<P> In 1469, the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile signaled the launch of the final assault on the emirate . The King and Queen convinced Pope Sixtus IV to declare their war a crusade . The Catholic Monarchs crushed one center of resistance after another until finally on January 2, 1492, after a long siege, the emirate's last sultan Muhammad XII surrendered the city and the fortress palace, the renowned Alhambra (see Fall of Granada). </P> <P> By this time Muslims in Castile numbered half a million . After the fall, "100,000 had died or been enslaved, 200,000 emigrated, and 200,000 remained as the residual population . Many of the Muslim elite, including Muhammad XII, who had been given the area of the Alpujarras mountains as a principality, found life under Christian rule intolerable and passed over into North Africa ." Under the conditions of the Capitulations of 1492, the Muslims in Granada were to be allowed to continue to practice their religion . </P> <P> Mass forced conversions of Muslims in 1499 led to a revolt that spread to Alpujarras and the mountains of Ronda; after this uprising the capitulations were revoked . In 1502 the Catholic Monarchs decreed the forced conversion of all Muslims living under the rule of the Crown of Castile, although in the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia (both now part of Spain) the open practice of Islam was allowed until 1526 . Descendants of the Muslims were subject to expulsions from Spain between 1609 and 1614 (see Expulsion of the Moriscos). The last mass prosecution against Moriscos for crypto - Islamic practices occurred in Granada in 1727, with most of those convicted receiving relatively light sentences . From then on, indigenous Islam is considered to have been extinguished in Spain . </P> <P> The society of al - Andalus was made up of three main religious groups: Muslims, Christians, and Jews . The Muslims, although united on the religious level, had several ethnic divisions, the main being the distinction between the Arabs and the Berbers . The Arab elite regarded non-Arab Muslims as second - class citizens; and they were particularly scornful of the Berbers . </P>

Muslim spain was a cultural center in the tenth century