From Muslim To Christian Granada

Honorable Mention, 2010 Best First Book, Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies In 1492, Granada, the last independent Muslim city on the Iberian Peninsula, fell to the Catholic forces of Ferdinand and Isabella. A century later, in 1595, treasure hunters unearthed some curious lead tablets inscribed in Arabic. The tablets documented the evangelization of Granada in the first century A.D. by St. Cecilio, the city’s first bishop. Granadinos greeted these curious documents, known as the plomos, and the human remains accompanying them as proof that their city—best known as the last outpost of Spanish Islam—was in truth Iberia’s most ancient Christian settlement. Critics, however, pointed to the documents’ questionable doctrinal content and historical anachronisms. In 1682, the pope condemned the plomos as forgeries. From Muslim to Christian Granada explores how the people of Granada created a new civic identity around these famous forgeries. Through an analysis of the sermons, ceremonies, histories, maps, and devotions that developed around the plomos, it examines the symbolic and mythological aspects of a new historical terrain upon which Granadinos located themselves and their city. Discussing the ways in which one local community’s collective identity was constructed and maintained, this work complements ongoing scholarship concerning the development of communal identities in modern Europe. Through its focus on the intersections of local religion and local identity, it offers new perspectives on the impact and implementation of Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

Creating Christian Granada provides a richly detailed examination of a critical and transitional episode in Spain's march to global empire. The city of Granada-Islam's final bastion on the Iberian peninsula-surrendered to the control of Spain's "Catholic Monarchs" Isabella and Ferdinand on January 2, 1492. Over the following century, Spanish state and Church officials, along with tens of thousands of Christian immigrant settlers, transformed the formerly Muslim city into a Christian one. With constant attention to situating the Granada case in the broader comparative contexts of the medieval reconquista tradition on the one hand and sixteenth-century Spanish imperialism in the Americas on the other, Coleman carefully charts the changes in the conquered city's social, political, religious, and physical landscapes. In the process, he sheds light on the local factors contributing to the emergence of tensions between the conquerors and Granada's formerly Muslim, "native" morisco community in the decades leading up to the crown-mandated expulsion of most of the city's moriscos in 1569-1570. Despite the failure to assimilate the moriscos, Granada's status as a frontier Christian community under construction fostered among much of the immigrant community innovative religious reform ideas and programs that shaped in direct ways a variety of church-wide reform movements in the era of the ecumenical Council of Trent (1545-1563). Coleman concludes that the process by which reforms of largely Granadan origin contributed significantly to transformations in the Church as a whole forces a reconsideration of traditional "top-down" conceptions of sixteenth-century Catholic reform.

A Companion to Islamic Granada gathers, for the first time in English, a number of essays exploring aspects of the Islamic history of this city from the 8th through the 15th centuries from an interdisciplinary perspective. This collective volume examines the political development of Medieval Gharnāṭa under the rule of different dynasties, drawing on both historiographical and archaeological sources. It also analyses the complexity of its religious and multicultural society, as well as its economic, scientific, and intellectual life. The volume also transcends the year 1492, analysing the development of both the mudejar and the morisco populations and their contribution to Grenadian culture and architecture up to the 17th century. Contributors are: Bárbara Boloix-Gallardo, María Jesús Viguera-Molíns, Alberto García-Porras, Antonio Malpica–Cuello, Bilal Sarr-Marroco, Allen Fromherz, Bernard Vincent, Maribel Fierro–Bello, Ma Luisa Ávila–Navarro, Juan Pedro Monferrer–Sala, José Martínez–Delgado, Luis Bernabé–Pons, Adela Fábregas–García, Josef Ženka, Amalia Zomeño–Rodríguez, Delfina Serrano–Ruano, Julio Samsó–Moya, Celia del Moral-Molina, José Miguel Puerta–Vílchez, Antonio Orihuela–Uzal, Ieva Rėklaitytė, and Rafael López–Guzmán.

To Live Like a Moor traces the many shifts in Christian perceptions of Islam-associated ways of life which took place across the centuries between early Reconquista efforts of the eleventh century and the final expulsions of Spain's converted yet poorly assimilated Morisco population in the seventeenth.

The Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (1232-1492) was the last Islamic state in al-Andalus. It has long been considered a historical afterthought, even an anomaly, but this impression must be rectified: here we place the kingdom in a new context, within the processes of change that were taking place across all Western Islamic societies in the late Middle Ages. Despite being the last Islamic entity in the Iberian Peninsula, Granada was neither isolated nor exclusively associated with the nearest Islamic lands. The special relationship between Nasrid territory and the surrounding Christian states accelerated historical processes of change. This volume edited by Adela Fábregas examines the Nasrid kingdom through its politics, society, economics, and culture. Contributors: Daniel Baloup, Bárbara Boloix-Gallardo, María Elena Díez Jorge, Adela Fábregas, Ángel Galán Sánchez, Alberto García Porras, Expiración García Sánchez, Raúl González Arévalo, Pierre Guichard, Antonio Malpica Cuello, Christine Mazzoli-Guintard, Rafael G. Peinado, Antonio Peláez Rovira, José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, María Dolores Rodríguez-Gómez, Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza, Roser Salicrú i Lluch, Bilal Sarr, Francisco Vidal-Castro, Gerard Wiegers, Amalia Zomeño.

Taking as its main subject a series of notorious forgeries by Muslim converts in sixteenth-century Granada (including an apocryphal gospel in Arabic), this book studies the emotional, cultural and religious world view of the Morisco minority and the complexity of its identity, caught between the wish to respect Arabic cultural traditions, and the pressures of evangelization and efforts at integration into “Old Christian” society. Orientalist scholarship in Early Modern Spain, in which an interest in Oriental languages, mainly Arabic, was linked to important historiographical questions, such as the uses and value of Arabic sources and the problem of the integration of al-Andalus within a providentialist history of Spain, is also addressed. The authors consider these issues not only from a local point of view, but from a wider perspective, in an attempt to understand how these matters related to more general European intellectual and religious developments.

The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain (1609-1614) represents an important episode of ethnic, political and religious cleansing which affected about 300,000 persons. The controversial measure was legimitized by an ideology of religious and political unity that served to defend the expulsion of them all, crypto-Muslims and sincere converts to Christianity alike. The first part focuses on the decision to expel the Moriscos, its historical context and the role of such institutions as the Vatican and the religious orders, and nations such as France, Italy, the Dutch Republic, Morocco and the Ottoman Empire. The second part studies the aftermath of the expulsion, the forced migrations, settlement and Diaspora of the Moriscos, comparing their vicissitudes with that of the Jewish conversos. Contributors are Youssef El Alaoui, Rafael Benítez Sánchez Blanco, Luis Fernando Bernabé Pons, Paulo Broggio, Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra, Antonio Feros, Mercedes García-Arenal, Jorge Gil Herrera,Tijana Krstić, Sakina Missoum, Natalia Muchnik, Stefania Pastore, Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, James B. Tueller, Olatz Villanueva Zubizarreta, Bernard Vincent, and Gerard Wiegers.