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But Ferdinand in this case would give them none, so they faced either death or slavery. When the city and its fortresses finally surrendered after three months of siege, Ferdinand and Isabella with their whole court celebrated mass in the principal mosque, hurriedly consecrated as St. Mary of the Holy Incarnation. Meanwhile long lines of the people of Malaga were led away into slavery. For two groups, however, a special fate was reserved. Twelve renegades, who had abandoned their Christian faith for Islam, were led out to an open field, stripped, and bound to upright posts. They were to be killed with sharpened canes, acañavereado. The horsemen in the army were given bundles of long stiff canes cut to a fine point. They rode back and forth, hurling their improvised javelins at the tethered renegades. Their accuracy improved until the bodies of the condemned resembled models for the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, spiked through with arrows. This protracted and exemplary execution lasted most of the day under the summer heat before the last unfortunate had expired. To complete what the chronicler Father Abarca described as “the festivities and illuminations most grateful to the Catholic piety of our sovereigns,” a number of Jewish converts who had returned to the faith of their fathers were burned alive at the stake.71

Malaga had guarded the western approaches to Granada, and Ferdinand already controlled the approach to the Vega of Granada itself. The only other area where the Muslims remained in control was the eastern half of the kingdom, with the great fortress city of Baza dominating the road from Valencia and Murcia. In the spring of 1489, the Castilian siege train deployed once more, but after five months Baza seemed no closer to surrender than on the first day. Even heaven seemed against them, for a sudden and unexpected flash flood swept away much of the Castilian camp and destroyed most of the rudimentary roads. Six thousand pioneers were set to work by Queen Isabella to restore the roads, and she came in person to raise the waning spirits of her troops. In the adulatory phrases of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera (later a noted historian of Spain and its empire in America), while the Muslims crammed the battlements of the city to watch, the queen arrived, “surrounded by a choir of nymphs, as if to celebrate the nuptials of her child; and her presence seemed at once to gladden and reanimate our spirits, drooping under long vigils, dangers and fatigue.”72 It had the opposite effect on the defenders, who sent negotiators to Ferdinand. His terms were as generous as those offered to the people of Malaga had been harsh. The surrender was quickly agreed, and on December 4, 1489, Ferdinand and Isabella rode into Baza, while a banner emblazoned with the cross was raised over the battlements. With the fall of the city, the last fortified town other than the city of Granada was in Christian hands.

But the cost of the war was growing daily. The king and queen had 80,000 men in the field and the prospect of undertaking a siege of Granada itself was an enterprise far greater than either Malaga or Baza. The task was more akin to the Ottoman assault on Constantinople in 1453 than anything that the armies of Spain had tackled. Peter Martyr said that Genoese merchants, “voyagers to every clime, declare this to be the largest fortified city in the world.”73 But unlike Constantinople, with its tiny garrison wholly inadequate to defend the long walls, Granada was crammed with 20,000 armed men, including the remains of the garrisons of Baza and Guadix, determined to defend the last piece of Muslim land in Al-Andalus. The heights above the city were walled and heavily defended and overlooked the plain below. The city itself was immured and could only be attacked frontally. William Hickling Prescott, in his History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, likened it to a sturdy oak, “the last of the forest, bidding defiance to the storm that had prostrated all its brethren.