Granada

The palace reached its height under Yusuf I and his son Muhammad V, who built the Comares Palace and the Palace of the Lions, while the city below swelled with Muslim refugees from the lands Castile and Aragon had taken, whole new quarters growing up around the Albaicín. Yusuf founded the Madrasa al-Yusufiyya in 1349, the only great madrasa of al-'Andalus, and Ibn Khaldun served at Muhammad's court. Ibn Battuta, visiting in 1350, called Granada "the metropolis of Andalusia and the bride of its cities".

That city of some 50,000 people surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs on 2 January 1492, under terms that let its Muslims keep their faith. The promise lasted less than a decade. Cardinal Cisneros began forced baptisms in 1499, the revolt they provoked gave the crown its reason to demand conversion or exile, and the mosques became churches one by one. Settlers poured in from across Castile, and when the Moriscos of the Alpujarras rose in 1568, Philip II expelled most of those left in the kingdom, though the city's own Moriscos had taken little part.