Gibraltar

Castile held the Rock for only 24 years. In 1333, with Alfonso XI unable to bring relief in time, the starving garrison surrendered to the Marinid sultan Abu al-Hasan, who rebuilt its walls, towers and citadel. Alfonso came back to besiege it in 1349, but the Black Death broke out in his camp and killed him in 1350. Gibraltar passed to the Nasrids of Granada in 1374 and became a base for raids into Christian lands; when the Count of Niebla attacked it in 1436 he drowned in the retreat, and his body hung from its walls for twenty-two years. The Muslim town fell at last in August 1462 to a surprise attack, launched while its commanders were away paying homage to a new sultan.

Isabella took the Rock for the Crown in 1501 and the next year gave it arms with a golden key, calling it the key between her kingdoms of the eastern and western seas. Spain held it for two more centuries, until an Anglo-Dutch fleet under Sir George Rooke captured it in August 1704, in the War of the Spanish Succession. Almost all of its 4,000 inhabitants left rather than swear allegiance to the Habsburg claimant, and settled nearby at San Roque. Ceded to Britain at Utrecht in 1713, the Rock withstood the Great Siege of 1779–1783, when 60,000 French and Spanish troops and ten floating batteries failed to break some 5,000 defenders.