The Last Crusade in the West. Castile and the Conquest of Granada by Joseph F. O’Callaghan (review)

With this book Joseph F. O’Callaghan closes his trilogy on the Reconquest and Crusade in Spain, which examines a Castilian history marked by the struggle with Muslim Al-Andalus. This work is, mainly, a narrative account of the fight from 1350 to 1492 between the Christian kingdom of Castile and Leon, and Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula. It is a struggle that O’Callaghan rightly considers a crusade—as the popes and the rest of their contemporaries believed—and that is the reason for the title chosen. The book is divided into eight chapters. Only the last two present an analytical but very succinct approach (full of interesting subjects, both ideological and practical, in a mere fifty-five pages). The core of the work (pp. 122–96) is dedicated to the last twenty years of that century-long struggle, until the final conquest of Granada by the Catholic monarchs Isabel and Fernando (1474–92), but overall the book is well balanced. With the book focused on the crusade against Granada led by Castile, Aragon and Portugal only appear in a tangential way, and other interesting subjects such as the “dynastic crusades” between Christians within the framework of the Avignon papacy of the middle and late-fourteenth century are covered in only two pages. There also are scattered references to Muslim jihad.

O’Callaghan knows the Iberian context very well, but, although this is a good book, there are some minor drawbacks. The bibliography covers works up to 2012, but there are only four entries for 2011–12. There are some omissions of works by Mario Lafuente on the war between Aragon and Castile and by Fernando Gómez Redondo on the historiography of that period. The author could have profited from the works by Roser Salicru on the presence of Castilian mercenaries in Morocco and foreign crusaders in Castile or papers in Las Actas de la Frontera. The readings for some discussions are a bit outdated (for example, on the debate on the Orden de la Banda and the Islamofilia of Peter I). Furthermore, a deep reading of some of the works cited by the author could have been much more profitable (such as Ana Echevarría’s Knights on the Frontier [Boston, 2009]).

In so narrative a history we can barely see an evolution of the crusading ideal and practice throughout those 150 years; very little is said about the external vision of the Iberian campaigns and almost nothing about the modern historiographical debate on Reconquista and crusade in Spanish academia.

These criticisms aside, O’Callaghan´s Last Crusade is a must for anyone interested in the history of medieval Spain, especially for those focused on the relationship between Castile and Granada in the late Middle Ages. It is a meritorious end for the author’s trilogy on the Reconquest and Crusade in Spain.