Completion of the Reconquista — Fall of Granada
Granada surrendered on 2 January 1492, ending 780 years of Muslim rule in the Iberian peninsula. The Emirate of Granada was the last of it, a mountainous strip along the southern coast that had survived for two and a half centuries after the great Castilian conquests of the thirteenth century by paying tribute, exploiting Castilian civil wars, and being difficult country to invade. Its end came when Castile and Aragon were united and at peace and could concentrate on it for ten years — a war of sieges and artillery, funded partly by the church, in which the towns were taken one at a time from 1482. The emirate helped by fighting itself: Boabdil rebelled against his father, was captured by the Castilians, and was released as a vassal to make the civil war worse. The terms of surrender were generous on paper. The Capitulations guaranteed Muslims their religion, mosques, law, property and language. They were kept for about seven years. Forced conversions began in 1499 under Cardinal Cisneros, produced a revolt, and were followed by an edict in 1502 requiring the Muslims of Castile to convert or leave, and the descendants of the converts were expelled from Spain entirely between 1609 and 1614. Columbus was at the camp of Santa Fe outside Granada and watched the surrender, and his commission followed within months. The word reconquista is a nineteenth-century coinage, and the idea of an eight-century national project was assembled long afterwards from what was mostly ordinary frontier warfare between shifting alliances.
- Year: 1492 CE
- Category: Military
