Alhambra and Granada
The Emirate of Granada, last Muslim state in Iberia, and its hilltop palace, the supreme surviving monument of Islamic Spain.
By the middle of the thirteenth century, Muslim Iberia had contracted to a single mountainous kingdom in the far south. The Emirate of Granada, founded around 1238 by Muhammad I ibn al-Ahmar, was the last surviving piece of al-Andalus, and it held on for a remarkable two and a half centuries after the rest had fallen. Its endurance owed less to strength than to shrewdness, and its great monument, the Alhambra, is why the world still remembers it.
Survival by tribute and cunning
Granada was wealthy, drawing on silk, trade, and the fertile plain below the city, but it was small and hemmed in on every side. Its rulers, the Nasrid dynasty, kept the kingdom alive by paying tribute to Castile, in effect accepting vassal status, and by playing Christian and North African powers against one another as the balance shifted. Shielded by the Sierra Nevada and linked by sea to Morocco, Granada rode out coups, dynastic feuds, and the slow tightening of Christian pressure for 250 years, an improbable run for the last Muslim state on the peninsula.
A palace that speaks
The Alhambra, from the Arabic for 'the red fort,' is a fortified palace complex on a ridge above the city, most of it built by the Nasrid sultans in the fourteenth century. The finest of it went up under two of them, Yusuf I and Muhammad V. On the neighboring hill lie the terraced summer gardens of the Generalife, laid out by earlier Nasrid sultans around 1300 and redecorated by Isma'il I in 1319. Behind plain outer walls lie some of the most refined interiors anywhere: the Court of the Lions with its ring of slender marble columns and twelve stone lions, ceilings dripping with honeycombed muqarnas, and walls sheathed in carved stucco, colored tile, and Arabic calligraphy. One phrase recurs by the thousand across those walls, the Nasrid motto wa la ghaliba illa Allah, 'there is no victor but God.' It reads today as both a boast and, with hindsight, an epitaph.
The last sigh
Granada's luck ran out when Ferdinand and Isabella threw the full weight of a newly united Spain against it. After a war of ten years, the last sultan, Muhammad XII, known to the Spanish as Boabdil, handed over the keys of the city on January 2, 1492. Legend says that as he rode into exile he stopped on a mountain pass for a final look and wept, giving the spot its name, the Moor's last sigh, and drawing his mother's cutting reply that he wept like a woman for what he had failed to defend like a man. The tale is almost certainly embroidered, but it lasted. Three centuries later the American writer Washington Irving lodged in the then-crumbling, half-abandoned palace and published Tales of the Alhambra in 1832, whose romantic sketches helped rescue the site and turn it into one of the most visited monuments on earth. The fountains still run in the Court of the Lions, beneath a motto insisting there is no victor but God, inside a fortress whose last defender lost.