7

The Naṣrids or Banu ’l-Aḥmar

629–897/1232–1492

Granada

After the Almohads (see below, no. 15) were defeated in Spain, most of the Muslim towns fell speedily into Christian hands: Cordova fell in 633/1236 and Seville in 646/1248. One Muslim chief, Muḥammad (I) al-Ghālib, who claimed descent from a Medinan Companion of the Prophet, managed to gain control of the mountainous and thus defensible extreme south of the Iberian peninsula covering the present provinces of Granada, Málaga and Almería with parts of Cádiz, Jaén and Murcia. He made Granada his capital and its citadel, known as the Alhambra (al-Ḥamrā’‘the Red [fortress]’), his centre, agreeing to pay pañasor tribute first to Ferdinand III of Castile and León and then to his successor Alfonso X. The Naṣrid sultans were rivals with the Marmids of Morocco (see below, no. 16) for control of the Straits of Gibraltar, and Muḥammad I and Muḥammad V actually controlled Ceuta during 705–9/1305–9 and 786–9/1384–7, minting coins there. But they eventually had to seek help from the Marīnids against pressure from the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragön; yet Muslim hopes of successful Marīnid intervention in the Iberian peninsula were dashed when the Marinīd sultan Abu ’1 Hasan ‘Alī and the Naṣrid sultan Yūsuf I were defeated by the Castilians and Portuguese at the battle of Tarifa (known in Christian sources as that of the Rio Salado) in 741/1340.

Despite its precarious position, partly because of instability and disturbances within the kingdom of Castile-Léon, the Naṣrid sultanate remained for two and a half centuries a centre for Islamic civilisation, attracting scholars and literary men from all over the Muslim West. The historian Ibn Khaldūn served as a diplomat for Muḥammad V on a mission to Pedro I of Castile at Seville, and in the vizier Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb, whose history of Granada is a source of prime importance, Naṣrid Granada produced a major literary figure. But in the fifteenth century the internal unity of Granada was impaired by internecine rivalries among the ruling family, aided and abetted by powerful families like that of the Banu ’1-Sarrāj (the ‘Abencerrajes’). The marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragön (subsequently Ferdinand V of Castile-Aragon) to Isabella of Castile in 1469 brought about the unification of the greater part of Christian Spain under one crown, and the prospects for the sultanate’s survival darkened. Dynastic strife grew worse under the last Naṣrids, until in 897/1492 Granada was handed over to the Christians by Muḥammad XII (Boabdil), who remained as lord of Mondújar and the Alpujarras for one year and some months before crossing over to Morocco.

The history and the chronology of the last Naṣrid amīrs are extremely confused; where Christian era dates alone are given in the above list of rulers, this indicates that the chronology has to be constructed from Christian sources alone and that regnal dates are not provided by the Arabic ones.

Lane-Poole, 28–9; Zambaur, 58–9; Album, 15.

The lists of Lane-Poole and Zambaur are, in our present state of knowledge, very inaccurate and misleading. See now EI² ‘Nasrids’ (J. D. Latham), with a much more accurate chronology, utilising the standard histories of Rachel Arié, L’Espagne musulmane au temps des Naṣrides (1232–1492), enlarged 2nd edn, Paris 1990, with table after plate XII; eadem, El reino naṣrí de Granada, Madrid 1992; and L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain 1250–1500, Chicago and London 1990, with tables at pp. 17–19.

F. Codera y Zaydín, Tratado de numismática arábigo-española, Madrid 1879.

A. Vives y Escudero, Monedas de las dinastías arábigo-españolas, Madrid 1893.

H. W. Hazard, The Numismatic History of Late Medieval North Africa, 84–5, 228, 279, 285 (for coins minted by the Naṣrids at Ceuta).

M. A. Ladero Quesada, Granada, historia de un país islámico (1232–1571), 2nd edn, Madrid 1979.

J. J. Rodriguez Lorente, Numismática nasrí, Madrid 1983.