Spain promised Granada its language, then banned Arabic | WHO OWNS THE STRAIT? Part 3

History Onion · Part 3 The Reversal · 2:59

In 1491 Ferdinand and Isabella signed a treaty with Boabdil, the last Muslim king in Spain. In writing, it guaranteed the Muslims of Granada their religion, their law and their language. Granada could still fight, and those guarantees were what it cost to end the war quickly. Within eight years the guarantees were gone. Granada's first archbishop, Hernando de Talavera, learned Arabic in his sixties and tried to convert the city by argument. In 1499 the Queen's confessor, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, decided that was too slow — he imprisoned Granada's Muslim leaders until they converted, baptised four thousand people, and burned the city's Arabic libraries in a public square. He kept three hundred books: the medical ones, for the university he was building. The quarter rose in revolt, and the revolt became the crown's argument: in 1501 the treaty was declared void because the Muslims had taken up arms. The forced baptisms had caused the rising, and the rising was now the reason the promise did not count. In 1567 Philip II banned the Arabic language outright. A Morisco elder, Francisco Núñez Muley, petitioned against it — a language is not a religion, he wrote, and there are Christians in Egypt and Syria who read and write Arabic. He was ignored.