This paper contributes to the growing field of "Al-Andalus legacy studies" but takes an unusual route - focusing not on wars or migrations, music, art, kings or saints but on historically under-utilized source of literary biography. The life, works, trial and passion of one man, Ibn al-Khatib (d. 1374 CE) became a distinct emotive symbol of Al-Andalus in three distinct period after his strangulation in prison and the immolation of his body by his political rivals. First, there was an immediate impact. In letters and works of his friend, rival and sometime protégé Ibn Khaldun, Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib was an instant "martyr" of poetic eloquence, one who died due to the political machinations of the fourteenth century court of the Nasrid ruler Muhammad V of Granada. His status as a literary martyr only increased by the time of Ahmad al-Maqqari (d. 1632 CE). He and a group of literary elite scholars working for the Sultan in Morocco, many of them bureaucrats and secretaries versed in Andalusi eloquence and literature and claiming descent from Andalusis, sat around Ibn al-Khatib's grave in Fes and wept spontaneously. A whole volume of Al-Maqqari's, "Breath of Perfume", is an extended hagiography of Ibn al-Khatib and he is held up as the insurmountable peak of eloquence. In the 21st his legacy in Spain was recently marked with a celebration of his birth in Loja, a town outside of Granada, including the painting of his imagined likeness on the foundations of historic monuments. In 2022 there were still refreshed black and white outlines of the poet on the ruins of the Loja, Alcazar. Following the theoretical path set out by scholars such as Eric Calderwood, Elizabeth Drayson and Alejandro García-Sanjuán, and history of emotions methodology, I show how Ibn al-Khatib, in fact, has been, like the larger legacy of Al-Andalus he is meant to represent, re-imagined for widely different purposes and in three different ways, first in letters between friends, then in hagiography and then in images used by a working-class town in modern Andalucía far outside the tourist bustle of the Alhambra.