The Taifa of Granada or Zirid Kingdom of Granada was a Muslim kingdom that was formed in al-Andalus in 1013 following the deposition of Caliph Hisham II in 1009. The kingdom was centered on Granada, its capital, and it also extended its control to Málaga for a period. Four kings succeeded each other during its nearly 80 years of existence, all of them belonging to an offshoot of the Zirid dynasty of North Africa, a Sanhaja Berber clan. The Taifa of Granada was considered to be the wealthiest out of all of the taifa kingdoms. It was eventually conquered by the Almoravids in 1090, putting an end to Zirid rule in Granada.
View of the 11th-century Zirid walls of Granada in the Albaicín district today
The bell tower of the Church of San José in Granada today, converted from the minaret of a former 11th-century mosque from the Zirid period
Al-Andalus was the Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian Peninsula. The term is used by modern historians for the former Islamic states in modern-day Gibraltar, Portugal, Spain, and Southern France. The name describes the different Muslim states that controlled these territories at various times between 711 and 1492. At its greatest geographical extent, it occupied most of the peninsula and part of present-day southern France (Septimania) under Umayyad rule. These boundaries changed constantly through a series of conquests Western historiography has traditionally characterized as the Reconquista, eventually shrinking to the south and finally to the Emirate of Granada.
19th-century portrait of Abd al-Rahman I, from Estoria de España.
Interior of the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba, the former Great Mosque built by Abd ar-Rahman I in 785, later expanded by his successors
Abd al-Rahman III receiving ambassador John of Gorze of Otto I the Great at the Medina Azahara, by Dionisio Baixeras Verdaguer, 1885.
A silk textile fragment from the last Muslim dynasty of Al-Andalus, the Nasrid Dynasty (1232–1492), with the epigraphic inscription "glory to our lord the Sultan".