Writing the Nation: The Place of Al-Andalus in Castilian Histories of the 15th and 16th Centuries

This paper will examine how Catholic Castilians imagined and wrote the history of al-Andalus and its peoples in relation to Castilian history during the period in which they absorbed much of the Muslim population of southern Iberia. Because written histories defined who belonged to the community and who had the authority to participate in civil society, they were often vigorously contested and reimagined. Writing and interpreting history was crucially important to the construction of national identity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as it was more recently in Spanish history in the well-known debate between Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz. Building on the recent work of Ana Echevarría, and using histories written by men as diverse as Alonso de Cartagena, Mosén Diego de Valera, Fernando de Pulgar, Alonso de Palencia, Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, Andrés Bernáldez, and Alfonso Carillo de Acuña, this paper examines how Castilians ideologically constructed al-Andalus even as they physically reconstructed and repurposed many of its buildings. It also considers how Castilian histories, including new editions of many of the aforementioned authors’ works, changed after the establishment of the Inquisition and the conquest of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, the last independent Muslim kingdom in Iberia.