The red-walled palace-fortress on the hill above Granada, built by the Nasrid dynasty in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the last Muslim kingdom in Western Europe contracted toward its final stronghold — the supreme surviving work of late Andalusi art, and the place where al-Andalus ended when Granada surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.
Carved into the plaster of the Alhambra, repeated thousands of times across its halls, runs a single Arabic phrase: "there is no victor but God." It was the motto of the Nasrid kings who built this palace, and it reads now as either piety or prophecy. While they were decorating these rooms with poetry, fountains, and light, their kingdom was shrinking around them. It was the last Muslim state in Western Europe, paying tribute to the Christian power that would finally swallow it. The Alhambra is the most beautiful thing al-Andalus ever made, and it was made as al-Andalus was dying.