GRANADA

GRANADA. Located in the southeastern sector of the Iberian Peninsula, the city of Granada lies in the northern foothills of the Sierra Nevada, some sixty kilometers from the Mediterranean. It rose to prominence in the mid-thirteenth century as capital of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, the last surviving state of medieval Al-Andalus or Islamic Iberia. During the latter half of the fifteenth century, Granada faced growing internal instability and the increasing militancy of its northern neighbor, the Christian kingdom of Castile.

Granada's capitulation in 1492 to the forces of Ferdinand V and Isabella I (ruled 1474–1504), king and queen of Aragón and Castile, signaled the end of independent Muslim power on the Iberian Peninsula. Though the treaty of surrender guaranteed Granadans their traditional religion, forced conversions in 1499 drove the Muslim community to insurrection. The crown responded by rescinding the treaty and demanding mass baptisms. By 1501 the city's Muslim population—estimated at fifty thousand souls in 1492—either emigrated to North Africa or became Moriscos (Muslim converts to Christianity). Thousands of "Old Christian" newcomers from southern and central Castile soon replaced the émigrés. By 1561, immigrants to the city numbered around thirty thousand, perhaps twice the dwindling Morisco population. Both Moriscos and immigrants found employment in Granada's lucrative silk industry. Granadan Moriscos dyed the raw silk produced by rural Morisco peasants; immigrants, however, dominated the weaving process. Merchants—often Genoese—exported raw silk to textile centers in the Castilian interior and finished cloth to Italy, North Africa, Flanders, and the Americas.

New local and national institutions marked Granada's incorporation into the crown of Castile and signaled the city's rising national stature. Internal security and coastal defenses were the province of the captain general, headquartered in the Alhambra, Granada's famed medieval Muslim fortress. The 1505 transfer to Granada of the Chancillería, one of two permanent high courts of appeal, established the city as one of Castile's principal bureaucratic centers. A new municipal council, chaired by a royal representative, the corregidor, governed civic affairs. Two council members represented Granada at the Castilian Cortes, a parliamentary body representing a select group of prominent cities. Granadans' spiritual welfare was the province of the Roman Catholic Church, led by the archbishop and the cathedral chapter. The crown exercised unusual control over church appointments in Granada through its Real Patronato, a papal concession of 1486 later extended to all of Spanish America.

These new institutions joined in converting and acculturating the subject Morisco population. In 1567, however, the Catholic authorities' growing intolerance of Morisco rejections of Castilian culture and religion resulted in stringent laws against Morisco cultural practices. The desperate Morisco revolt of 1568 was quelled with equal violence and forced resettlements to the Castilian interior. The expulsions reduced Granada's population by a third, devastated the silk industry, and exacerbated Granada's share of the general economic troubles of late sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Europe. Seville, gateway to the Americas, soon surpassed Granada in population, prosperity, and prominence, and Granada was relegated to only regional importance for the remainder of the early modern period.

GRANADA

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