is told in Jews of Granada, and the expulsion of 1492 is described in The Expulsion of 1492. Many of the exiles went to Portugal, North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, where they formed the Sephardi communities described in Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire.

XIV. Granada after the Conquest

In the first years after the conquest the capitulations were generally observed. The first archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, a Hieronymite friar and former confessor of the queen, favoured a policy of gradual and voluntary conversion. He learned some Arabic, encouraged his clergy to do the same, and commissioned an Arabic vocabulary and grammar and a catechism in Arabic from the Hieronymite friar Pedro de Alcalá, published in 1505. He sought to persuade the Muslims by example and instruction rather than by force.

In 1499 the archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, came to Granada and adopted a different policy. He pressed for mass baptisms, including of the elches, Christians who had converted to Islam, and ordered the burning of Arabic books, sparing only works on medicine. His actions provoked a revolt in the Albaicín, the Muslim quarter of Granada, in December 1499, which was calmed by Talavera and the count of Tendilla, the captain general of the city. A larger revolt broke out in the Alpujarras and other mountainous regions in 1500 and 1501.

The monarchs treated the revolts as a breach of the capitulations by the Muslims and offered them the choice of conversion or exile. Most were baptised, becoming the Moriscos, the new Christians of Muslim origin. In February 1502 a royal decree required the Muslims of the Crown of Castile to convert or leave. In the Crown of Aragon Muslims were allowed to remain until the 1520s, when they too were forcibly converted. The history of the Moriscos, culminating in the revolt of the Alpujarras in 1568 to 1571 and the expulsion of 1609 to 1614, is told in The Morisco Revolt and Expulsion.

XV. Talavera, Cisneros and the Bible

The contrasting policies of Talavera and Cisneros reflected two attitudes to the conversion of Muslims. Talavera relied on preaching, instruction and charity. He is reported to have said that the Muslims should be won by the example of Christian conduct and that the Christians should adopt the virtues of the Muslims. He permitted the use of Arabic in the liturgy and prayed with converts in their own language. His approach was later criticised, and he was investigated by the Inquisition shortly before his death in 1507.

Cisneros, a Franciscan reformer and later regent of Castile and inquisitor general, combined a programme of forced conversion in Granada with a major project of Biblical scholarship. In 1499, the year of the burning of the Arabic books in Granada, he founded the University of Alcalá de Henares, where he sponsored the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, printed between 1514 and 1517. The Polyglot presented the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin texts of the Bible in parallel columns and was the first printed edition of the Greek Scriptures to be completed, though not the first published.

The paradox of a Biblical scholar who ordered the burning of books has been widely noted by historians. The Polyglot was produced with the help of converso scholars, such as Alfonso de Zamora, Pablo Coronel and Alfonso de Alcalá, who had been Jewish before 1492 and provided the Hebrew and Aramaic texts. The history of the project belongs to the story of Bible scholarship in the peninsula described in Spain and Bible Scholarship.

XVI. The Language of Crusade and Providence

The Castilian chroniclers presented the war as a holy war and a crusade. The papacy issued crusade bulls in 1482 and later years, granting indulgences to those who fought or contributed money, and the sale of the bulls provided a substantial part of the funds for the war. The chroniclers described Ferdinand and Isabella as the instruments of divine providence in restoring the land lost in 711.

The Biblical language of the chronicles drew on the conquest of Canaan and the history of the kings of Israel. The fall of the walls of Nasrid towns was compared with the fall of Jericho, recorded in Joshua 6:20, and the victories of the monarchs were attributed to divine assistance. Writers at the court of the monarchs compared Isabella with Deborah, whose song of victory is recorded in Judges 5:7, and Ferdinand with David.

Muslim writers interpreted the loss of Granada in the same providential terms but in reverse, attributing it to the sins and divisions of the Muslims. An anonymous Granadan author of the sixteenth century, writing in exile in North Africa, recorded the last years of the kingdom in a work known as the Nubdhat al-asr, which describes the civil wars of the Nasrids and the conditions of the surrender. Morisco writers in the sixteenth century, writing in Spanish in Arabic script, the aljamiado literature, preserved the memory of the kingdom and the hope of its restoration.

XVII. The Ottoman and Mamluk Response

The Muslims of Granada appealed for help to the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Qaitbay, and to the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II. In 1489 Qaitbay sent an embassy to Ferdinand and Isabella, threatening reprisals against the Christians of his territories and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem if the war did not stop. The monarchs replied that they were reclaiming land that had belonged to their ancestors and that they treated their Muslim subjects well. In 1501 Peter Martyr of Anghiera was sent to Cairo to reassure the sultan.

The Ottomans sent a naval force under Kemal Reis to the western Mediterranean in the 1480s and 1490s, which raided the coasts of Spain and helped to carry Muslim and Jewish refugees to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman and North African powers were unable to intervene effectively in the war itself. After the conquest, the corsairs of North Africa, many of them descendants of Andalusi refugees, raided the coasts of Spain for centuries.

XVIII. Columbus at Santa Fe

The fall of Granada coincided with the decision of the Catholic Monarchs to support the voyage of Christopher Columbus. Columbus had been at the Castilian court since 1486, pressing his proposal to reach Asia by sailing west, and he was present at the siege of Granada. In January 1492, after the surrender, the monarchs agreed to his terms, and on 17 April 1492 they signed the Capitulations of Santa Fe, granting him the titles of admiral, viceroy and governor of the lands he might discover.

In the prologue to the journal of his first voyage, as transmitted by Bartolomé de las Casas, Columbus linked the three events of 1492: the conquest of Granada, which he saw on 2 January, the expulsion of the Jews, and his own voyage. He presented the voyage as part of the same providential programme of the expansion of the faith. The voyage, which set out from Palos on 3 August 1492, is the starting point of the history told in The Age of Discovery and in The Conquest of Mexico and the Requerimiento.

XIX. Legacy

The fall of Granada ended nearly eight centuries of Muslim political presence in the Iberian Peninsula. It completed the territorial unification of the Crown of Castile and gave Ferdinand and Isabella immense prestige in Europe. The experience of the war, with its large armies, artillery and logistical organisation, contributed to the development of the Spanish military system that would dominate Europe in the sixteenth century under commanders such as Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, who had served in the Granada war.

The aftermath of the conquest also showed the limits of the Mudéjar tradition. Within ten years of the capitulations, the Muslims of Granada had been forcibly converted, and within a century and a quarter their descendants had been expelled. The Jews of Spain had been expelled within months. The ideal of a kingdom united in one faith, enforced by the Inquisition, replaced the older system in which Christians, Muslims and Jews had lived under one crown with their own laws.

The monarchs chose to be buried in Granada, in the Royal Chapel built next to the cathedral on the site of the former great mosque. Their tombs, with those of their daughter Joanna and her husband Philip, are in the chapel, which also preserves Isabella's crown, sceptre and books, and Ferdinand's sword. The city celebrates the anniversary of the conquest each year on 2 January, an occasion that has become the subject of debate in modern Spain about the meaning of the conquest and its memory.

XX. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.