Christian Sources for the Last Muslim Kingdom in Western Europe

Abstract

As paradoxical as it may seem, we have more Christian than Muslim sources for studying the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada. The enormous loss of autochthonous documents and archives dating from the Nasrid period highlights the importance of Christian sources for the study of every aspect of the last Muslim territory in Western Europe. Because the issue is so complex, we never achieve a uniform picture of Nasrid history through Latin sources. As could be expected, we are far better informed about aspects that interested Christians most, for a variety of reasons. Likewise we can gather more data from border territories, which were in direct contact with Christian realities, than from areas in the kingdom’s interior, at least until the Castilian conquest took place. The present chapter deals not only with Iberian sources – the traditional approach of Spanish scholars because of those sources’ capital importance for the subject until quite recent times. This essay also takes into account other European sources in order to enhance the place of the emirate in its Continental and Mediterranean contexts, both Christian and Muslim, which are impossible to separate from the geographical position of the territory. The history of the Kingdom of Granada is not just Spanish or Muslim; we claim that it has an irrefutable European and Mediterranean dimension and vocation. Therefore the analysis will proceed by taking into consideration not the origin of the sources but their nature, so that scholars may readily identify the archives and series that might be of the greatest interest for their research. Consequently, we will review political, economic, social, and literary sources so as to encompass every possible aspect of Nasrid history, from the birth of the kingdom (1232) to its political extinction (1492).