ABSTRACT
One of the best-known stories concerning the end of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada is that of the captive girl Isabel de Solís. Isabel was apparently captured in the skirmishes between Muslims and Christians in the 1470s and given as a slave to the house of King Abū al-Ḥasan, known to posterity as “Mulay Ḥasan” ( maulāya, Ar. “My sovereign/lord”), who ruled Granada for over two decades, split across two reigns, until 1485. Mulay Ḥasan’s wife Fāṭima, often called Fāṭima al-Ḥurra (“The Free Woman”) or, in other sources, ʿ Āʾisha al-Ḥurra, had already given birth to a son, Muḥammad XII, better known as Boabdil, the legendary “last Moor” whose sighing retreat from Granada has been memorialized as the dying gasp of Andalusi society. But a wife and sons were not enough to keep Ḥasan’s fancy from turning toward Isabel, who, as Rachel Arié states, was “called Zoraya after her conversion to Islam.” 1 Becoming his lover and then wife, she gave birth to two sons, Saʿad and Naṣr. According to later legend, the feud between Zoraya and Fāṭima that this love affair provoked weakened the Nasrid kingdom, for Boabdil sided with his mother and eventually ascended the throne but was soon overtaken by the Catholic kings. 2
Zoraya/Isabel’s identity has become the stuff of legend. Numerous fictional and theatrical accounts have imagined her life over the last two centuries, including plays, novels, and screen renditions, but apart from this fictional afterlife, her existence can be confirmed with solid historical documentation. 3 It is known that she was a Christian girl, very probably the daughter of Castilian nobleman Sancho Jiménez de Solís, mayor of La Peña de Martos, near Jáen, and it is generally thought, based on the sources, that she was captured during a Muslim raid and sold as a slave. She must have become a Muslim sometime around 1475-1480 and thus came to be called in Arabic and Castilian chronicles “rūmiyya” or “la romía” (Ar. female Rūm or Christian/slave.) We know that the sons she bore to King Ḥasan were first raised as Muslims but on 30 April 1492 were baptized by the bishop of Guadix and were known as Juan de Granada and Fernando de Granada in later years. Zoraya was known as Isabel, the former “Queen of Granada,” in a few Christian sources from the first decade of the sixteenth century, after which she disappears from the historical record.
