The Queen’s Skirmish was a short encounter outside Granada that became the last battle before the city’s surrender. Staged before Isabella of Castile and her daughters, it began as a response to a Christian raid and turned into a duel between champions. For the young Catalina, the contest joined religious triumph to personal fear; in the wider story, its aftermath marks both the conquest’s military culmination and the beginning of her later doubts about perpetual war.

Setting and challenge

On January 6, 1492, Isabella and her children were visiting Zubia, a village near Granada, so the queen could inspect the walls of the red fort. They had only a light guard. A commander rode into the village square in alarm, reporting that the gates had opened and armed Moors were coming out. With no time to return to camp, the queen and the princesses had nowhere secure to withdraw.

The apparent scale of the threat proved misleading: the force was a raiding party, not the entire army. Its leader was Yarfe, the Moorish champion, mounted on a large black horse. He had come in response to Hernando Pérez del Pulgar’s earlier raid on a mosque, where Hernando had left a Christian prayer. Yarfe now displayed that prayer tied to his horse’s tail, riding before the Christian ranks to provoke them. The gesture made the confrontation an answer to an earlier insult as well as a military challenge.

The champions’ duel

Isabella’s champion, Garallosco de la Vega, rode from the Spanish line to the house where the queen and princesses watched. He removed his helmet and asked the queen’s permission to answer Yarfe. Isabella granted it. Catalina protested that Yarfe was much larger and feared that de la Vega would be killed, but the duel went ahead while the queen and those with her prayed.

The encounter differed sharply from a court joust. The champions charged each other on horseback and the impact unseated both, ending the mounted contest at once. They rose and fought on foot. Yarfe’s size and strength pressed de la Vega backward, and the Spanish champion fell beneath him. At the moment Yarfe was about to finish the fight, de la Vega used a concealed short dagger in a desperate counterstroke. Yarfe fell, then managed to return toward his own men, acknowledging defeat. The outcome turned on a hidden weapon and a sudden reversal, not on the formal pageantry Catalina knew from court.

From skirmish to surrender

The encounter did not immediately end the danger. At a hidden signal, the gates of the fort opened and soldiers began to emerge. One of Catalina’s sisters urged the family to flee, but Isabella remained on her knees and ordered her daughters to pray. The episode thus places the queen’s religious resolve beside the practical vulnerability of a lightly guarded royal party, while Catalina’s alarm registers the cost that the heroic language of combat can conceal.

The Queen’s Skirmish proved to be the Moors’ last battle. Their champion was dead, Granada was encircled, and its people were starving. Support expected from Africa had not arrived; the Turks’ promised assistance failed, and Granada’s king had lost confidence while his son remained a hostage among the Christians. Isabella and Ferdinand II of Aragon pressed the advantage of a gathering Christian crusade. Within days, Boabdil agreed to terms. In the formal surrender that followed, he came on foot to the city gates and handed the keys of the Alhambra Palace to the Spanish king and queen on a silken pillow. The duel was therefore not the surrender itself, but it became a decisive marker of the city’s isolation and the collapse of its remaining military resistance.

Catalina’s changing interpretation

As a child, Catalina had treated the Christian campaign as God’s work and imagined its purpose extending far beyond Granada. She understood England as essential to an alliance against France and to a wider crusade against Muslim powers. The victory at Granada belonged to that early framework: a successful campaign seemed to confirm that military force could serve a sacred mission.

The meaning of the conquest changed as Catalina looked back on what followed. She remembered the Moors leaving Granada under Christian rule and wondered whether defeated enemies would simply return to fight again. Much later, after leading England through war against Scotland, she concluded that her parents’ example of driving the Moors overseas had won only one battle in a conflict that could continue across generations. In her reflection, the Queen’s Skirmish stands at the beginning of a history whose apparent conclusion—the surrender of Granada—could not guarantee peace. Its significance lies both in the victory it helped foreshadow and in the later recognition that victory alone could not end hatred.