The fall of Granada in January 1492 is the conventional date for the end of the Muslim political presence on the Iberian peninsula. The substantive demographic and cultural consequences of the post-1492 period took, however, the next century and a half to work themselves out, ending with the formal expulsion of the Morisco population between 1609 and 1614. The Iberian peninsula's eight-century Muslim presence was, by the second decade of the seventeenth century, substantially terminated. The cultural and demographic recovery from the loss was, for the affected communities, never complete; the al-Andalus tradition that had developed continuously from 711 to 1492 was, after the Morisco expulsion, preserved only in fragments and in the substantial North African diaspora.
The post-conquest century
The surrender of Granada was conducted under terms (the Treaty of Granada, signed 25 November 1491, effective 2 January 1492) that preserved on paper the religious, legal, and cultural rights of the Muslim population. The Muslims of Granada would retain their religious institutions, the use of Arabic in public and private life, their distinctive dress, and their existing legal-economic arrangements. The terms were, in immediate practice, observed by the Castilian administration for about a decade. The substantive change began with the appointment of Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros as Archbishop of Toledo in 1495, with substantial political authority over religious policy.
Cisneros's policy from approximately 1499 onward was the systematic violation of the Treaty of Granada's protections. The principal episodes were the forced public conversions of Muslim leaders in Granada in 1499 (with the burning of Islamic religious books, including substantial portions of the great Granada mosque's library); the suppression of the Muslim revolt of 1499-1501 that this had triggered; the formal decree of February 1502 requiring all Muslims in Castile (which by this date controlled the former Emirate of Granada) to convert to Christianity or leave the kingdom; and the parallel forced conversions in Aragón in 1525-1526. By 1530, the formal Muslim community of Iberia had ceased to exist; the converted population (the so-called Moriscos) was estimated at perhaps three hundred thousand to half a million people.
The Morisco century (1502-1609) was substantially difficult. The Inquisition, established in Castile in 1478, used substantial resources to monitor the religious conformity of the converted Morisco population, with frequent investigations, arrests, and (in particularly egregious cases) executions. The substantial Morisco population of the Albaicín quarter of Granada and the various rural Morisco communities of Andalusia, Valencia, and Aragón continued to practise Islam in private, in many cases, throughout the sixteenth century, with substantial cultural and religious continuity from the pre-1492 period. The Morisco revolt of the Alpujarras (1568-1571), provoked by additional Castilian decrees restricting Morisco cultural practices, was suppressed with substantial brutality.
The final resolution came in 1609. King Philip III of Spain ordered, on the 9th of April 1609, the formal expulsion of all Moriscos from Spain. The expulsion was carried out over the next five years, with about three hundred thousand Moriscos deported to North Africa (principally to Morocco, with smaller communities in Tunis, Algiers, and the Ottoman territories). The Moriscos took with them, in many cases, substantial cultural inheritances of the al-Andalus tradition — including, particularly, the Andalusian musical tradition (which survived continuously in Fez, Tetouan, and Algiers into the contemporary period). The remaining Muslim and Morisco Iberian communities were, by 1614, substantially destroyed.
The Andalusian Jewish community
The substantial Andalusian Jewish community — which had been one of the principal beneficiaries of the cultural and economic prosperity of the Caliphate and the taifa periods — was destroyed in parallel with the Muslim community. The Alhambra Decree of 31 March 1492, issued by Ferdinand and Isabella less than three months after the fall of Granada, gave the Spanish Jewish population four months to either convert to Christianity or leave the kingdom. About 100,000 to 200,000 Sephardic Jews left Spain over the following decade, settling principally in the Ottoman Empire (Salonika, Istanbul, Izmir, Edirne — the Sephardic communities of the Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia preserved their Iberian-derived Judeo-Spanish language, Ladino, for the next four centuries), in North Africa (Fez, Tetouan, Tangier), in Italy (Livorno, Venice), in the Netherlands (Amsterdam after 1600), and elsewhere. The remaining Iberian Jewish population converted to Christianity (the so-called Conversos), with a substantial community continuing in Spain and Portugal until the Spanish Inquisition's systematic operations against them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Sephardic Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire preserved, through the early modern period, substantial cultural inheritances from al-Andalus — including the Andalusian poetic and liturgical traditions, the substantial corpus of Andalusi rabbinic literature, and the Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) language that descended directly from the spoken Castilian of the fifteenth-century Iberian Jewish community. Modern Israeli and global Sephardic Jewish culture preserves substantial elements of this inheritance.
The long Spanish silence
The Spanish national-historical narrative from approximately 1500 to 1850 was substantially built on the systematic minimisation of al-Andalus and the celebration of the Reconquista as the founding event of Spanish national identity. The Catholic Monarchs of 1492 — Ferdinand and Isabella — became, in subsequent Spanish historiography, the founders of the modern Spanish nation; the Muslim period was treated as a long aberration during which the proper Christian Iberian destiny had been temporarily interrupted. The Mozarabic Christian tradition (which had preserved continuity with the pre-conquest Visigothic period and which had played a substantial role in the Reconquista) was held up as the legitimate inheritance; the Muslim Andalusian tradition was either ignored or actively denigrated.
The Spanish silence on al-Andalus began to break in the early nineteenth century, partly through the work of the French Orientalist scholars (Évariste Lévi-Provençal, Reinhart Dozy, who produced the first substantial modern scholarly accounts of the Caliphate of Córdoba in the 1840s and 1850s) and partly through the romantic revival in Spanish literature and art (Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra, 1832, was instrumental in bringing the Andalusian heritage back into international cultural consciousness). The substantial Spanish academic re-engagement with al-Andalus began in the early twentieth century and accelerated substantially after Franco's death in 1975. The contemporary Spanish historical and cultural treatment of al-Andalus is now substantial, with major academic institutions (the Granada School of Arabic-Islamic Studies, the Madinat al-Zahra archaeological project, the Higher Council for Scientific Research's Arab-Islamic studies programmes) operating continuously.
Where the Caliphate can still be found
The principal physical inheritances of the Caliphate of Córdoba are, in 2026:
In Spain: the Great Mosque of Córdoba (the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, UNESCO World Heritage, with the principal caliphal-period fabric preserved); Madinat al-Zahra (UNESCO World Heritage); the Aljafería palace at Zaragoza (late taifa, with substantial preserved caliphal-period architectural fabric); substantial post-caliphal monuments (the Giralda at Seville, the Alhambra at Granada, the various Mudejar synagogues and palaces of Toledo, Seville, and elsewhere); the Escorial Library outside Madrid (with about 2,000 Arabic manuscripts of Andalusi provenance, including some that survived the destruction of the Madinat al-Zahra library).
In Morocco: the substantial Andalusian-tradition urban culture of Fez and Tetouan (with continuous descent of the Andalusian Muslim families through the post-1492 emigration); the Andalusian musical-tradition conservatories at the principal Moroccan cities; the substantial Sufi religious orders that descended from the Andalusi tradition.
In the Sephardic Jewish diaspora: the substantial cultural inheritance of the Sephardic communities of Istanbul, Salonika (substantially destroyed during the German occupation of 1941-1944), Jerusalem, and the modern Israeli, French, and South American Sephardic populations.
In the institutional inheritance of European intellectual life: the substantial influence of Andalusian-transmitted Greek philosophical and scientific texts on the medieval European university tradition; the architectural elements (the ribbed vault, the horseshoe arch, the use of carved stucco decoration) that passed from Andalusia through the Mudejar tradition to the Iberian and broader European architectural inheritance; the Arabic vocabulary that entered Iberian Romance languages and from there a substantial fraction of European languages (the standard Spanish dictionary's Arabic loan-words run to about 4,000, including the contemporary words for sugar, mattress, basket, alcohol, algebra, alfalfa, and several thousand others).
The Caliphate, in the institutional sense, ended on the 30th of November 1031. Its cultural inheritances have, in the nearly thousand years since, substantially shaped the development of the Mediterranean and European intellectual world. The substantive estimate of its consequences, on the contemporary scholarly view, remains an ongoing project.
"Things which we have not because we have lost them — we still have them, sometimes, in the form of an absence." — Spanish poet Antonio Machado, 1907, on al-Andalus
End of Chapter IX · End of Volume X