Al-Andalus Chair: ‘Positive otherness on the border of Granada, 13th-16th centuries’

‘Andalusia was always a frontier land. A border understood today more as the cultural osmosis of reciprocal influences and not so much as the supposedly violent sphere of opposing civilisations’. This is the premise on which Manuel García Fernández, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Seville and full member of the Andalusian Academy of Regional Sciences, bases his thesis on the coexistence between Muslims and Christians on the Granada frontier during three centuries (13th and 16th). 

As the professor himself explains: ‘The Frontier of Granada would progressively define the territorial structures of Andalusia in the late Castilian Middle Ages during the 13th to 16th centuries. But beyond the line or the physical boundary of state separation, an unofficial, polyvalent and complex society, outside the central powers of the kingdom of Castile and the Nasrid Sultanate, would develop in the Andalusian and Granada frontier from one side to the other. In it, positive otherness would be justified as the necessary coexistence between Christians and Muslims, one of the fundamental characteristics of the Andalusian and Granadine territory, in periods of truces and above all in the multiple neighbourly, cultural and commercial contacts. Institutions of power and regional government ordered the development of these activities, which were often complementary for the survival of the neighbouring frontiers. This would project throughout Europe the image of a peculiar and different Andalusia, despite the Christian conquest and its alleged ‘Castilianisation’. 

This new session of the Chair al-Andalus, entitled ‘Positive otherness on the border of Granada, 13th-16th centuries’, will take place on Thursday 23 January 2025 at 19:00 at the headquarters of the Three Cultures Foundation of the Mediterranean.

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