On this day in 1492, Granada, home of the Alhambra palace and the seat and final stronghold of the Moorish kingdom in Spain, was surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II and Isabella I, ending the Reconquest.
<When the Spanish began to reconquer their peninsula from centuries of Muslim rule, the Islamic kingdoms of Cordoba had descended to a few petty Islamic sultanates. In the great expulsion following the Reconquista the Camelot of Islam, and of Judaism and Christianity, was carefully ripped asunder; intellectually and physically bankrupted. To this day one of the two great traditions of Judaism still remembers Cordoba with the nostalgia and longing that persisted over the centuries for it was during the Jewish golden age of Spain (under Muslim rule) that their greatest philosopher, Maimonides, composed his acclaimed commentaries. In Baghdad, the capital of the Islamic world, the Mongol capture was the culmination of a century of moral and intellectual decay. The Mongol may have plunged the sword into the world of Islam but it was the Muslim rulers themselves, in their denial of their earlier vaunted traditions, who had vanquished their armor.
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