This volume introduces the reader to an Islamic space within the late-medieval West that is little known and extraordinarily attractive. The Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (1232–1492), the last remnant of al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula, has normally merited brief mentions as an active part of the Mediterranean scene at the end of the Middle Ages; it has also played the lead role in specific studies of some facet of its historical reality. For example, it has famously earned a place in general works on the art of Western Islam, which harbors some of its most brilliant manifestations. But it has rarely enjoyed a general treatment that encompassed a total, broad, and deep view of the Nasrid world as a historic society. Few scholars have ventured to situate it within the complex Islamic societies of the late-medieval Mediterranean and the varied phenomena of their evolution. And even fewer have offered a thorough appreciation of the multiform character of this society: suspended between two worlds, still steeped in the essence of medieval Islam but also fully launched on a journey to the Modern Age, open to interchange, and invaded by principles alien to its nature that initiated its evolution. The first monographs that adopted this approach were the fundamental works of Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada (1969) and Rachel Arié (1973), together with collected volumes such as those edited by María Jesús Viguera Molíns (2000) and Rafael Peinado Santaella (2000).
We hope that the present multifaceted examination of the Nasrid kingdom through its politics, society, economics, and culture will help readers to perceive it as a hybrid society that was extraordinarily dynamic: still strongly marked by its Islamic essence but well integrated into its own time and space, in full transition to the Early Modern Age, and deeply influenced by its interactions with the Latin Mediterranean world. Although it was the last Muslim territory in the Iberian Peninsula, it was by no means either isolated or wholly oriented toward the rest of the Islamic world – though of course that world provided it with significant support at every level. The Nasrid kingdom also maintained fundamental relationships with its neighbors in the Latin West, interactions that played out in the political, diplomatic, economic, and cultural spheres.
The Nasrids’ special relationships with nearby Christian states may have accelerated certain transformations of their late Andalusi society toward more highly evolved forms. One of the most interesting features of the kingdom’s history is how it reveals certain dynamics or factors of change, the tensions and adaptations characteristic of a society in transition. That may be, in fact, the most important role that this small state played in the history of al-Andalus. It was not, as many interpretations would have it, a mere end-point or shadow of Andalusi society, an anomaly that represented the decadence of an entire age and culture. This impression needs to be corrected by emphasizing the role of this space in the context of the change and evolution being experienced by Western Islamic societies at the end of the Middle Ages.
Such a society, in all its manifestations, underwent transitions of enormous complexity that we cannot apprehend without a rich and varied series of approaches. Research into the Nasrid world has managed to convert into a strength what seemed to be one of its great weaknesses: its paucity of written sources in comparison to other sociopolitical entities of the time, both Islamic and Christian. “Nasrid studies” has become an ample and multidisciplinary area of historiography in recent years, leading Hispanic medievalism in general, and studies of Andalusi Islam in particular, in theoretical and methodological innovation. This renewal of methodology has favored combined systems of analysis. Of course written documentation provides important information, as we see in the contributions of Francisco Vidal Castro on Arabic sources and Raúl González Arévalo on Christian ones. But it is increasingly joined by other modes of information, such as anthropological analysis: beginning with reflections on the Islamic nature of Andalusi society by Pierre Guichard, who offers us a splendid general Introduction here, it also underlies the contributions by Amalia Zomeño and Bilal Sarr on the composition of Nasrid society and its internal functioning. Finally there is archaeology, which has developed in recent years within Nasrid studies: in the present volume Alberto García Porras offers us an overview, while Antonio Malpica Cuello analyzes patterns of settlement within the territory and the evolution of the Alhambra as a populated space. Here we expand these diverse ways of approaching a bygone society through a series of studies that not only covers all the manifestations of the Nasrid world but also embodies the many ways in which they have been developed and encompassed through scholarship.
In planning the makeup of this volume we have made choices that we must now clarify for the reader. We wish to offer a general frame of reference by placing the Nasrid kingdom in its political, institutional, and juridical contexts, explored respectively in the essays by Bárbara Boloix Gallardo, Antonio Peláez Rovira, and Amalia Zomeño. Roser Salicrú i Lluch illustrates the kingdom’s firm insertion into a dynamic international sphere, whose economic development is explored by Adela Fábregas; Daniel Baloup studies its ambivalent relationships with the convergent interests of other Mediterranean powers, and the territorial and ideological struggle that marked its relations with Castile. In fact this last relationship, based on a territorial conflict, would determine the kingdom’s end when Castile conquered it at the end of the Middle Ages. Nasrid society also had to be placed in its proper cultural context: María Dolores Rodríguez Gómez describes its intellectual development, Expiración García Sánchez its achievements in science, Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza its brilliant art and architecture, and José Miguel Puerta Vílchez its splendid literature. We focus on the latest advances in research in which, in recent years, other fields of study have offered new paths and methodologies that have enriched Nasrid studies. Having established the general framework that situates the Nasrid kingdom within late-medieval Mediterranean societies, we then turn to research into its material dimension: Antonio Malpica explores the archaeology of landscape, Christine Mazzoli-Guintard the urban spaces that loom so large in Nasrid society, María Elena Díez Jorge its inhabitants’ daily lives, and Alberto García Porras its material culture.
Of course, if we are to understand a transitional society like this one we must also look at the reverse of the medal: how it confronted the definitive, traumatic step of a new historical reality, brought about by a process of conquest and submission. As Rafael Peinado describes Castile’s imposition on the former Nasrids, it presupposed a fundamental transformation into a new society, evoked in all its complexity by Ángel Galán Sánchez. In a decisive epilogue, a new ideological identity arose through religious conversion: Gerard Wiegers describes all of the resistances and distortions that it produced. All these essays provide us with essential keys for understanding not only the fundamentals of the Nasrid world but also the roads it traveled toward its final dissolution.
The preparation of this volume has required much time, labor, and enthusiasm from all the participants involved. Our first contacts with Brill and our editors there, Kathy van Vliet and Jorik Groen, took place in 2016. From the first moment, the opportunity to make a work on the Nasrid kingdom of Granada available to a broad public was enormously attractive, and has received the publisher’s help and support throughout. Our translator of the Spanish and French texts and editor of the English ones, Consuelo López-Morillas, performed the difficult work that resulted in this elegant English version. But the project could never have come to fruition without the wisdom, generosity, and patience of this large group of authors, who took up the challenge of presenting to interested readers the Nasrid kingdom in every manifestation of its corner of the medieval Islamic world, through reflections drawn from their own research. Our deepest gratitude and respect for their valuable work goes to them all. The efforts of so many have resulted in a magnificent volume that, we trust, will situate this small Islamic Mediterranean state in the place it deserves within medieval studies.
Adela Fábregas
Granada, 26 May 2020