Introduction

This chapter outlines the convivencia between Mudejares and repobladores, or settlers, during the initial period of the organization of the Kingdom of Granada, from its integration into Castile to the beginning of the sixteenth century. The people of Granada to whom the second and third types of capitulations were applied kept their horses and side-arms, as did those subject to the first type, except when they capitulated after having resisted. Now it examines principle characteristics prior to looking at the actual processes of colonization. The essential problem was the growing presence of the Christian repobladores and the cultural and ideological abyss that loomed between victors and vanquished. The population movements and Christian colonization had produced a distribution of settlement in which the Mudejares were reduced to rural and mountain areas. Baptism was considered the first stage in Christianization, an important stage because it was accompanied by the change in legal status, and law was the framework of society.