Boabdil, or Muhammad XII, was the last Nasrid emir of Granada, who surrendered the city and the Alhambra to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, ending Muslim rule in Iberia.
Boabdil — Muhammad XII — was the twenty-third and last Nasrid emir of Granada. He came to the throne amid civil war within his own dynasty and ruled the last Muslim state in Iberia in its final, doomed decade.
After years of defeat in the Granada War, he surrendered the city and the Alhambra to Ferdinand and Isabella on 2 January 1492 and left for exile. With his surrender the long history of Muslim rule in Iberia came to an end.
Boabdil seized power by rebelling against his father, Abu al-Hasan Ali, splitting the Nasrid house at the worst possible moment. Captured by the Christians at Lucena in 1483, he was released as a pawn, set against his own relatives to deepen Granada's civil wars.
As the Christian armies took the emirate's towns one by one, Boabdil was left ruling little more than Granada itself. In 1491–1492 he negotiated the surrender of the city on terms, and then departed for North Africa, where he is thought to have died in Fez decades later.
Boabdil comes down to us wrapped in legend more than record: the tragic last king, weeping as he looked back on the city he had lost — "the last sigh of the Moor" — while his mother is said to have told him not to weep like a woman for what he could not defend like a man. This is literary tradition, shaped by later Christian and Romantic writers, as much as history.
The historical Boabdil was a ruler dealt an impossible hand: a divided dynasty, a bankrupt emirate, and two united Christian crowns bent on his destruction. He is judged harshly by legend for the surrender, but modern historians stress how little room he had to do anything else.