Hernando Pérez del Pulgar’s Raid on the Alhambra

Hernando Pérez del Pulgar’s Raid on the Alhambra turns a covert military incursion into a deliberate religious provocation. Pulgar and his companions entered Granada’s stronghold in disguise, carried a Christian prayer into its mosque, and escaped a clash with the guards; the Christian court celebrated their survival as both a daring exploit and a public affront to the Moors.

The Plan

Pulgar confided the plan to the young Catalina, asking her to promise not to tell her mother. He knew a little-used postern gate at the Alhambra Palace, he said, and intended to force an entry with his companions. Their aim was not simply to penetrate the fortress: they would pray in the mosque and leave an Ave Maria fixed to its floor with a dagger.

Catalina responded with excitement, not apprehension. She was too young to grasp that the sentries and the Moors’ anger made the venture potentially fatal. The difference between her delighted anticipation and the danger Pulgar knowingly accepted gives the episode its double character: a daring adventure to the child, a calculated challenge to those guarding Granada.

The Incursion and Escape

Pulgar and his companions dressed in Arab clothes to pass as townspeople under cover of darkness, then slipped through the postern gate. They hurried to the mosque, knelt and recited the Ave Maria, and stabbed the prayer into the floor. The gesture carried the raid’s purpose into the heart of the sacred space: the intrusion was meant to be discovered as an insult, not merely accomplished as a feat of stealth.

Guards surprised them inside. The Christians fought their way back down a narrow street, using thrusts and parries to reach the door they had forced open moments earlier. They escaped into the night before the full alarm sounded. No one was scratched, and none of Pulgar’s men was lost, turning a mission with the potential for disaster into a clean escape.

The Court’s Reception

Pulgar later appeared at the queen’s audience for petitioners and friends, dressed in his best suit, his beard combed and his eyes dancing, and told the story. His account presented the raid as a joke at the Moors’ expense and the prayer in their holy place as a triumphant insult. The queen was delighted, as was the king; Catalina and her sisters regarded Pulgar as a romance hero, and Catalina asked him to tell the story again and again.

That public delight did not erase Catalina’s private memory of fear. As she applauded Pulgar’s exploit, she remembered the chill she had felt while wondering whether he would return. The gap between the court’s retelling, which made danger into comedy and glory, and the child’s remembered dread preserves the raid’s human cost without diminishing its success.

Retaliation and Significance

The raid was understood as a challenge that would draw a response. Soon afterward, while the queen and her daughters were visiting Zubia to see the fort’s walls, the gates opened and a Moorish army thundered out. The party had ridden with only a light guard; there was no time to return to camp, and the queen and princesses could not outrun the horsemen or find a place to hide or make a stand. The episode thus connects Pulgar’s celebrated act of provocation to a moment of immediate danger for the royal women.

The raid’s meaning shifts with its audience. To Pulgar and the court, the prayer fixed in the mosque was a Christian victory and an affront to Granada; to Catalina, the celebration was shadowed by the possibility that its supposed hero might have died. Its swift, bloodless escape made the exploit easy to repeat as a romance, while the expected retaliation exposed the peril behind that story.