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This vivid and violent image reflects European fascination with the supposed tyranny of Oriental despots. It depicts an execution where both perpetrator and victim are Moors, the European term for the Muslims who ruled Spain and North Africa in the medieval period. Granada, the kingdom referenced in the painting’s title, was the last Iberian Muslim city-state to fall to the Castilians (1492 CE), an event which marked the end of the Reconquista and the initiation of the Jewish and Muslim expulsion from Spain. We have stated elsewhere in this module that describing Middle Eastern politics and governance exclusively in terms of authoritarianism or despotism distorts a more complex historical reality, but this notion was (and continues to be) a relatively common western prejudice. For many Europeans of the nineteenth-century, Regnault’s painting captured the essence of rulership and justice in North Africa and the Middle East.

Learning Resources

Name: Execution Without Trial Under the Moorish Kings of Granada

Material: Oil on canvas

Size: Height: 302 cm (119 in)

Width: 146 cm (57 in)

Date: 1870

Place of Origin: Granada, Spain

Location: Museé d’Orsay, Paris

Source and Registration#: Professor John E. Woods

John Woods

Professor of Iranian and Central Asian History, and of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations

Alexander Barna

Outreach Coordinator, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago