Reconquista: the Emirate of Granada, the last Moorish stronghold in Spain, surrenders.
The Emirate of Granada (Arabic: , romanized: Imrat arnah), also known as the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (Spanish: Reino Nazar de Granada), was an Islamic realm in southern Iberia during the Late Middle Ages. It was the last independent Muslim state in Western Europe.Muslims had been present in the Iberian Peninsula, which they called Al-Andalus, since the early eighth century. At its greatest geographical extent, Muslim-controlled territory occupied most of the peninsula and part of present-day southern France. From the ninth to the tenth century, under the Caliphate of Crdoba, the region was one of the most prosperous and advanced in Europe. Conflict with the northern Christian kingdoms was recurrent, while mounting civil strife led to a fragmenting of Muslim states in the early eleventh century. This marked a precipitous decline in Muslim power and facilitated the centuries-long Christian Reconquista.
By 1230, the Almohad Caliphate in Morocco ruled the remaining Muslim territories in southern Iberia, which roughly corresponded to the modern Spanish provinces of Granada, Almera, and Mlaga. Exploiting the Almohad's dynastic strife, the ambitious Muhammad ibn al-Ahmar rose to power and established the Nasrid dynasty over these lands. By 1250, the emirate was the last Muslim polity in the peninsula. Although effectively a vassal of the rising Crown of Castile, for over two centuries, Granada enjoyed considerable cultural and economic prosperity; much of the famed Alhambra palace complex was built during this period, and the Nasrids would be the longest-lived Muslim dynasty in Iberia.
Nascent Christian power in Iberia meant that Granada's existence was always precarious. In 1491, after a decade of intermittent warfare known as the Granada War, the emirate was forced to capitulate to the Catholic Monarchs. The following year, Muhammad XII, the last Nasrid ruler of Granada, formally relinquished his sovereignty and surrendered his territories to Castile, eventually moving to North Africa in exile. This marked the end of independent Muslim rule in Iberia.
The Reconquista (Portuguese and Spanish for "reconquest") was a period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula of about 781 years of war between Spanish Christians and Muslims between the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in 711, the expansion of the Christian kingdoms throughout Hispania, and the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada in 1492.
The beginning of the Reconquista is traditionally marked with the Battle of Covadonga (718 or 722), the first known victory in Hispania by Christian military forces since the 711 military invasion undertaken by combined Arab-Berber forces. The rebellion led by Pelagius defeated a Muslim army in the mountains of northern Hispania and established the independent Christian Kingdom of Asturias.In the late 10th century, the Umayyad vizier Almanzor waged military campaigns for 30 years to subjugate the northern Christian kingdoms. His armies ravaged the north, even sacking the great Santiago de Compostela Cathedral. When the government of Córdoba disintegrated in the early 11th century, a series of petty successor states known as taifas emerged. The northern kingdoms took advantage of this situation and struck deep into al-Andalus; they fostered civil war, intimidated the weakened taifas, and made them pay large tributes (parias) for "protection".
After a Muslim resurgence in the 12th century, the great Moorish strongholds in the south fell to Christian forces in the 13th century after the decisive battle of Navas de Tolosa (1212)—Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248—leaving only the Muslim enclave of Granada as a tributary state in the south. After 1492, the entire peninsula was controlled by Christian rulers. The conquest was followed by a series of edicts (1499–1526) which forced the conversions of Muslims in Spain, who were later expelled from the Iberian peninsula by the decrees of King Philip III in 1609. Likewise, on 30 July 1492, all the Jewish community – some 200,000 people – were forcibly expelled.
Beginning in the 19th century, traditional historiography has used the term Reconquista for what was earlier thought of as a restoration of the Visigothic Kingdom over conquered territories. The concept of Reconquista, consolidated in Spanish historiography in the second half of the 19th century, was associated with the development of a Spanish national identity, emphasizing nationalistic and romantic aspects.