At a glance
Era 4- Dates
- c. 1460-c. 1533 CE; ruled 1482-1492 CE
- Who
- Last Nasrid ruler of Granada, who handed the city to Castile and Aragon
- Era
- Al-Andalus
ProfileMuhammad XII, Boabdil
Abu Abdallah Muhammad, whom the Spanish called Boabdil, was born around 1460 in the Alhambra, the son of the Nasrid sultan Abu l-Hasan Ali and his wife Aisha. Granada was by then the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia: rich and beautiful, but small, hemmed in by Castile and split by rivalries at court.
In 1482, the year Castile and Aragon began their final war on Granada, Muhammad rose against his father and seized the throne. The next year he led a raid into Castile, was beaten at Lucena and taken prisoner. To win his freedom he promised to rule as a vassal of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the Christian monarchs used him to keep the Muslims divided. For years he fought his father and then his uncle, Muhammad al-Zaghal, while the Castilian armies, with their heavy cannon, took the kingdom's towns one by one: Ronda, Malaga, Baza, Almeria.
By 1490 the city of Granada stood almost alone. Its people held out through a long siege, but no help came from North Africa or Egypt. In November 1491 Muhammad agreed to terms that promised Granada's Muslims their faith, their mosques, their law and their property, and on 2 January 1492 he handed over the keys of the Alhambra.
He was given an estate in the Alpujarras, then crossed to Morocco in 1493 and settled in Fez, where he died, most sources say, around 1533. A later legend has him looking back at the city from a mountain pass that is still called the Moor's Sigh. Within a decade, the promises of the treaty had been broken.
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