History, Religion, Culture: Contextualizing Sixteenth-Century Granada

Abstract

The city of Granada is a cultural icon, Spain’s top tourist resort celebrated since the Middle Ages by writers, musicians and artists as an earthly paradise. It is also the topographical site at the heart of the great cultural interchange between native Christians and Arab Muslims which defined Spain as a country apart from other European nations, and which expresses its essence. Granada was the final bastion of independent Muslim power in Spain, which came to an end on 2 January 1492 when the last Muslim ruler of the city, Boabdil, handed over its keys to King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile. It had been a beacon of light for Muslims living under Christian rule in other parts of the Iberian peninsula, but it also fascinated the Christians, who longed to capture the city, and besieged it regularly in the years prior to 1492. But, while the city relinquished Islam and became Christian, it was also the burning crucible from which a resurgence of the Muslim faith throughout the peninsula originated. Three key periods of time, 1499–1502, 1568–1570 and 1588–1614, would be crucial in forging the future of the entire Muslim community of the country, as well as that of Spain itself. The vexed issue of convivencia, the term used to describe the interplay and living together on a daily basis of Catholic Christians, Arab Muslims and Jews, casts a very long shadow, and, in order to understand it within the framework of those key dates in the history of Granada, we must go back a very long way, to the year 711 A.D.