Emirate of Granada

What was left

Drafted from Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (1990)formation

The middle of the thirteenth century removed al-Andalus. Cordoba fell to Castile in 1236, Valencia to Aragon in 1238, Seville in 1248; Portugal took the Algarve. Within about twenty years, five centuries of Muslim rule over most of the peninsula was reduced to one emirate in the south-east corner.

What survived is the subject here, and the manner of its founding is the thing to understand about it.

Muhammad ibn Yusuf ibn Nasr, called Ibn al-Ahmar, was a minor commander from Arjona proclaimed in 1232 in the confusion that followed the Almohad collapse in al-Andalus. He was one of several claimants in a fragmented country, and what distinguished him was neither descent nor doctrine — he claimed descent from the Ansar of Medina and made no caliphal claim at all — but judgement about what was possible.

He moved his capital to Granada in 1238 because it was defensible, distant from the Castilian frontier and near the sea. In 1246 he accepted vassalage to Ferdinand III of Castile and agreed an annual tribute. And in 1248 he sent Granadan troops to help Ferdinand besiege Seville, which was held by other Muslims.

That is a hard sentence and it should not be softened. It is also the reason there was an emirate at all. The alternatives available in 1246 were submission on terms or conquest without them, and every other Andalusi ruler who chose differently was gone within a generation. Ibn al-Ahmar bought two hundred and fifty years with a tribute and a contingent of troops.

What he bought them for is what follows. The territory — roughly the modern provinces of Granada, Málaga and Almería — was mountain country with a fertile coastal strip, hard to invade and easy to hold, and it filled up with refugees from everywhere else. A small state became one of the most densely populated in Europe, perhaps three hundred thousand people, because it was the only place left to go.

How Granada was assembled

Drafted from al-Makkari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (1843)expansion

Al-Maqqari, writing in the seventeenth century, gives the founding of the emirate in Ibn Khaldun's words, and what the passage records is not a conquest. It is forty years of a man changing sides at the right moment.

The family were from Arjona, a castle in the district of Cordoba. Their ancestors had been army officers, known locally as the Banu Nasr; they traced their genealogy to Sa'd ibn Ubada, a Companion of the Prophet and lord of the Khazraj. When the Almohads began to fail, and members of the Almohad royal family were handing their castles to the Christian king, Muhammad ibn Yusuf had himself proclaimed sultan of al-Andalus in 1231.

Then he had the Friday prayer said in the name of somebody else.

Four allegiances in five years

The name he ordered mentioned in the public prayers, as Commander of the Faithful, was that of Abu Zakariya at Tunis — the Hafsid who had just kept Ifriqiya out of the Almohad wreck. A man with a castle in Andalusia was borrowing the credit of a governor at the far end of North Africa who had himself seceded eighteen months earlier.

Jaén and Jerez submitted the following year. In 1233, hearing that his rival Ibn Hud had received a favourable answer from Baghdad, Ibn al-Ahmar sent in his allegiance to Ibn Hud instead. Then Seville revolted from Ibn Hud under a local notable, and Ibn al-Ahmar allied with him, gave him a daughter in marriage, promised to defend him on condition of vassalage — and entered Seville as its lord in 1234. In due course he had the man seized and put to death, through an agent he sent for the purpose. One month later Seville went back to Ibn Hud and threw his troops out.

Meanwhile he had made an alliance with Ferdinand III of Castile against Ibn Hud, and received occasional Castilian troops. Ibn Hud, to break that up, offered Ferdinand thirty castles on his own western frontier if the king would drop Ibn al-Ahmar and help him take Cordoba. The offer was accepted and the castles handed over. Cordoba fell to Castile in 1236 — may God restore it to Islam, the text adds — and Ibn al-Ahmar co-operated with his forces at the siege of Seville in 1248.

What he was assembling

Granada itself came by conspiracy rather than by siege. A friend of his inside the city raised the citizens against Ibn Hud, got Ibn al-Ahmar proclaimed, and rode to Jaén to offer him their allegiance. He sent an advance force, followed with the rest of the army, took up residence, and built the fortress of the Alhambra to live in.

Málaga followed soon after. Almería came in 1245, handed over by Ibn Hud's own vizier, who had seized it. Lorca sent its allegiance in 1264. Every one of those acquisitions is a defection managed, not a town stormed.

By the end the Muslim population of Spain had been driven onto the coastal strip between Ronda in the west and Almería in the east — twenty stages long, Ibn Khaldun measures it, and one stage or less from the sea to the northern frontier. Ibn al-Ahmar, the passage says plainly, then grew angry and tried to recover the rest of the island, and found it too difficult.

The thing he built instead

What he had instead was North Africa on call. In 1261 the sultan of the far Maghreb sent three thousand warriors under a standing agreement; when they went home others crossed in their place, continually, until Ibn al-Ahmar died in 1272.

That is the machine. A strip of coast one day's march deep, a genealogy running to a Companion of the Prophet, a Castilian alliance renewed whenever Castile was the greater danger, and a rotating corps of Berber volunteers paid for out of silk. It held for two hundred and fifty years, and every part of it was assembled by a man from a small castle who was never, in any year of his life, the strongest party at the table.

A tributary that worked

Drafted from Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (1990)peak

The emirate paid tribute to a Christian kingdom for most of its existence and was, for much of that time, richer per head than the kingdom it paid.

The reason is silk. The sierras behind Granada and Almería were the largest silk-producing region in Europe, and the emirate's economy was built on it: mulberry, worms, spinning and weaving in the towns, and export through Málaga and Almería to Genoese buyers who had permanent factories in both. Granada exported dried fruit and sugar as well, and the ports handled the North African trade. The state taxed all of it, and the tribute to Castile — which was frequently in arrears and periodically renegotiated — was payable out of customs rather than out of the peasantry.

The politics were played with equal care. Granada survived by being useful and by never being worth the cost of conquering. It fought for Castile against Muslims when required and against Castile when Castile was distracted; it invited North African intervention when it needed leverage and expelled the North Africans when they became a threat; and it exploited every Castilian minority, succession dispute and civil war for two and a half centuries. The emirs were also, several of them, personally close to Castilian kings — Muhammad V spent part of his exile at the court of Pedro the Cruel and returned with Castilian help, and the Alcázar Pedro built at Seville was decorated by craftsmen from Granada in the Granadan manner.

The high point is the second reign of Muhammad V, from 1362 to 1391. Diplomacy that kept both Castile and Fez at arm's length, a court that produced Ibn al-Khatib — vizier, physician, historian, and one of the finest prose writers in Arabic — and his student and successor Ibn Zamrak, whose poems are carved on the walls of the Alhambra.

This is the part of the emirate's history the phrase "the last remnant" makes invisible. Granada was not a survival waiting to end. It was a functioning state with a specialised export economy, a professional diplomatic service and a cultural output that its neighbours imitated, and it behaved like one for ten generations.

The king's mother sent me some dinars

Drafted from Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Batuta (1829)peak

In 1350 the most travelled man in the world came to Granada, and the king would not see him.

Ibn Battuta had been to Mecca, Iraq, Persia, the Swahili coast, Anatolia, the Golden Horde, Constantinople, India — where he sat as a judge for the sultan of Delhi — the Maldives, Ceylon, Bengal, Sumatra and China, and had lived through the Black Death at Damascus on the way home. He crossed from Gibraltar into what was left of Muslim Spain, and his account of the last Islamic kingdom in Europe is four paragraphs long.

What he says about the city

I then went to Granada, the chief city of Andalusia, which, for its structures and suburbs is unequalled in the whole world.

It is divided by the river, he writes, and besides the river there are many other streams, and cisterns, gardens, orchards and palaces surrounding it on every side. That is the whole description. A man who had written pages on Delhi and Kilwa and the Maldives gives the Alhambra's city one sentence of praise and moves on.

What he says about the court

The King of Granada was at this time Abu'l-Walid Yusuf ibn Nasir. I never met him, on account of a disease under which he then laboured. His noble and excellent mother, however, sent me some dinars for my support.

Yusuf I was the sultan who built the Comares palace and the Gate of Justice, and he is the reason the Alhambra looks the way it does. He was assassinated four years after this, and his son Muhammad V finished the work.

What Ibn Battuta records is a sick king who did not receive the most famous traveller in Islam, and a queen mother who sent money to the visitor anyway. That is a functioning court doing the correct thing with a diminished head, which is roughly the Nasrid method for two and a half centuries, seen for a moment from the doorway.

The poet from the desert

The thing he actually wanted to write about was a young man he met among the scholars of the city.

Abu Ja'far Ahmad ibn Ridwan al-Judhami had been brought up in a desert and had never studied or given himself any trouble about learning, and yet produced poetry so good as scarcely to be equalled by the most accomplished writers. Ibn Battuta copies out a specimen, and the translator's English of it is Regency rather than Andalusi, but the conceit survives:

Friend, from whom 'tis pain to part, / Take thy station in my heart. / Through my eye, its lucid door, / View the structure o'er and o'er. / There enthroned thou'lt always see / Every chamber filled with thee. / But when from thee, with pain distrest, / I feel the void within my breast, / My vacant eyes too well declare / Their favourite inmate is not there. / But, when thy charms my spirits fill, / I close my lids to keep thee still.

Then he left, went down to Gibraltar, took ship to Ceuta, and was across into Africa. From Granada he travelled to Marrakesh, then to Fez, and then straight out into the Sahara for Mali.

Why the brevity is the point

Granada in 1350 was not a frontier curiosity to a man of Ibn Battuta's world. It was an ordinary Muslim city with a sultan, scholars, a mosque and a court that paid its respects to travellers, and he treats it as such — one stop on a coastal itinerary whose real destinations were elsewhere.

Nothing in the passage suggests that he thought he was visiting a survival. The kingdom he passed through had a hundred and forty-two years left, and to a Moroccan of the fourteenth century the interesting question about al-Andalus was not whether it would last but who in Fez would be paying for its defence next season.

The palace with the writing on it

Drafted from Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (1990)aside?What aside means

The Alhambra is the best-preserved medieval Islamic palace complex in the world, and it was built by a tributary state in its last century and a half.

Ibn al-Ahmar began the citadel on the Sabika hill in the 1230s. The buildings that draw four million visitors a year are later: the Comares palace and the great gate under Yusuf I in the 1330s and 1340s, and the Court of the Lions under Muhammad V after 1362. It is a complex of courts, chambers and gardens built of brick, timber, plaster and tile — cheap materials, worked to an extraordinary standard — with water running through it as an organising element rather than an ornament.

The feature that belongs in a political history rather than an architectural one is the writing. The Alhambra is covered in inscriptions: Qur'anic verses, the Nasrid motto, and — unusually — a great deal of original poetry, much of it by Ibn Zamrak, the court poet of Muhammad V, composed for the specific room it is carved in. The fountain in the Court of the Lions has a poem on its basin that describes the fountain. The walls of a palace state, in verse, what the palace is for and who built it.

Two things follow.

The first is about scale, and it is sharper here than almost anywhere. The emirate was a tributary of a larger kingdom for two hundred and fifty years and never held more than a corner of one peninsula. Measured by territory, by population, by armies, by anything a chancery would have counted, it is negligible — and it produced the building that more people now travel to see than anything else the medieval Islamic world put up.

The second is about what the building was doing. A dynasty that paid tribute, sent troops to its overlord's sieges and could not have won a war against Castile in any year of its existence built a palace whose entire vocabulary is sovereignty: the throne room facing the Christian frontier, the inscriptions naming the emir as victorious, the motto — wa la ghaliba illa Allah, there is no conqueror but God — repeated thousands of times across the walls.

That motto is usually read as piety. Read it in the political situation it was carved into and it is also an argument: that the emirate's weakness relative to Castile settles nothing, because conquest is not what confers right. It is the most articulate thing a small state ever carved into a wall about being one.

The help that stopped coming

Drafted from Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (1990)contraction

Granada's survival strategy had two legs. One was managing Castile. The other was North Africa, and it was cut off in a single afternoon in 1340.

The Marinids of Fez were the last North African power to take the Iberian frontier seriously, and for most of the fourteenth century Granada used them. Zanata Berber volunteers, the ghuzat, crossed the strait to serve in the emirate's armies under their own commander; Marinid armies crossed when the emirate could persuade them that Islam in the peninsula required it; and the mere possibility of a Marinid landing was a card Granada played in every negotiation with Castile.

It was also a danger. The ghuzat were a foreign corps with its own shaykh and its own loyalties, and more than one emir found them backing his rivals. Every state that has hired an outside army for its frontier has run the same risk, from Baghdad's Turkish guard onward; here it went wrong less catastrophically and for the same reasons.

In October 1340, at the Salado river near Tarifa, a combined Castilian and Portuguese army with volunteers from across Europe destroyed a joint Marinid and Granadan force. Alfonso XI followed it by taking Algeciras in 1344. The Marinids never mounted another serious expedition to the peninsula, and after Rio Salado no North African power did.

The consequence took a century and a half to arrive and was decisive when it did. From 1340 Granada was alone: one small state, on one frontier, against a neighbour four or five times its size, with no possibility of a second front and no ally who could reach it. That it lasted another hundred and fifty-two years is the strongest evidence for how well the first leg of the strategy worked.

The other thing that changed is harder to date and shows in the fifteenth century. Granada's internal politics became lethal — the Banu Sarraj faction and its rivals, emirs deposed and restored, sultans blinded, the court divided into parties that each sought Castilian backing. A state whose entire security rested on unified diplomacy toward one neighbour began negotiating with that neighbour in two or three voices at once.

The weathercock

Drafted from al-Makkari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (1843)contraction

The historians of Granada, al-Maqqari says, recorded a great many warnings, and the ruin of the kingdom was announced more than once. He is not endorsing the omens. He is doing what a seventeenth-century Maghribi scholar does with a catastrophe in the recent past: collecting what the people who lived through it said about it afterwards.

The talisman

He had read, in the handwriting of a historian from Guadix who lived at Tlemcen, an account he says he vouches for. A jurist told the historian that he had been present when they took down the talisman known as the weathercock from the top of the old citadel at Granada, during repairs, and had seen it with his own eyes. It was heptagonal, and carried a verse:

The palace at fair Granada presents to the eye of the observer a talisman turning round with the succession of time. The horseman on its weathercock, although a solid body, turns with every wind. This, to the wise man, reveals many a mystery. Indeed, after subsisting a short time, a calamity will come which shall ruin both the palace and its owner.

A city that told itself its own fortress was inscribed with a prophecy of its fall was a city that had understood its position. The verse is not a prediction of 1492. It is a description of a state that had lived for two centuries on turning with every wind.

The review, and the river

Abu'l-Hasan Ali came to the throne after a civil war with his brother al-Zaghal, made war on the Christians, took several castles, and was feared and sued for peace. His armies grew and he decided to review them. He had his architects build him a platform outside the Alhambra, and the troops passed in front of him daily from the twenty-fourth of March 1478 until the review was finished a month later — armour polished, silk robes, fast horses, swords and spears and shields inlaid with gold and silver.

One day while the sultan sat under his pavilion and the troops filed past, with the slope and the crest of the Sabika hill crowded with people who had come out to watch, the rain came down in torrents and the Darro burst its banks. The flood came off the mountains carrying boulders and whole trees, and took houses, shops, mills, inns, markets, bridges and garden walls with it. The water reached the square where the great mosque stood. Nothing like it had been seen in that country, and the people took it for the harbinger of what was coming.

Set the two halves of that day beside each other and the fifteenth century is in them: the largest army the emirate could put on parade, and a river that did not care.

What actually went wrong

Al-Maqqari's source is unsparing about the rest, and it is not weather. The Castilian nobles fell out among themselves, one seizing Cordoba, another Seville, another Jerez — and instead of profiting from it, the sultan gave himself to pleasure, handed the government to his viziers, hid himself from his subjects, let the army lose its discipline, imposed new taxes, and had several of his best generals executed on the theory that the Christians were too busy to attack him. Then the king of Castile finished his civil war, brought the rebellious nobles to heel, and was free.

The last thing to go was the family. Abu'l-Hasan had two sons by his cousin and wife, and another wife he doted on, a Christian, who had also borne him children. The court divided into a party for each set of sons. The truce ran out while they were arguing.

Everything in that paragraph had been survivable before. Granada had spent ten generations trading on the fact that Castile was always divided and always distracted. In the 1470s Castile stopped being either, and the emirate chose that decade to be both.

1492

Drafted from Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (1990)end

The marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469, and their joint accession, removed the thing Granada had lived on for two and a half centuries: a divided Christian Spain that could always be played against itself.

The war began in 1482 with a Castilian raid on Alhama, and in the same months Muhammad XII — Boabdil in the Castilian sources — rose against his own father. The emirate spent the following decade fighting Castile and itself simultaneously, with Ferdinand and Isabella negotiating separately with the rival claimants and supporting whichever was weaker. Boabdil was captured in 1483 and released on terms that made him a Castilian client, which destroyed his standing among his own people and was presumably the point.

The war was fought town by town with artillery, and it was expensive and slow. Málaga held out through the summer of 1487 and was punished for it: the population was killed or enslaved, and towns afterwards surrendered faster, which was the intention. Almería and Guadix went in 1489. Granada city was invested through 1491 and negotiated its surrender in November; Boabdil handed over the Alhambra on 2 January 1492.

The terms were generous on paper. The Capitulations guaranteed the Muslim population its religion, its law, its property, its language and its customs. They were kept for about seven years, and what happened after that is not part of the emirate's history but of its aftermath.

Columbus sailed in August 1492 under a commission granted at Santa Fe — the camp outside Granada that had been built for the siege — by monarchs who had spent ten years and their whole treasury taking this emirate and who signed his contract in the months after it fell. The two events are usually filed in different histories. They happened in the same place, in the same year, to the same budget.

Palaces in imitation of Granada

Drafted from al-Makkari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (1843)afterlife

Al-Maqqari finished his great book on al-Andalus in Cairo in the 1630s, a hundred and forty years after the country he was writing about ceased to exist. He was born at Tlemcen. He had never seen Granada and never would. The last pages of the work are the nearest thing there is to a report on what happened to the people afterwards, written by someone who went and looked at part of it.

Boabdil at Fez

The terms of the surrender assigned the deposed sultan the Alpujarras, and he went to live at Andarax. Some time later the king of Castile used a stratagem to get him out of Spain: he pretended that Abu Abdallah had expressed a wish to leave, and wrote to the governor of Almería instructing that nobody hinder Muley Abu Abdallah from sailing to whichever African port he liked best, and that everyone who read the letter should facilitate his passage and observe the treaty towards him.

He took the hint, embarked at Almería, and landed at Melilla. He had meant to settle at Marrakesh, and on landing heard that the country there was suffering famine and pestilence, so he went to Fez instead. There, complaining of his luck and regretting the kingdom he had lost, he settled with his family, and built himself some palaces in imitation of those of Granada.

Al-Maqqari saw them. Which we ourselves saw and visited during our residence in that city.

He died at Fez in 940 of the Hijra and was buried outside the gate of the law. He left two sons. When al-Maqqari was in Fez in 1037 of the Hijra he was acquainted with some of their descendants, who were living on the charitable allowances made to the poor out of the funds of the mosques, and who were, he writes, nothing more than mere beggars.

The hundred and twenty years in between

The Capitulations guaranteed the population its religion, its law, its property and its customs. Within seven years the Christians had begun infringing them one by one, and by 1498 were compelling conversions — the most plausible pretext being that their priests had written books on the propriety of forcing Christians who had become Muslims back to their former religion. Then the argument was extended: thy ancestor was a Christian, although he made himself a Muslim; thou must also become a Christian.

The Albaicín rose and killed its magistrates, which supplied the excuse for the next measure: a law condemning to death anyone who revolted against his magistrates, unless he immediately became a Christian. Every Muslim in Granada and its neighbourhood was ordered to convert within a fixed time. Those who refused took up arms in the villages and were hunted down and almost exterminated, except for a group who fortified themselves on a mountain, won a battle there and killed the lord of Cordoba, and were granted terms: they could cross to Fez with their families and their movable property, but might carry no more money than the journey required.

Those who stayed were Christians in appearance and not in their hearts. They prayed and performed their ablutions at the proper hours in secret, and were watched with the greatest vigilance, and many were discovered and burnt. They were forbidden weapons, and then any sharp instrument made of iron, down to small knives.

Where they went

The final expulsion, al-Maqqari writes, happened in our own time, in 1610. Many thousands went to Fez; thousands crossed from Oran to Tlemcen; the greater part took the road to Tunis.

Few reached where they were going. They were set upon and robbed on the road, especially on the roads to Fez and Tlemcen. Those who made for Tunis mostly arrived safely, and repopulated empty towns and districts there, and also Tetouan, Salé and the plain of the Mitidja near Algiers. Some took service with the sultan of Morocco, who formed them into a body and gave them the port of Salé — where, al-Maqqari notes, they have since made themselves famous by their naval expeditions, and have fortified the castle and built themselves houses, palaces and baths, and are living there still. A few went on to Constantinople, Egypt and Syria.

God, the passage ends, is master of all lands and dominions, and gives them to whomever he pleases.

What was left in the ground

The Alhambra was not destroyed. The Christian king ordered repairs to it and to the other fortresses immediately after the surrender, came up to it daily during the work, and went back down to his camp every night until he stopped being afraid of the townspeople. It has been maintained by whoever held Granada ever since, which is why the best-preserved medieval Islamic palace in the world is in a country that spent the next century removing every other trace of the people who built it.