Granada War

Between 1482 and 1492 the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, waged a decade of campaigns against the Nasrid Emirate of Granada, the last Muslim state on the Iberian peninsula. It ended on 2 January 1492, when the emir Muhammad XI, known to Christians as Boabdil, handed over the city and the Alhambra palace. Spanish tradition treats the conquest as the closing act of the Reconquista.

Granada had outlived the other Muslim states of al-Andalus by more than two centuries, but by the late fifteenth century it was badly weakened. After the death of Emir Yusuf III in 1417, succession quarrels kept it in near-permanent civil strife, with rival emirs sometimes holding different quarters of the capital. Taxes stayed high to pay for fortresses and troops, and the emirate also paid tribute to Castile. Along the frontier, raids and local truces were routine. The Castilian civil war of 1475 to 1479 ended with Isabella secure on her throne, and her marriage to Ferdinand in 1469 meant that Castile and Aragon could now act together.

In late December 1481 Granadan forces surprised the Castilian town of Zahara and enslaved its people. Andalusian nobles answered by seizing Alhama early in 1482, and the Crown's backing for that raid is usually taken as the start of the war. Emir Abu'l-Hasan Ali failed to win Alhama back, while a Christian attack on Loja also failed. On the very day Loja was relieved, his son Boabdil rose against him and claimed the title of emir. Captured by the Castilians at Lucena in 1483, Boabdil was released so that he could keep fighting his own family, and for several years he acted as a vassal of the monarchs while his uncle, al-Zagal, took power in much of the emirate.

Campaigns were seasonal, opening in spring and ending in winter. Castilian artillery, greatly expanded with the help of French and Burgundian specialists, let the Christians reduce walled towns far faster than before. Ronda fell in 1485 after about a fortnight. In 1487 the great port of Málaga endured a siege from May to August; when it fell, Ferdinand punished most of its inhabitants with slavery. With the coast lost, Granada could no longer receive help from overseas. In 1489 a six-month siege of Baza, which strained Castile's finances and drew Isabella to the camp in person, forced al-Zagal to give up.

Boabdil, disappointed by his reward, then broke with the monarchs, though he held little beyond the capital and the Alpujarras mountains. Appeals to the Mamluk sultan of Egypt and to Fez brought no help. The siege of Granada began in April 1491, a treaty of surrender was agreed on 25 November, and the city was handed over on 2 January 1492.

How large the armies were is debated. Chroniclers give Castilian forces of 50,000 to 70,000 in the main campaign years, but some historians argue that Castile's revenues and grain contracts could have supported only roughly 8,000 to 20,000 men at a time.

The surrender terms promised Muslims freedom of worship and the right to emigrate, and Boabdil was offered a small lordship before leaving for Morocco in 1493. The promises did not last. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 expelled Jews who would not convert, and pressure for mass conversion under Archbishop Cisneros provoked a revolt; by 1501 Granada's Muslims had to choose between baptism, exile or slavery. The war cost Castile an estimated 450 million maravedís and gave its soldiers experience they later used in the Italian Wars.

Our 1400 map shows the Emirate of Granada on the southern coast beside the Crown of Castile. By the 1492 map, the emirate has disappeared and its lands belong to Castile.