Boabdil
Boabdil handed over the keys of Granada in January 1492 and was reproached by his mother for weeping over what he had not defended as a man. He was Muhammad XII of the Nasrid dynasty, and he rebelled against his own father before he was twenty. Captured by the Castilians at Lucena in 1483, he was released on terms that made him their vassal - a calculated move, because a released claimant meant the emirate would go on fighting itself while Ferdinand and Isabella took its towns one at a time. It worked. Granada spent the 1480s in a three-cornered civil war between Boabdil, his father and his uncle, while the Castilian campaign moved through the countryside with artillery and church money, reducing the emirate town by town from 1482. By 1491 he held the city and nothing else. He surrendered it on terms - the Capitulations of Granada - that guaranteed his people their property, their law and their religion. Those terms lasted about seven years. Forced conversion began in 1499, the Alpujarras rose in revolt, and the guarantees were treated as void; the expulsion of the Moriscos followed over the next century. He was given an estate in the Alpujarras, sold it, and crossed to Fez, where he died in about 1533 - by one account fighting in a battle for a sultan who was not his own. The sigh of the Moor, the story of his mother's rebuke at the pass where he looked back, appears in no contemporary source and was written into the romantic literature of the nineteenth century. What is contemporary is the surrender document, and what it promised.
- Lived: 1460 CE – 1533 CE
- Nationality: Andalusi
- Roles: head_of_state
