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INTRODUCTION ~ A Conquered City W hen did Granada become a "Christian" city? The most obvious answer to this question is misleading: January 2, 1492-the date on which the "Catholic Monarchs" Isabella and Ferdinand of Castile and Aragon triumphantly entered this city in the southeastern corner of the Iberian Peninsula, thus subduing Islam's last bastion in Western Europe and completing the centuries-long Christian "reconquest" of Spain. Although under Christian political control after 1492, Granada long remained in many ways an Islamic city. For eight years after the conquest, for example, Islam remained the religion practiced by the overwhelming majority of the city's residents. The resounding voices of the muezzins from the city's minarets continued to call the Muslim faithful to prayer five times each day in the more than two hundred mosques that still filled the urban landscape.! In 1500, after a local Muslim uprising, and with rebellion yet raging in the nearby Alpujarras Mountains, a royal order mandated that all of the city's Muslims convert to Christianity or leave the kingdom. After the ensuing mass baptisms, all of Granada's remaining residents were technically "Christian." Nonetheless, the traditional language, dress, and customs of Muslim Granada endured among many of the city'S moriscos (formerly Muslim converts to Christianity) well into the sixteenth century. Even after the expulsion of the vast majority of the city's moriscos in 1569-1570 at the height of a second major rebellion in the Alpujarras (1568-1571), Granada retained much of its preconquest physiognomy and character. The towering minaret of Granada's great mosque, for example, continued to be a dominant feature of the city's skyline until it was finally destroyed in 1588-nearly twenty years after the expulsion of the moriscos. Even today, Granada remains the most apparently Islamic of Spain's major cities. Tourists by the thousands flock each day to the city primarily to see the Alhambra-the magnificent palace and fortress complex built by the sultans-and other surviving reminders of the city's Muslim heritage. In short, the creation of Christian Granada-the subject of this book-was not an event but rather an historical process, and a gradual and incomplete one at that. The resonance of the date of the city's conquest among scholars and nonI 2 :: CREATING CHRISTIAN GRANADA scholars alike-Spain's anna mirabilis of 1492-underscores dramatically the fact that the Granada story was no isolated or peripheral development. Inherently, an examination of Granada's transformation from a Muslim city into a Christian one brings us directly to the heart of three vital and interrelated themes in the history of medieval and early modern Spain: first, the nature of Spanish imperial expansion; second, the fate of Christian Spain's religious minorities; and third, the growth in the power and institutional strength of the Spanish church in the era of the Catholic Reformation . On each of these three critical matters, careful study of the Granada case suggests new perspectives on which the central arguments of this book are based. First, the conquest and settlement of new territories is a recurring and in some ways defining feature of medieval and early modern Spanish history. The creation of Christian Granada was an important and transitional episode in a much larger story of Spanish expansion both within the Iberian Peninsula and overseas. On the one hand, the conquest of the Nasrid sultanate of Granada represented a long-delayed last step in the Christian "reconquest" of Spain from Muslim rule-a process that had remained stalled since the thirteenth-century capture of Cordoba, Seville, and the rest of northern and western Andalusia. On the other hand, the conquest of Granada preceded by only eight months the August 1492 departure of Columbus's first voyage. In Columbus's wake, of course, Spanish conquerors and settlers embarked on an unprecedented wave of overseas imperial expansion that would carry them as far away as the vast reaches of North and South America and the remote islands of the Philippines, thus creating the world's first territorial empire of truly global scale. The coincidence of Granada's conquest and Columbus's first voyage, moreover, was not merely chronological. The Genoese adventurer in fact received his April 1492 commission from Queen Isabella in the newly founded village of Santa Fe-on the site of the Catholic Monarchs' former siege camp just outside of Granada-only after the successful conclusion of the costly ten-year military campaign against the...

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