The Last Muslim Kingdom in Western Europe
By the mid-thirteenth century, sustained Christian military campaigns, traditionally termed the Reconquista, had reduced Muslim political control in Iberia to a single remaining territory: the Emirate of Granada, established under the Nasrid dynasty in 1232 and confined to the mountainous southern region around the city of Granada itself. This final Muslim kingdom survived for more than two and a half centuries, considerably longer than its increasingly precarious military and political position might have suggested, through a combination of defensible mountain terrain, periodic tribute payments to neighboring Christian kingdoms, and the fractured, competing interests of the Christian kingdoms that might otherwise have moved against it sooner.
A Conquest That Shares Its Year With Columbus
On January 2, 1492, Granada's last Nasrid ruler, Muhammad XII, commonly known as Boabdil, formally surrendered the city to the combined forces of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, the same monarchs who, later that same year, would fund Christopher Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic, a coincidence of timing this course's companion Afro-Latino curriculum has already examined in relation to Spanish colonization of the Americas. Granada's fall ended, in a formal political sense, 781 years of continuous Muslim rule somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula, a span of time considerably longer than the entire history of the United States to the present day.
Initial Tolerance, Followed by Forced Conversion
The Treaty of Granada, negotiated as part of the surrender, initially promised Granada's Muslim population religious tolerance and the right to continue practicing Islam freely under the new Christian monarchy. This promise did not hold. Within a decade, Spanish authorities began a sustained campaign of forced conversion, and by 1502, Muslims throughout Castile faced a stark, formal choice: convert to Christianity or leave Spain entirely. Those who converted, becoming known as Moriscos, faced continued suspicion and discrimination from Spanish authorities and the broader population, who frequently doubted the sincerity of these conversions and continued treating Moriscos as a distinct, second-class population regardless of their formal religious status.
A Parallel Expulsion of Spain's Jewish Population
This same period produced a closely related and equally consequential expulsion: the 1492 Alhambra Decree, issued by Ferdinand and Isabella just months after Granada's surrender, ordered Spain's entire Jewish population to convert to Christianity or leave the country entirely, a decree affecting an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 or more Jewish Spaniards, many of whom had lived in Iberia for centuries and had played a significant role in the intellectual and economic life of Al-Andalus examined throughout this unit. This expulsion, occurring in the same year and same broader political context as Granada's fall, reflects a wider pattern of religious consolidation under Ferdinand and Isabella that treated both Iberia's Muslim and Jewish populations as incompatible with the newly unified Catholic Spanish state they were building.
The Final Expulsion, More Than a Century Later
Forced conversion did not resolve Spanish authorities' underlying suspicion of the Morisco population; throughout the sixteenth century, Moriscos faced continued restrictions on their language, dress, and cultural practices, restrictions that provoked periodic uprisings, including a significant Morisco rebellion in the Alpujarras mountains in 1568 to 1571. This sustained tension culminated in a final, decisive action: between 1609 and 1614, King Philip III ordered the complete expulsion of Spain's entire Morisco population, an estimated 300,000 people, regardless of their formal Christian conversion, one of the largest forced population removals in early modern European history, sending hundreds of thousands of people, many of whose families had lived in Iberia for many generations, into exile primarily across the Mediterranean into North Africa.
What Remained, and What This Unit Sets Up
Al-Andalus's formal political existence ended in 1492, and its remaining population was expelled entirely by 1614, but its cultural, architectural, linguistic, and culinary legacy did not disappear from Iberia; Spanish and Portuguese vocabulary, agricultural techniques, architectural styles, and culinary traditions examined throughout this unit's earlier lessons persisted long after the population that introduced them had been forcibly removed, a pattern of cultural legacy outlasting the specific population that created it that this course's later units, particularly its examination of Portugal's African communities and France's Black Parisian community, will revisit in different historical contexts. This unit's closing point connects directly to this course's overall purpose: Al-Andalus represents the deepest, longest-sustained instance of African and North African presence in Europe examined across this entire course, nearly eight centuries, predating by more than a millennium the twentieth-century migrations this course's later units will examine, and its final, forced ending through expulsion establishes a pattern, the tension between genuine, sustained African and North African presence in Europe and periodic, sometimes violent efforts to remove or exclude that presence, this course will trace repeatedly across the many centuries and countries that follow.
