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.
"There is much to praise in this book: its amenable style, its rich documentation (much of it unused before), it's fascinating story-line, its lively pageant of individuals from the Jewish convert Juan de la Torre, who made a fortune in the silk trade which allowed him to become lord of a nearby village and to purchase a seat on Granada's municipal council for his son, to another judeoconverso Jua
Trevor J. Dadson, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations
"David Coleman seeks to bridge the gap between local and institutional history in his study of the transformation of the Spanish city of Granada in the century after its conquest by Isabella and Ferdinand on January 2, 1492, by asking when and how Granada became a Christian city. To answer these questions, Coleman takes his readers on a far-flung trip that begins and ends at Granada but in the mea
Lucy K. Pick, Journal of Modern History
"David Coleman's richly detailed book takes the conquest of Granada in 1492 not as the culmination of a military campaign, but instead as the first step in the century-long Christianization of an ethnically diverse and socially dynamic Spanish city.... It is to Coleman's credit that this valuable book captures the city's unique frontier atmosphere at the same time that it illuminates Granada's rol
