Reframing ‘Reconquista’. Hernando de Baeza’s Take on the Conquest of Granada

• Autores: Teresa Tinsley
• Localización: A Plural Peninsula: Studies in Honour of Professor Simon Barton / coord. por Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, 2023, ISBN 9789004425460, págs. 183-211
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • The Catholic Monarchs proclaimed the 1492 conquest of Granada as the culmination of an 800-year struggle against the Muslims. Yet, the conquest of Muslim territory was not always predominant in Christian strategic thinking, as relations between the faith groups were not consistently hostile and political alliances were commonplace. The narrative of the ‘fall and redemption’ of Spain, with its roots in ideologically-driven ‘Gothic’ histories designed to justify Castilian supremacy in a divine mission to combat Islam, became embedded in historiography from the mid-16th century onwards, and was later re-utilised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by national-Catholic historians. It can therefore appear that the idea of an exclusive Christianity triumphing against Islam and repressing Jewish elements in its heritage was uncontested and inevitable. But what would the conquest of Granada have meant to a third or fourth generation judeoconverso, whose family had been decimated by the Inquisition? How would the extinction of Islamic political power in the Peninsula be interpreted by someone who had been a cross-border mediator, a negotiator, an interpreter and a friend of the emir himself? What hopes and fears would they have for the future? Hernando de Baeza, whose life and work I researched under Simon Barton’s guidance, was such a man. His short account of the extinction of Nasrid Granada offers a different take on how the incorporation of large numbers of former Jews and Muslims into Christian society might have been represented in ‘national’ historiographical narratives. This chapter highlights the ways in which his memoir resists key elements of the ideologically-driven narratives of the Christian side and, in doing so, makes the case for a more inclusive society.