Edict Banning the Abencerraje Family from Granada

The Edict Banning the Abencerraje Family from Granada turns a royal purge into a lasting sentence imposed on an entire lineage. Its terms reach beyond the accused men: they prohibit the family’s residence in Granada and regulate where its future children may live, making political punishment a condition inherited by the next generation.

Origins in the Royal Purge

The order follows an accusation that members of the Abencerraje Family had conspired to kill the king and divide the kingdom in revenge for an injury he had inflicted on two of them. The alleged plot was discovered before it could be carried out, but the account leaves its truth unresolved. The accused were arrested and beheaded before the people learned of the case; the narrator observes that the populace would have risen in opposition had it known in time.

The executions provoke public mourning. Knights, ladies, and the city grieve the loss of a family celebrated for courage, generosity, courtesy, and service. The king refuses appeals for mercy, even when petitioners offer large sums of gold and silver. After the executions, the authorities demolish the family’s houses, confiscate its property, proclaim its members traitors, and prohibit the family from living in Granada. Only Abindarráez’s father and uncle are exempted from the general ban because they were found not to have taken part in the alleged conspiracy.

Terms and Scope

The decree does not end with expelling the surviving family members. It prescribes the future of their children according to sex: any sons must be sent away to be raised outside the city from birth and may never return; daughters, once old enough, must be married outside the kingdom. The exception for the father and uncle therefore does not restore the family’s secure standing in Granada. Even their descendants are subject to the order’s restrictions.

This structure makes the edict both territorial and hereditary. It bars residence in a particular city while using removal, marriage, and the upbringing of children to prevent the family from re-establishing itself there. The order operates alongside confiscation and the destruction of homes: the family loses property and a place to live, while its future generations are directed away from the city and, for daughters, beyond the kingdom.

Abindarráez and the Edict’s Personal Consequences

Abindarráez presents his own childhood as an immediate consequence of the decree. Because he was born into the proscribed family, he was sent to be raised at Cártama, in a fortress once held by Christians, and entrusted to its governor, an old friend of his father. The edict thus determines his place of upbringing before he can make any choice of his own.

At Cártama, he grows up alongside Jarifa, the governor’s daughter. They are raised under the belief that they are brother and sister, and their love develops within that mistaken understanding. The decree does not itself create their affection, but it helps establish the circumstances of their shared upbringing far from Granada. Later, when the king orders Jarifa’s father to leave Cártama for Coín and leave Abindarráez behind, the resulting separation brings their attachment and the danger of parting into the foreground; this later relocation is a separate royal order, not a term of the edict.

Political and Narrative Significance

The episode emphasizes the gap between the family’s celebrated reputation and the state’s treatment of it. The Abencerraje Family is remembered as exemplary in courage and generosity, yet an accusation whose truth the account does not settle leads to executions, confiscations, exile, and restrictions on descendants. The stated exemption of two uninvolved men does not spare the family as a whole from punishment.

Within Abindarráez’s story, the decree converts a distant act of royal justice into a continuing personal condition: he is raised away from his birthplace and grows up in the household where he meets Jarifa. It also gives the embedded account of his family history a political dimension. His private love and separation unfold against an inherited sentence that has already determined where he may live and where his family may belong.