GRANADA 



THE CITY OF THE MOOR 



GRANADA is the creation of the Moors. Its 

 history is all of them the record of their glory 

 and their fall. The Pomegranate, as its con- 

 queror styled it, ripened only in the warm sun- 

 shine of Islam, and withered with its decline. 

 Under the Christian, it fell from the rank of a 

 splendid capital to a poor provincial town. Now 

 it subsists merely as a great monument to a 

 vanished race and a dead civilisation. 



With Granada before it became the centre of 

 an independent kingdom, we need concern 

 ourselves but little. Its real interest dates from 

 the establishment of the Nasrite dynasty in the 

 first half of the thirteenth century. It was the 

 time when the great Almohade Empire was 

 breaking up. Probably all Andalusia would 

 have shared the fate of Cordova and Seville, 

 and the conquests of the Catholic kings been 

 anticipated by two centuries, had not a young 

 man of Arjona, Ibn Al Ahmar by name, deter- 

 mined to fashion for himself a kingdom out of 



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