Yusuf III
Yusuf III ruled the last Muslim state in Spain for nine years and spent them losing ground slowly enough to be called a success. Granada by his accession was a tributary of Castile occupying the mountainous south-east corner of the peninsula, and had been for a century and a half. It survived on three things: terrain that made invasion expensive, tribute paid to Castile to make invasion unattractive, and the chronic instability of Castile itself, which was usually too busy with its own succession disputes to finish the job. He inherited a war. The Castilian regent Fernando de Antequera took Zahara and then Antequera itself in 1410 after a five-month siege - the most serious loss Granada had suffered in generations, and the reason the regent took the name. Yusuf then did the thing his dynasty was good at: he bought a truce, paid the tribute, and waited. Fernando became king of Aragon in 1412 and left Castilian politics to a minority and its factions, and Granada was left alone for the rest of Yusuf's life. The tribute is the structure of the whole arrangement and worth stating plainly: Granada paid Castile to be left alone, in gold that came largely from the trans-Saharan trade through its ports, and the payment was suspended whenever Castile was weak and resumed whenever it was not. War came when a Castilian ruler needed a victory more than the money. He was also a poet, and an anthologist of the poetry of his own dynasty, which is not incidental - the Nasrid court sustained a literary and architectural culture through two centuries of tributary decline, and the Alhambra was largely built by rulers paying protection money to Castile. The emirate outlived him by seventy-five years and fell in 1492.
- Lived: 1376 CE – 1417 CE
- Nationality: Andalusi
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
