The Early Medieval Era · 711-1031 · al-Andalus (Cordoba)
Mozarabic Christianity
Not yet available
There's no built conversation for this tradition here yet.
About This Movement
After 711 most of Iberia's Christians lived under Muslim rule, kept the old Visigothic liturgy, and — as generations passed — increasingly spoke, wrote and thought in Arabic. In the 850s that quiet accommodation broke open in Córdoba, where some four dozen Christians were executed after publicly denouncing Islam, many of them going out of their way to provoke the sentence. The community then argued with itself about what had happened: the priest Eulogius wrote the martyrs up as heroes and was executed himself in 859. His friend Paulus Alvarus complained bitterly that young Christians were mastering Arabic poetry while their Latin decayed. And other Christians, including bishops assembled in council, judged that the martyrs had thrown their lives away. Very little of the community's ordinary life is recoverable, but that argument survives in the words of the people who were having it. The window closes with the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba in 1031.
Sources
- The Eulogius Corpus (trans. Kenneth Baxter Wolf, TTH 71, Liverpool, 2019) (primary) — First complete English translation of Eulogius of Cordoba (Memoriale sanctorum, Documentum martyriale, Liber apologeticus martyrum) - a real voice in a live communal argument.
- Paulus Alvarus, Indiculus luminosus and letters (primary) — The lay voice in the argument for the martyrs, and the famous lament over young Christians preferring Arabic. No complete English translation exists; available in excerpts via Colbert (1962) and Coope/Wolf.
- Chronicle of 754 (trans. K. B. Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, TTH 9) (primary) — A Latin Christian voice from al-Andalus at the start of the entry's window - sets the conquest-era baseline before the martyrs' crisis.
- Kenneth Baxter Wolf, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain (Cambridge, 1988) (secondary) — Standard study of the martyrs' movement; free full text online at libro.uca.edu.
- Jessica A. Coope, The Martyrs of Cordoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (Nebraska, 1995) (secondary) — Reads the crisis as a communal argument about assimilation and conversion.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ch. 9: 'Christians under Muslim rule' (Sidney H. Griffith) (reference) — From the vol. 3 TOC; cf. ch. 8 (Kennedy, 'The Mediterranean frontier') for the political frame.