Creating Christian Granada offers a richly special exam of a severe and transitional episode in Spain's march to worldwide empire. the town of Granada-Islam's ultimate bastion at the Iberian peninsula-surrendered to the keep an eye on of Spain's "Catholic Monarchs" Isabella and Ferdinand on January 2, 1492. Over the next century, Spanish country and Church officers, besides tens of millions of Christian immigrant settlers, reworked the previously Muslim urban right into a Christian one.

With consistent awareness to situating the Granada case within the broader comparative contexts of the medieval reconquista culture at the one hand and sixteenth-century Spanish imperialism within the Americas at the different, Coleman rigorously charts the alterations within the conquered city's social, political, non secular, and actual landscapes. within the approach, he sheds mild at the neighborhood components contributing to the emergence of tensions among the conquerors and Granada's previously Muslim, "native" morisco group within the many years top as much as the crown-mandated expulsion of many of the city's moriscos in 1569-1570.

Despite the failure to assimilate the moriscos, Granada's prestige as a frontier Christian group less than development fostered between a lot of the immigrant group cutting edge spiritual reform rules and courses that formed in direct methods a number of church-wide reform activities within the period of the ecumenical Council of Trent (1545-1563). Coleman concludes that the method wherein reforms of mostly Granadan beginning contributed considerably to variations within the Church as a complete forces a reconsideration of conventional "top-down" conceptions of sixteenth-century Catholic reform.