Late Middle Ages

The fall of Granada in 1492

The fall of Granada on 2 January 1492 was the longest in the making and the most consequential of any event in late medieval Iberian history. The last Muslim kingdom in the peninsula, founded by the Nasrid dynasty in 1232 in the wake of the collapse of the Almohad caliphate, had survived for 260 years by a combination of tribute, diplomacy, and a careful playing-off of the Christian kingdoms. The unification of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1479 produced a Christian state that was, for the first time in the history of the late medieval peninsula, in a position to make a sustained and unconditional effort. The fall of Granada completed the Reconquista, gave the Catholic Monarchs a dynastic and religious legitimacy that was unique in Europe, and cleared the way for the Alhambra Decree of 31 March 1492 and the voyage of Columbus in the autumn of 1492. This article treats the final campaign in three phases (1482–1487, 1488–1490, 1490–1492), the negotiations that produced the Treaty of Granada, and the political and religious consequences of the fall.

The kingdom of Granada in the late fifteenth century

The Nasrid kingdom of Granada in the late 15th century was, in many respects, a remarkable state. The dynasty had been in existence for 250 years, a longer continuous rule than any other in western Europe at the time. The capital, the city of Granada, had grown in the 14th century from a relatively modest city to a population of perhaps 100,000; the Alhambra, the great palace of the Nasrid kings, is the most impressive building of the period in western Europe. The kingdom was a federation of the city of Granada, the surrounding plain of the Vega, the Alpujarras in the south, and a string of fortified towns along the frontier with Castile. The economy was based on the silk trade, the sugar trade, the cultivation of the Vega, and the manufacture of paper. The Nasrid kings were wealthy, well-informed about European affairs, and able to maintain a substantial army and a sophisticated diplomatic service.

The weakness of the kingdom was, however, considerable. The succession was repeatedly disputed, the frontier with Castile was increasingly difficult to defend, and the kingdom was dependent on the import of grain from Castile in years of bad harvest. The Nasrid kings had paid tribute to Castile since 1246, the Treaty of Jaén by which Muhammad I had agreed to make annual payments to Ferdinand III, and the tribute was raised repeatedly in the course of the 15th century. The kingdom was also internally divided: the powerful families of the countryside, the caziques, often had more in common with the Christian border lords than with the Nasrid dynasty, and the great cities of the kingdom — Granada, Málaga, Almería, Guadix — were, in their political culture, a long way from the monarchy.

The first phase, 1482–1487

The final campaign opened in 1482. The Catholic Monarchs had planned the campaign in the Cortes of Toledo of 1480, and the first move was a punitive expedition against the Nasrid frontier fortress of Alhama. Alhama was taken on 28 February 1482, by a bold assault on a high hill in the heart of the Nasrid kingdom, an event that the Castilian chronicler Andrés Bernáldez described in his Memorias with the air of a providential victory. The fall of Alhama provoked a counter-attack by the Nasrid king, Muley Hacén (Abu al-Hasan Ali), but the Christian position in the kingdom was already strong. The fall of Loja on 29 May 1482, in which the king was nearly captured, was a setback; the fall of the city of Málaga on 18 August 1487, after a long siege, was the decisive event of the first phase. Málaga was, with a population of perhaps 20,000, the second city of the Nasrid kingdom, and its fall was the end of the Nasrid hold on the coast.

The first phase was the most difficult. The Catholic Monarchs were short of money, the army was not yet the standing professional force that it would become, and the Nasrid kingdom was still strong enough to make the war expensive. The fall of Málaga was followed by the fall of Baza (December 1489) and the fall of Guadix (December 1489), which ended the Nasrid hold on the central and eastern part of the kingdom. The surrender of Baza was negotiated by Ferdinand in person, and the ceremony of surrender, with the king riding into the city on a white horse, was a sign of the political gravity of the moment. The fall of Baza was the end of the Nasrid kingdom, in any real sense; the city of Granada, with the surrounding plain, was all that remained.

The second phase, 1488–1490

The second phase of the war was the period of consolidation. The Catholic Monarchs took possession of the surrendered cities, organised the new bishoprics, established the new Castilian administration, and began the slow process of converting the Muslim population. The most important event of the period was the marriage of the heir to the Castilian crown, the prince John, to Margaret of Austria, the daughter of Maximilian I, at Burgos on 3 April 1497. The marriage was a major diplomatic event, and it was followed by the death of the prince, on 4 October 1497, of fever; the death of the heir, who was just nineteen, was the first of a series of deaths that would eventually bring Catherine of Aragon, the youngest daughter of the Catholic Monarchs, to the English throne.

The other great event of the period was the death of the Nasrid king, Muley Hacén, in 1485, and the succession of his son Boabdil (Muhammad XII). Boabdil had been a captive in Castile since 1483, and he had been released on condition that he become a vassal of the Catholic Monarchs. The release of Boabdil, in 1485, was a major political gamble: the Catholic Monarchs hoped that he would be a more pliable king than his father. The gamble paid off in the long run, but in the short run it produced a civil war in Granada. The Nasrid kingdom was, in effect, divided between Boabdil in the city of Granada and his uncle Muhammad XIII (el Zagal) in the eastern part of the kingdom. El Zagal was the more effective of the two, and the Christian armies found him a more formidable opponent; his surrender in 1490, after the fall of Baza, was the end of the Nasrid dynasty in any real sense.

The final siege, 1491–1492

The siege of Granada began in April 1491, with the assembly of the Christian army at the camp of Santa Fe, a planned city on the plain west of Granada, which the Catholic Monarchs had laid out in a grid of streets in the manner of the new military architecture. The army was the most powerful that Christian Iberia had ever assembled: perhaps 80,000 men, including the Castilian nobility and the regular Castilian infantry, the Aragonese cavalry, the Burgundian auxiliaries, and a powerful train of artillery. The Nasrid defence was determined, but the Christian position was overwhelming. The siege of Granada was, in many respects, the model of the new late medieval siege: a system of fortified camps, a network of redoubts, a regular supply system, and a sustained artillery bombardment. The Nasrid position was reduced to a city of perhaps 100,000 people surrounded by a hostile countryside and cut off from the sea by the Castilian fleet.

The Treaty of Granada of 25 November 1491 was the political settlement. Boabdil, by then the sole Nasrid king, agreed to surrender the city in return for the right of his family to retain the Alpujarras, the right of the Muslim population of Granada to keep their property, their religion, and their laws, and the right of the Nasrid family to leave the peninsula. The terms were generous; the Catholic Monarchs, who needed a political settlement that would not produce a Muslim revolt, were prepared to offer them. The fall of the city took place on 2 January 1492. Boabdil, by the conventions of the period, handed the keys of the city to the Catholic Monarchs, and the king and queen entered the city in triumph. The Catholic Monarchs took up residence in the Alhambra, and the cross was raised on the tower of the Alcazaba.

The consequences of the fall

The fall of Granada had three long-term consequences. The first was the religious. The fall of the last Muslim kingdom in the peninsula was the occasion for the Alhambra Decree of 31 March 1492, by which the Catholic Monarchs ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Castile and Aragon. The decree was signed in the Alhambra, and the wording — the Jews were accused of having “attempted to subvert and destroy the holy Catholic faith” — was an explicit statement of the religious motivation of the expulsion. The decree was not new in form: the sentencia-estatuto of the archbishop of Toledo in 1449, the Sentencia-Estatuto of Pedro Sarmiento, had already restricted the rights of the conversos. The decree of 1492 was, however, the most extensive and the most consequential. The expulsions affected perhaps 200,000 people, and they were a major demographic and economic loss to Spain.

The second consequence was the political. The fall of Granada gave the Catholic Monarchs a dynastic and religious legitimacy that was unique in Europe. The title of Catholic Monarchs, conferred by Pope Alexander VI in 1496, was an explicit recognition of the religious character of the regime. The Catholic Monarchs used the title as a basis for a foreign policy that combined dynastic marriages, military campaigns, and the religious defence of the Catholic church. The most important marriage was the marriage of the Catholic Monarchs’ daughter, Catherine of Aragon, to Arthur, prince of Wales, in 1501, the basis of the First Treaty of Medina del Campo of 27 March 1489. The fall of Granada was, in this sense, the basis of the Spanish claim to be the leading Catholic monarchy in Europe.

The third consequence was the geographical. The fall of Granada was followed, in the same year, by the voyage of Christopher Columbus, sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs. Columbus sailed from Palos on 3 August 1492, and landed in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492. The combination of the fall of Granada and the discovery of the New World gave Spain a new role in European affairs. The Catholic Monarchs were, in the long view, the founders of the Spanish empire, and the fall of Granada was the beginning of a new phase in the history of the Iberian peninsula. The Treaty of Tordesillas of 7 June 1494, by which Castile and Portugal agreed to divide the Atlantic discoveries, was the international recognition of the new political reality. The fall of Granada was, in short, a turning point in the history of Europe.

Reading the fall

The historiography of the fall of Granada has been transformed by the work of the past generation. The older Spanish historiography — the work of the centro de estudios of the late 19th century, the Memorial Histórico Español of 1851, the more modern synthesis of the 20th century — treated the fall as a kind of national epiphany. The newer scholarship — the work of Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, the late Manuel González Jiménez, José Enrique López de Coca, the late María Isabel del Val — has read the fall in a wider European context, and has been more attentive to the political and economic circumstances that produced it. The standard work in English is now the relevant chapters of John Edwards’s The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs (2000), which is a balanced and useful synthesis. The fall of Granada is best read, finally, not as the culmination of the Reconquista but as the beginning of a new phase in the history of the Iberian peninsula.

References and further reading

  • John Edwards, The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474–1516 (Oxford, 2000).
  • Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, La España de los Reyes Católicos (Madrid, 1999).
  • David J. Wasserstein, The Alhambra Decree and related work on the Jewish expulsion.
  • Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (4th ed., New Haven, 2014).
  • William H. Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (Boston, 1837).