Creating Christian Granada provides a richly detailed examination of a critical and transitional episode in Spain's march to global empire. The city of Granada—Islam's final bastion on the Iberian peninsula—surrendered to the control of Spain's "Catholic Monarchs" Isabella and Ferdinand on January 2, 1492. Over the following century, Spanish state and Church officials, along with tens of thousands of Christian immigrant settlers, transformed the formerly Muslim city into a Christian one.
With constant attention to situating the Granada case in the broader comparative contexts of the medieval reconquista tradition on the one hand and sixteenth-century Spanish imperialism in the Americas on the other, Coleman carefully charts the changes in the conquered city's social, political, religious, and physical landscapes. In the process, he sheds light on the local factors contributing to the emergence of tensions between the conquerors and Granada's formerly Muslim, "native" morisco community in the decades leading up to the crown-mandated expulsion of most of the city's moriscos in 1569–1570.
Despite the failure to assimilate the moriscos, Granada's status as a frontier Christian community under construction fostered among much of the immigrant community innovative religious reform ideas and programs that shaped in direct ways a variety of church-wide reform movements in the era of the ecumenical Council of Trent (1545–1563). Coleman concludes that the process by which reforms of largely Granadan origin contributed significantly to transformations in the Church as a whole forces a reconsideration of traditional "top-down" conceptions of sixteenth-century Catholic reform.
David Coleman is Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University.
Table of Contents
IntroductionChapter 1. A Frontier SocietyChapter 2. Mudejares and MoriscosChapter 3. A Divided City, A Shared CityChapter 4. The Emergence of a New OrderChapter 5. Creating Christian GranadaChapter 6. Defining ReformChapter 7. Negotiating ReformChapter 8. Rebellion, Retrenchment, and the Road to the SacromonteNotes Bibliography Index
What People are Saying About This
Richard L. Kagan
Granada's conquest by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492 symbolically marked the end of Muslim Spain. Creating Christian Granada is an important book about the process of fashioning a new Spain in accordance with Christian ideals. David Coleman's chapters on the laity's role in the creation of Granada's new religious institutions are especially insightful. Of particular value also is his account of Juan de Dios, a Granadan divine who became one of the most respected and influential religious reformers in sixteenth-century Spain. Richly documented yet readable, Creating Christian Granada is a must for anyone interested in the religion and society of early modern Spain.
Helen Nader
With impeccable scholarship and a riveting narrative, David Coleman uncovers the untold story of how and to what ends Granada's native Muslim population converted to Christianity and became energetic and innovative creators of the local Christian culture that would eventually influence the language of Catholic reforms at the Council of Trent. This book is necessary reading for all who care about how Spain, the medieval kingdom of 'the three religions,' became a land of only one repressive and militant faith.
Mark Meyerson
Creating Christian Granada addresses an important and intriguing question for the history of late medieval/early modern Spain: how the once Muslim city of Granada was transformed into a Catholic city. David Coleman answers the question with finesse and sensitivity. The book is based on extensive and groundbreaking archival research and brings much new and exciting material to light.
Thomas E. Burman
Coleman's book is...an excellent study of the dynamics of social and religious change in a city that not only rested at the real frontier between Christendom and Islam, but that he rightly locates at the conceptual frontier where the key themes of late medieval and early modern Spain intersect.
