Nasrid

The Nasrids, in Arabic Banu Nasr or Banu al-Ahmar, were the last Muslim dynasty to rule in the Iberian Peninsula. Muhammad I Ibn al-Ahmar rose from Ibn Hud's Andalusi forces, made himself emir in 1232 and entered Granada in 1238, founding a Castilian tributary emirate.

For two and a half centuries it balanced Castile and the Marinids of Fez, paying tribute while setting neighbours against each other. In 1337 the throne belonged to Yusuf I, who joined the Marinid invasion broken at Río Salado in 1340 and saw Algeciras fall. The fourteenth century, above all Muhammad V's long second reign, was Granada's golden age: the city became a refuge of Islamic learning and craftsmanship, and the Alhambra took its lasting form.

From the early fifteenth century dynastic coups weakened the emirate as Castile and Aragon united under the Catholic Monarchs. The decade-long Granada War ended when the last sultan, Muhammad XII, called Boabdil, surrendered in 1492, closing more than seven centuries of Muslim rule in al-Andalus.