The End of the Reconquista: Granada and Beyond, 1415–1580

Abstract

Abstract The pivotal point of this chapter is the series of campaigns waged between 1482 and 1492 by the ‘Catholic Monarchs’, Ferdinand and Isabella, which culminated in the conquest of the Emirate of Granada and the ending of Muslim power in Spain (see maps 10 and 11). Recent research has confirmed the political significance of these events, while in its scale and intensity the Granada war ranks alongside the Varna campaign and the wars against the Hussites as one of the greatest crusades of the fifteenth century. Thanks largely to the work of Professor M. A. Ladero Quesada, the character of the war itself is now clear; but both the background to the crusade, and its long-term results, remain highly problematic. In the case of the former, the difficulty lies in deciding whether or not the crusade represented a radical change in Castilian policy towards Granada and, more broadly, attitudes towards convivencia. And in the case of the crusade’s long-term results, the dominant question is the fate of Iberian crusading ideas, institutions, and attitudes after the completion of the Reconquista. Continuity is apparent in some features of Spanish government and society in the sixteenth century, such as Castile’s advance into North Africa and the resultant struggle with the Ottomans, and the survival into the Early Modern period of both the Iberian Military Orders and the ‘Bula de la cruzada’. But investigation of the subtler links between the crusade and the Spanish conquest of the New World, and Habsburg imperial policy generally, forms one of the most tantalizing aspects of the history of later crusading.