Isabella & Ferdinand's Granada

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

From the early Middle Ages to the present day, travellers have been bewitched by the peerless beauty of Granada. From 1230 until 1492, it was ruled by the Nasrids - Spain's last Islamic dynasty - from their fortress palace of the Alhambra. After capturing Granada to complete the Christian Reconquista, the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella made the Alhambra the site of their royal court. But what became of the Jews, the Muslims and the Gitanos who were displaced?

In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr. Elizabeth Drayson about this complex and fascinating city and Spain's deep obsession with erasing historical and cultural memory.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In the early 700s the Maus conquered southern Spain, the land they dubbed Al Andalus, now known as Andalusia.
0:09.0	Although by 1248 the Christians had reconquered most of the peninsula, the Emirate of Grenada,
0:16.0	ruled from 1230 by the Nazareth dynasty, remained morish for seven centuries.
0:23.0	A great testament to Grenada's golden period under the Nazareth is the Alambra, from where I speak to you today.
0:30.0	That palace of delicately carved plasterwork with stars and arches and couplers and inscriptions in Arabic,
0:38.0	its geometric patterns and ceramic tilework, its gilded wooden ceilings,
0:43.0	and its courtyards of reflective pools of water make it a paradise on earth.
0:50.0	But it was not to last, from 1482 the forces of the most Catholic kings, Fernando and Isabel, known in English as Fernando and Isabella,
0:59.0	set out to make Grenada part of their kingdom.
1:03.0	To explore the lost paradise of Grenada, I'm joined by Dr Elizabeth Grayson, Maritus fellow in Spanish at Murray Edwards College Cambridge.
1:14.0	She's the author of The Maul's Last Stand, how seven centuries of Muslim-Row in Spain came to an end,
1:20.0	and her most recent book is Lost Paradise, the story of Grenada published by Head of Zeus in 2021.
1:34.0	Dr Grayson, thank you so much for joining me to talk about Grenada and your wonderful book Lost Paradise.
1:42.0	That's maybe then we should start with that idea actually, this idea of Grenada as a paradise.
1:48.0	We have very much a sense today that that idea remains, but at what point was it a paradise I suppose?
1:57.0	Thank you, Shansami.
1:58.0	I think the first thing to say about that is that the idea isn't some kind of, I don't know, romanticised imaginary fantasy.
2:06.0	It was actually a lived reality, it was a real paradise to the people who were there, and that goes back actually as far as the ninth century,
2:15.0	when the Muslim sage Abdel Malik, who was writing at that time, described the whole environment as a kind of rural, archaedier of paradise.
2:24.0	And you can see that attitude as well in the poetry of the Nazareth Post, you know, the verse on the walls of the Alambra,
2:31.0	and you can see it when Sultan Abdel handed the keys of Grenada over in 1492 to the Christian monarchs.
2:38.0	He said King Kerdan and Ovarigan, these are the keys of this paradise.
	...

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