Málaga in 1487: The Siege That Ended the Nasrid Port, and What Survives of It in the City

Mālaqa in the 1480s was the Nasrid kingdom's maritime gateway, having taken over that role from Almería by the mid-fourteenth century, and it lived on trade. Muhammad II had signed a commercial treaty with Genoa in 1279 and the Genoese held a privileged position in the port. A ship's register kept by Filippo de Nigro in 1445 shows the city inside the network the Genoese Spinola family ran across the western Mediterranean. Its potters made the gold-lustred ceramics that Granada's kings sent as diplomatic gifts to the Mameluke sultan in Cairo, from workshops in the suburb of Fontanalla below the Ejido hill. Its shipyard, the Atarazanas built under Muhammad V, stood at the sea's edge with seven horseshoe arches through which the water came in to a basin that could hold twenty galleys, and light patrol ships were built there by Christian captives. About 15,000 people lived inside the walls, most of them Muslims, with a sizeable Jewish minority, a small Genoese colony and the captives. The governor, usually a Nasrid prince, lived in the Alcazaba with his secretaries and lawyers.

The defences were the reason the siege lasted. The walls had many towers, monumental gates and a moat, and above them stood the Alcazaba, begun by the Hammudid taifa rulers in the early eleventh century, given its entrance fortifications in the great reform of Badis of Granada after he annexed the city in 1057, and rebuilt with its palaces by the Nasrid emir Muhammad II. Above that, since Yusuf I's works of 1344 to 1354, stood the Gibralfaro, joined to the citadel by the Coracha, a corridor between two zig-zagging walls that followed the hill. Antonio de Nebrija, the grammarian, counted 110 large towers around the castle's circuit besides the small ones. The Alcazaba and the Gibralfaro had taken their final shape in 1348, the year the plague reached Europe. Wikipedia's summary is that the defences 'made the city nearly impregnable', and the summer of 1487 tested the claim.

The men who held it were not the city's own. When Ronda fell on 22 May 1485, its warden Hamet el Zegrí, a Berber chieftain, refused Ferdinand's offer of vassalage and took refuge in Málaga, and it was he, with a corps of Gomeres, the North African mercenaries Wikipedia calls 'experienced and disciplined', who led the resistance. The Alcazaba itself was commanded by Ali Dordux, a merchant, and the two commands would end the siege differently.

The Catholic Monarchs reached Vélez-Málaga on 17 April 1487 and took it on 27 April. Ferdinand left it for Málaga on 7 May by the Siege article's account, while the History of Málaga article dates the siege's beginning to 5 May and the Alcazaba article to 6 May. A day or two of disagreement over the start is the first contested figure, and it is printed here as such. The army's size is the second. The History article says the Castilian force was 'over 45,000 strong'. The Siege article says Ferdinand set out from Córdoba with 20,000 horsemen, 50,000 labourers and 8,000 support troops, which is a different kind of count, and neither article attributes its number to a named chronicle in the text this site read. The defenders are given as 15,000 'African (Maghrebi) mercenaries and Mālaqi warriors', a figure that may be the whole population under arms rather than a garrison.

The siege was a siege in the fifteenth-century sense: a blockade by land and sea to stop food and water, siege towers built to reach the walls, mines dug towards them and counter-mined from inside, and artillery under Francisco Ramírez de Madrid, whom the Siege article names as the artillery commander alongside the Marquis of Cádiz and García Fernández Manrique. Wikipedia calls it one of the longest sieges of the war for Granada. The History article gives it as six months and the Siege article as about four, and the dates in the table above, early May to 18 August, make the shorter figure the arithmetic one. Isabella joined the camp. What broke the city was hunger. By August, the Siege article records, people inside were 'eating dogs and cats, eating the leaves of vines and palms, and chewing hides'.

On 13 August the city offered to surrender and Ferdinand, the History article says, 'decided to make an example of the resistors and refused to grant them an honorable capitulation'. Ali Dordux negotiated separately for his own group, obtained Mudéjar status for twenty-five families, and on 18 August handed over the Alcazaba. The monarchs entered the same day and, by the Alcazaba article's account, 'raised their standard at the Torre del Homenaje', a sentence Wikipedia itself marks as needing a citation. The Gibralfaro under Hamet el Zegrí was the last to fall, by assault according to one article and by surrender on 19 August according to the other. Its defenders were sold as slaves and Hamet el Zegrí was executed. The port that had been the Nasrid kingdom's window on the sea was gone, and the fall of Granada itself came four and a half years later, in January 1492.

What happened to the people of Málaga is the part of the story that Spanish and English accounts have argued over for five centuries, and the honest way to print it is as a range with the reasons attached. The Siege article says the population 'was condemned to slavery or death', that the survivors 'numbering from 11,000 to 15,000 excluding the foreign mercenaries' were enslaved, and that they went three ways: some sent to North Africa in exchange for Christian captives, some sold to defray the costs of the campaign, some given away as gifts. The History article says the same in a sentence: 'The civilian population was punished by enslavement or execution, with the exception of twenty-five families allowed to stay as Mudéjar converts in the Moorish compound'. The ransom process, by which captives could buy themselves out, was completed in June 1489. Jewish captives were held in a camp at Carmona and their ransom was met half from the captives' own assets. The 11,000 to 15,000 range is the only figure in either article that the text itself frames as uncertain, and it is the one that matters most, so this post repeats it as a range and does not pick a number. If the city held about 15,000 people at the siege's start and 15,000 defended it, the figures cannot all be right at once. That is a caution about fifteenth-century counting, not a resolution.

The land was then redistributed by repartimiento, the customary division of a conquered town's property among those who had served, and between 5,000 and 6,000 Christians from Extremadura, León, Castile, Galicia and the Levante were brought to repopulate the province, of whom about a thousand settled in the city, now called Málaga in Castilian. Churches and convents were founded outside the walls, La Trinidad, Los Ángeles, the Santuario de la Victoria and the Capuchin monastery, to draw the new population into new neighbourhoods. La Trinidad and El Perchel, the barrios west of the river, began that way. The mosque on the Gibralfaro was consecrated as a church of Saint Louis of Toulouse, the Ayuntamiento's page records, and the castle became a barracks and a prison, which it stayed until 1925. The twenty-five Mudéjar families kept the covenant the war's capitulations offered elsewhere: recognise the monarchs, surrender the fortresses, keep your faith and law. In the mid-sixteenth century that covenant was withdrawn and conversion forced, the converts became moriscos under suspicion, and in 1610 those who refused were expelled from Málaga.

Start at the top, because the whole point of the Gibralfaro was to see the besiegers coming.

Reading the Alcazaba as a siege

The Ayuntamiento's own page describes the citadel as two walled precincts, a lower one that keeps 'elements from the earliest period of construction' with rectangular and square towers, and an upper one that was 'the seat of government of the city'. The entrance is deliberately hard: the Puerta de la Bóveda Vaída turns under an 11th-century horseshoe arch, the Puerta de las Columnas alternates stone and brick voussoirs, and the Torre del Cristo holds 'the second bent entrance, a Taifa construction that was renovated in the Nasrid period', each bend a place where a column of attackers has to slow and turn under the walls. The dungeons are described as 'like a large inverted funnel, which made them impossible to scale'. The Airón well, 40 m into the rock to a natural vein of water, is why a blockade took months rather than weeks. The Torre del Homenaje at the top, first built in the Taifa period with a large brick arch on its eastern face, is the keep where the article says the monarchs' standard went up. The restorers 'decided to respect the ruins and simply consolidate them'. Two Nasrid palaces survive in part, and since 2003 an exhibition of the ceramics found in the Alcazaba, the lustreware trade this city was known for, fills them. The Alcazaba page has the hours, the tickets page the official shop beside the tour prices, and the Alcazaba or Gibralfaro post decides which to give the hour to if you only have one.

The Gibralfaro's page is briefer about 1487 than its walls are: it records the name as Yabal, hilltop, and Faruh, from the Greek for lighthouse, the reign of Yusuf I between 1344 and 1354 as the building date, the completion under Muhammad V 'adapted for artillery advances', and a fortified area of 21,310 square metres with an inner enclosure of 12,630. Its interpretation centre in the old gunpowder magazine opened on 29 July 1998 and presents 'the life of the Castle as a military garrison and coastal watchtower from 1487 to 1925', which is the after-life this post ends on. The wall-walk is 'protected over much of its length by battlements, topped by pyramid-shaped capstones', and from it the whole of the besiegers' ground, the plain of the Guadalmedina and the sea, is in view.

The searches that bring people to Málaga history are broader than one siege, so briefly. Málaga is not the oldest city in the world or in Spain, but it is among the oldest continuously inhabited in western Europe: the Wikipedia history dates the first Phoenician settlement at Cerro del Villar, on an islet in the Guadalhorce estuary, to around 770 BC, and the move to the mainland colony of Malake to the eighth century BC, which is the 2,800 years the tourism copy quotes. Under Carthage from 573 BC and Rome from 218 BC it was Malaca, whose Augustan theatre the Nasrid builders later quarried.

Under Byzantium from 552, the Visigoths from 615, and from the conquest of 711 to 714 it was Mālaqa in Arabic. 'Málaga' in Spanish is simply the Castilian form of that name, taken over after 1487. What the Phoenician root meant, the origin of the name, is debated and this post does not choose an etymology.

The city is famous, to the extent a search engine measures fame, for Picasso, born at Plaza de la Merced 15 in 1881, whose birthplace museum and Picasso Museum have their own pages. For the beaches and the Costa del Sol it anchors. And for the sweet Málaga wine that the port exported from the sixteenth century, once the raisin and wine trade the Nasrids had built passed to Castilian and foreign merchants.

The homepage sets the city out for a first visit. The museums hub includes the Museo de Málaga in the Aduana, whose archaeology floor holds the Roman and Nasrid finds, free for EU citizens and $1.75 (€1.50) for everyone else.