Read 1492: The Year Our World Began for Free Online

modernity, which grows out of the whole of the past. No single year ever inaugurated anyone’s modernity on its own. But for us, 1492 was special. Key features of the world we inhabit—of the way power and wealth, cultures and faiths, life-forms and ecosystems are distributed around the planet—became discernible in the historical record for the first time. We are still adjusting to the consequences.

Chapter 2
“To Constitute Spain to the Service of God”
    The Extinction of Islam in Western Europe
    January 2: Granada falls to Christian conquerors.
    T he king of Granada rose early…and made his person ready in the way that Moors do when faced with danger of death.” His mother clung to him despairingly.
    “Leave me, my lady,” he said. “My knights await me.”
    As he rode to confront the enemy camped outside the walls of his capital, after eight months of siege, throngs of starving citizens assailed him, with weeping mothers and howling babies, “to shout out that…they could no longer bear the hunger; for this reason they would abandon the city and go over to the enemy camp, allowing the city to be captured, and all of them to be taken prisoner and killed.” So he relented of his determination to fight to the death, and decided to try to negotiate an honorable surrender. 1

    Working in the year Granada fell, illustrators of Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor unmistakably depicted the siege, under a commander with King Ferdinand’s features.
Woodcut from D. de San Pedro, Cárcel de amor (Barcelona: Rosembach, 1493).
    Presumably, the chronicler who told this impressive but improbable tale—with its chivalric touches and heart-tweaking sentiments—was romanticizing. For most of the previous ten years of warfare in Granada, Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muhammad—Muhammad XI, or “Boabdil,” as Christians called him—had not behaved with exemplary valor but had relied on conspiracy, compromise, and a series of tactical alliances to stave off what seemed like inevitable defeat for his realm at the hands of the hugely bigger neighboring kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.
    Granada already seemed an anachronism—the last Muslim-ruled state on the northern shore of the western Mediterranean. Muslims lost Sicily three centuries earlier, and by the mid–thirteenth century, Christian conquerors from the north had swept up all the remaining kingdoms of the Moors—as they called Muslims—in what are nowSpain and Portugal. Ferdinand and Isabella, joint monarchs of Aragon and Castile, or, as they preferred to say, “of Spain,” justified the war with religious rhetoric in a letter to the pope:
    We neither are nor have been persuaded to undertake this war by desire to acquire greater rents nor the wish to lay up treasure. For had we wished to increase our lordships and augment our income with far less peril, travail, and expense, we should have been able to do so. But our desire to serve God and our zeal for the holy Catholic faith have induced us to set aside our own interests and ignore the continual hardships and dangers to which this cause commits us. And thus we may hope both that the holy Catholic faith may be spread and Christendom quit of so unremitting a menace as abides here at our gates, until these infidels of the kingdom of Granada are uprooted and expelled from Spain. 2
    In a sense what they said was true, for they could have saved the costs of the war and exacted handsome tribute from the Moors. But other considerations impelled them, of a nature more material than they admitted to the pope. Granada was a rich country. It was not particularly populous. Despite wildly excessive guesses in the traditional literature, it is hard to make the total population add up to much more than three hundred thousand. But it could feed many more with its prodigious harvests of millet, which Christians would not eat. The products of Granada’s industries—silk, leather wares, arms, ceramics, jewel work, dried fruits and nuts,