Abencerrages

بنو سراج, Banū Sarrāj) were a family or faction that is said to have held a prominent position in the Kingdom of Granada in the 15th century.

The Chambers Biographical Dictionary records that they arrived in Spain in the 8th century[1] but the name is familiar from the romance by Ginés Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada, which celebrates the feuds of the Abencerrages and the rival family of the Benedin (Arabic banu Edin), and the cruel treatment to which the former were subjected.

[2] The story is told that one of the Abencerrages, having fallen in love with a lady of the royal family, was caught in the act of climbing up to her window.

[3] Washington Irving in Tales of the Alhambra (1832) disagrees, saying the massacre was a fiction, but that a number of Abencerrages were killed in one of the battles at the time.

Nonetheless, many poems and plays, including Romance de la pérdida de Alhama, the novella The Abencerraje, and two operas (Les Abencérages, by Luigi Cherubini, and L'esule di Granata, by Giacomo Meyerbeer)[4] mention the legend.