Martir-martir Kristen di Spanyol Muslim/Bab 3

3

The Martyrs of Córdoba and Their Historians

[36] The abundant attention that the martyrs of Córdoba have attracted in the last four hundred years stands in marked contrast to the relative neglect they suffered in the first seven centuries after their deaths.(1) The only manuscript of Eulogius' writings known to have survived to modern times was one which presumably accompanied his own remains to Oviedo, where he was translated in 884. There it lay until the sixteenth-century bishop and inquisitor general Pedro Ponce de León happened to fall upon it in his search for collections of saints' lives.(2) In 1571 the bishop forwarded his rare find to one of Philip II's official chroniclers, the Cordoban-born Ambrosio de Morales.(3) He could not have picked a more appreciative beneficiary. Three short years later the first printed edition of the Eulogius corpus appeared. As it turned out this timely publication actually saved Eulogius' literary efforts from oblivion. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the Oviedo manuscript had relapsed into obscurity, this time never to be recovered.

At the time that Morales first became aware of the manuscript's existence he was engaged in the compilation of sources for one of his pet projects: a comprehensive history of Spain. Eleven years before, Morales had met some Italian ambassadors in Toledo who were critical of the Spanish intellectual community for failing to produce an up-to-date account of Iberian "antiquities and events."(4) Morales took the criticism to heart and personally resolved to remedy the cultural defect: "from that point on, I truly prepared myself for this task, to satisfy this need of my people, and to restore the honor and authority of our Spain." But, as he soon realized, he was not alone. A historian named Florian de Ocampo had already begun a work of similar scope. Yet Ocampo died suddenly in 1563 leaving his magnum opus unfinished and the door open for Morales [37] to step in. When the Eulogius manuscript found its way into his hands, the task took on an even deeper personal significance. Fifteen years later Morales sent the last volume of his continuation of Ocampo's Corónica general to the printers, candidly admitting that no part of the work had given him more pleasure than the chapter devoted to the martyrs. "Because in it I am obliged to write about many holy martyrs through whom the glory of Spain is sovereignly exalted in heaven and on earth, before God and men alike. . . and even more because all of the martyrs were crowned in Córdoba, leaving my homeland illuminated with their worthy triumph."(5)

Morales' pride in his native city as well as in the Spain that had just added a great naval victory at Lepanto to its long list of military achievements against the Muslims on the peninsula, is evident in his manner of presenting the martyrs. His purpose was to bring to the attention of his readers the pathetic heroism of a handful of Cordoban Christians futilely resisting the encroachment of Islam four centuries before the liberation of their Andalusian homeland. Morales made no attempt to recreate the tensions that split the ninth-century community, nor did he dwell on Eulogius' reasons for writing. He simply translated and paraphrased the passiones of the martyrs, omitting altogether the lengthy apologies that Eulogius felt obliged to append to them. The seven centuries that separated the two Catholic authors, seven centuries that had witnessed a complete reversal in peninsula hegemony, had removed the need to justify the self-destructive zeal of the martyrs.

Though Morales did not feel compelled, given the sympathies of his audience, to defend martyrdom under non-persecutory circumstances, the awkwardness of the situation was no less apparent to him: "Although the Christians of Córdoba enjoyed the consolation of churches and monasteries,. . . and some liberty to practice their religion, still the greatest and truest consolation, which they had from the hand of our Lord in that time, and the most marked mercy with which he desired to bestow them, was to give them many worthy martyrs."(6) Morales realized that the martyrs of Muslim Spain were not, as their Roman counterparts had been, the product of any obvious form of persecution. But this discrepancy was for him only circumstantial. Divine providence was at work as much in the ninth as in the third century.

Morales' Latin edition of Eulogius' writings and his transcription [38] of the passiones in the Corónica general assured the martyrs the attention of every subsequent historian of Spain. And every historian who treated the Cordoban executions felt obliged to offer his own opinions as to why, given the lack of persecution, the martyrdoms ever took place.

The most popular means of explaining and justifying the martyrs' actions among Spanish historians, who, like Eulogius and Morales, have traditionally assumed an apologetic stance, has been to question and reinterpret the reputed tolerance of the Muslim authorities. Juan de Mariana, whose Historia general de España appeared first in Latin in 1592 and nine years later in Castilian, had to admit on the basis of the surrender terms granted by the Muslim conquerors and Eulogius' references to a thriving Christian church in al-Andalus, that the situation was a "tolerable manner of servitude."(7) But the quality of this servitude was not consistent. Increased taxation under cAbd ar-Rahmân II made life unbearable for the Christians. "From these beginnings, the seeds of ancient animosities began to swell and break open. . . , as the faithful tried to shake off that heavy yoke." At the same time the Christian community of Córdoba became subject to verbal and physical abuse by the Muslim population: "irritated by injuries of this type, the Christians did not hesitate to blaspheme in public the law and customs of the Moors. The kings and governors took this opportunity to persecute the Christian people with the greatest cruelty. "(8)

This reassessment served as the basis of virtually every Spanish treatment for the next 250 years. Enrique Florez, who published his mammoth España Sagrada, in 1753, posited the existence of two separate estados or "conditions" of Christian life in al-Andalus: one of peace and the other of persecution.(9) The former, as he described it, arose out of a pragmatic realization by the Muslim conquerors that they needed the cooperation of the indigenous people in order to maintain their hold on the peninsula. But just as the references in the writings of Eulogius and Alvarus to a flourishing Andalusian church provided Florez with all the evidence he needed to support the existence of an estado de paz, so their reports of taxation and personal abuse suggested a growing estado de persecución no less intense than its Roman imperial counterpart.(10)

This emphasis on the persecutory aspects of Christian existence [39] in al-Andalus peaked in the middle of the last century. In a work devoted exclusively to the Andalusian Christians, Francisco Simonet wrote that "Islamization fought with the total weight of its power, with all the rage of its tyranny, and with all the seduction of its sensuality, against the wretched mozarab flock, plotting its imminent and complete destruction."(11) In order to resist this encroachment and maintain the integrity of the Christian community, the leaders had to "apply a moral and superhuman force." They had to defy the persecution and offer themselves to martyrdom.(12) Simonet's definition of persecution, expanded to include not only the "rage" of Islamic tyranny, but the seductiveness of its doctrine and lifestyle, left no room for doubt that the martyrs did exactly what they had to do.

While Spanish historians followed Mariana's lead and portrayed the Muslim treatment of Christians as provocative, a markedly different historiographical tradition developed simultaneously on the other side of the Pyrenees. In 1587, barely a year after Morales released the pertinent volume of his Corónica general, a Frenchman from Lyons named Louis Turquet de Mayerne published his own Histoire generale d'Espagne. Unlike Morales, Turquet de Mayerne was singularly unimpressed with the zeal that the martyrs demonstrated. His treatment, in contrast to that of his Spanish counterpart, was short and uncomplimentary. "In the end of cAbd ar-Rahmân's reign there was a great persecution against the Christians who dwelt in Muslim territory, the cause of which was their insolence and rebellion." The Frenchman went on to enumerate the various religious liberties that the Christians enjoyed under Muslim rule. Taxes, which the emirs raised from time to time, led to Christian complaint and Muslim irritation. "Some Christians of better judgement exhorted the rest to patience, foreseeing the problem, but it was in vain . . . [as they] were condemned by a council, and are blamed by the authors of histories, who have made no scruple to number as martyrs those rebels who perished in this massacre."(13) For Turquet de Mayerne, the Christians who repudiated the martyrs deserved credit for their admirable restraint and their recognition of the inscrutability of divine providence.

Just as Mariana set the pace for Spanish historians, Turquet de Mayerne's rather deprecatory approach became the norm for [40] scholars who looked at Spain from the outside. The most important of these was the Dutch orientalist Reinhardt Dozy, whose Histoire des musulmans d'Espagne first appeared in 1861. Why, Dozy asked, when all the evidence suggested that "the Christians of Córdoba had accommodated themselves quite well to foreign domination," were there "exceptions to the rule?"(14) Dozy offered two explanations. First, priests and monks, who constituted the majority of the malcontents, held extremely biased views of Muhammad, Islam and the Arab people. They were simply incapable of treating Islam as anything more than a new version of paganism, or of regarding Arab customs as anything less than diabolically inspired profligacy. Secondly, the clerics were sometimes the victims of intolerance at the hands of the Muslim populace, a circumstance which, when combined with such recalcitrant attitudes toward Islam, proved volatile: "Feeling sanctified in their pride, exasperated at the outrages they received, and pushed by a febrile need to act, priests, monks, and a small number of like-minded laymen, would not resign themselves to suffer in silence, to make sterile vows, to be torn with feelings of anger."(15)

The arrests of Perfectus and Joannes were, in Dozy's opinion, the immediate cause of this outburst of "hate and fanaticism."(16) But it was Isaac who provided his coreligionists with a way of demonstrating their discontent in a self-sanctifying way. The subsequent movement not only alarmed the authorities who were, at the time, especially sensitive to any form of dissent, but split the Christian community. Following Turquet de Mayerne, Dozy portrayed Christians like Eulogius' infamous exceptor reipublicae, who converted to Islam when faced with the prospect of losing his position, not as bad Christians but as "chrétiens raisonnables" who remained untouched by the fanaticism of the others.(17)

It is not surprising that Dozy's analysis of the situation evoked some harsh criticism from those Spanish historians to whom the martyrs of Córdoba were nothing less than religious heroes and national treasures. Justo Pérez de Urbel, who published a biography of Eulogius in 1927, dismissed Dozy as one "disoriented by his revolutionary and rationalist ideas," and therefore "incapable of comprehending the nobility" of Eulogius' character.(18) On the other hand, Dozy's influence on subsequent historiography is unmistakeable. Modesto Lafuente y Zamalloa, whose Historia [41] general de España appeared within six years of Dozy's study of Muslim Spain, admitted that there were fanatics on both sides of the religious division in al-Andalus, and that the hostility that Christians felt toward the Muslims was exacerbated in part "by the sometimes indiscreet and exaggerated religious zeal of some Christians."(19)

But in addition to promoting a greater degree of sympathy for the "chrétiens raisonnables," whom Eulogius had categorically repudiated, Dozy also suggested what turned out to be a very popular way of explaining the harsh reaction that the martyrs evoked from the Muslim authorities. As he saw it, "the Arab government was alarmed with good reason at this new type of rebellion; for among the participants, fanaticism was no more than one aspect of their being; it was mixed with a military ardor and some rather fierce desires for political vengeance."(20) There was, from the perspective of the authorities, little real difference between the spontaneous self-sacrifice of the martyrs and the perennial uprisings by Christian and muwallad factions that plagued the outlying parts of the emirate.

Evariste Lévi-Provençal, the great scholarly successor to Dozy, applied this same sort of reasoning in 1932 when he criticized Simonet's religious persecution thesis:

   If the reigns of many cUmayyad emirs were marked by persecutions of the Christian communities, that of Córdoba in particular, one must realize that these persecutions were dictated less by the fanaticism of the princes than by concerns of a political nature. These communities were in effect the most active focus for movements of nationalism. . . By the force of circumstances, every Christian became suspect; and more times than not this was not without some reason.(21)

The image of the martyrs as early Spanish nationalists proved very popular among Spanish historians of the first half of this century, leading to something of a historiographical rapprochement between the two previously antagonistic traditions. Whether or not a state of persecution existed in mid-ninth-century Córdoba was no longer of such pressing concern. The mere existence of a foreign power in Spain was enough to justify the pathetic struggle of the Cordoban patriots.

Pérez de Urbel, who was, as we have seen, less than enchanted with Dozy's attitude toward the martyrs, nevertheless adopted and [42] adapted the Dutch historian's political interpretation for his own biographical purposes. Though no less convinced than his countrymen that the martyrs' movement was a reaction against a real persecution, he recognized a nationalistic element, a "tendencia españolista," closely intertwined with the more obvious religious aspect.(22) As Pérez de Urbel saw it, Eulogius "had constituted himself as a leader of a 'national party' " that sought to revive the "old hispano-gothic spirit." "In a time when españolismo seemed crushed for good by the violence of the conquering people," Eulogius "rose up bravely with all of the eternal characteristics of his race." As such, Eulogius and cUmar ibn Hafsun, the remarkably successful muwallad rebel of the late ninth and tenth centuries, were two sides of the same coin, both working for the "cause of the Spanish spirit."(23)

This proto-nationalistic interpretation of the martyrs' movement achieved its most ebullient expression in the work of Isidro de las Cagigas, whose study of the mozarabs was published in 1947. Expanding Pérez de Urbel's thesis, Cagigas described the Cordoban martyrs, ibn Hafsun, and the rebels of Toledo as three separate manifestations of the same phenomenon: a nationalistic opposition to Muslim rulers on the part of the mozarabs and the muwallads, the only truly Spanish inhabitants of al-Andalus. What distinguished the Cordoban situation from the other two was the powerful control exercised there by the emir. The ill-fated revolts of 805 and 818 demonstrated the futility of armed rebellion in the heart of cUmayyad Spain. Without recourse to any military option, the Cordoban Christians turned to religion which "opened for them a new road to follow in their protest against the tyrants." In the works of Eulogius, that "revolucionario pacífico," Cagigas found "the first conscious buds of the rebirth of Spanish patriotism."(24)

For all of its attractiveness to a generation of Spanish scholars preoccupied with the roots of their historical identity, the nationalistic interpretation has not held up well under the weight of scrutiny. The complete absence of references to any such secular motives in the sources has led J. F. Rivera Recio, Raphael Jiménez Pedrajas, and Emilio Linage Conde to dismiss Cagigas' view altogether in favor of exclusively religious explanations. But what was the precise nature of these religious motives?(25) Over the last thirty years a new generation of historians has directed its attention [43] to this question, from a variety of interesting perspectives. Franz Richard Franke's "Die freiwilligen Märtyrer von Cordova und das Verhältnis der Mozaraber zum Islam," published in 1953, focuses primarily on the differences between Christian-Muslim polemic in the east and its counterpart in Spain. But in the course of his review of the martyrs' movement, he makes some very astute observations pertaining to the question of motive.

Franke's point of departure is the simple observation that a large percentage of the confessors came from monasteries. Many had, in other words, taken active steps toward detaching themselves from Cordoban society, "to flee from the corruption of the world, a world which bore the stamp of the unbelievers."(26) In addition many of those who had no formal ties to a monastery nevertheless were infused with the same ascetic spirit, and, like Sabigotho and Aurelius, pursued martyrdom out of fear that the usual austerities might not be enough to secure their salvation. In Franke's words, "it must have seemed so much safer to suffer for an instant the surrender to human judgement, to confess Christ publicly and to flee his adversary, and to obtain by means of death the crown of the martyrs, than to run the risk of a lifelong struggle."(27) As we shall see in the final chapter, Franke's emphasis on this link between monastic and martyrial self-denial is the most fruitful approach to the question of motive.

The credit for bringing Eulogius and the martyrs to the attention of American scholars belongs to two historians whose work first appeared in print in the early 1960s. Edward P. Colbert's published dissertation, "The Martyrs of Córdoba (850-859): A Study of the Sources," is precisely what the title states: a review of the Latin documentation surrounding the events.(28) Colbert's specific concerns were, first of all, to search the corpus muzarabicorum for evidence as to the state of Christian culture in al-Andalus, and secondly to determine whether or not the victims listed in Eulogius' martyrologies should be considered true martyrs. Despite his expressed intention of avoiding the pitfalls of bias that have trapped previous historians, it is quite clear that Colbert's aim from the outset was to vindicate the martyrs and mozarabic culture as a whole after what he regarded as a century of deprecation beginning with the work of Dozy.(29) The fact that Colbert's treatment offers little in the way of useful interpretive frameworks does not diminish [44] its importance as an exhaustive survey of the primary sources and thus as a catalyst for further research by a broader scholarly community.

If Colbert's treatment can be faulted for its lack of conceptual creativity, Allan Cutler's article, "The Ninth-century Spanish Martyrs' Movement and the Origins of Western Christian Missions to the Muslims," perhaps errs in the other direction.(30) In Cutler's view the martyrs were united in an effort to "create a great rebellion against the Saracen regime in Spain as the necessary prelude to the inauguration of the Messianic Era," by reconverting Christians who had been absorbed either religiously or culturally by Islam. Three characteristics of the situation in Córdoba suggested this hypothesis to Cutler. For one thing, Eulogius' references to Muhammad as a praecursor antichristi, coupled with Alvarus' more elaborate exegetical exercises to the same effect, seemed to indicate a preoccupation, on the part of the martyrs' two main supporters, with the imminent climax of sacred history.(31) Secondly the great anxiety that the movement evoked from the authorities implied that they were extremely apprehensive about the potential for rebellion.(32) Thirdly, the spontaneous confessions of the martyrs resembled the confrontation technique of proselytization that, centuries later, would highlight Franciscan attempts to convert Muslim leaders. "Indeed," writes Cutler, "there is so much similarity between the ninth-century Spanish martyrs' movement and the 'left wing' of the early Franciscan mission to the Muslims that the latter may well have been a revival of the former."(33) We will have more to say about Cutler's thesis later in this study.

As varied as the scholarly treatments of the Cordoban martyrs' movement are, all have two things in common. First of all, in each case the historian has attempted to uncover the single motivating force behind the martyrs' actions, with Muslim persecution, Christian fanaticism, Spanish patriotism and mozarab apocalypticism each enjoying the spotlight at one time or another. Secondly, without exception, they have not hesitated to ascribe the motives of the martyrs to the author of the martyrology. Cutler portrayed Eulogius as one of the orchestrators of an apocalyptic rebellion spearheaded by the martyrs' belligerent proselytization techniques.(34) Pérez de Urbel described him as the "indisputable leader of a heroic event in which two antagonistic peoples clashed."(35) For Raphael Jiménez Pedrajas, Eulogius was the [45] "visible head of the Christian resistance," who sought the same goals as the martyrs: "to provoke in the Cordoban church a healthy reaction, that would free it from the enervating and deadly torpor that was invading it."(36) Neither these historians nor their predecessors seem to have considered the possibility that Eulogius' motives for recording the passiones might not be the same as those that led the martyrs to sacrifice their lives. To date only James Waltz and Norman Daniel have recognized the importance of treating Eulogius as a separate entity, apart from the executed Christians whose praise he sang.

Waltz wrote his article in response to Cutler's invitation for "future scholars to dig deeper and come up with better answers."(37) Instead of addressing himself directly to the motives of the victims, Waltz focused on the specific concerns that prompted the literary productivity of Eulogius and Alvarus. Both were, in Waltz's estimation, highly sensitive to the erosion of Latin-Christian culture after almost a century and a half of forced incorporation into an Arab-Islamic world. And both resolved to do something about it. In Waltz's words, ". . . they constructed a positive program designed to uphold the values and demonstrate the superiority of Latin-Christian culture to their fellow Christians."(38) One part of that program involved the revival of Latin scholarship, an end to which Eulogius contributed by securing Latin volumes from the north which had become scarce in the south.(39) Another involved the refutation of heresies, a task which Alvarus assumed with great zeal in his correspondence. Third and finally, both strove for the "intensification of the spiritual quality of Christian life through the maintenance of Spanish Christian practices."(40)

The martyrdoms were not, in Waltz's view, an original part of Eulogius' and Alvarus' program:

   Their aims neither required nor anticipated the martyrdoms. Yet it may be argued that they caused the martyrdoms indirectly, because their assertion of Latin-Christian culture in open opposition to Arabic-Islamic culture sharpened the outlines of each culture, made explicit and obvious previously implicit and muted culture conflicts and thereby prepared a confrontation situation in which bearers of each culture maintain the truth of their, and the falsehood of their opponents', faith and culture with all possible reason, authority, and invective.(41)

In other words, the original program of cultural definition and preservation to which Eulogius and Alvarus had dedicated [46] themselves did not include the orchestration of any martyrs' movement. Yet the movement -- which may nonetheless have been catalyzed by this program -- coincidentally paralleled their program of cultural polarization so that they readily adopted it and incorporated it as a way of "informing, instructing and uniting" Christians against Muslims.(42)

Waltz's contention that Eulogius and Alvarus "had devised and were implementing . . . a careful, comprehensive program calculated to enhance and maintain Latin-Christian culture among Cordoban Christians" places too much emphasis on a single aspect of their literary concerns. By portraying the two as the authors and implementers of a program whose pre-martyrial phase amounted to little more than Eulogius' book collecting and Alvarus' refutation of heresy, Waltz errs in much the same manner as Cutler. Both historians have tried to explain Eulogius' and Alvarus' support for the martyrs in terms of a broad, preconceived campaign, designed to rectify the imbalance between Islam and Christianity. But the evidence required to prove either that they were apocalyptically motivated or that they had worked out a program for the revival of Christian culture is simply not there.

Norman Daniel devoted the second chapter of The Arabs and Medieval Europe to the Cordoban martyrs. His decision to ignore previous secondary treatments of the subject freed him from the historiographical labyrinth to make some fresh and useful observations. Most notably he recognized that Eulogius was different from the rest of the martyrs and appreciated the psychological conflicts that surface in his writings. Contrasting Eulogius' enthusiastic support of the martyrs with his personal reluctance to join them, Daniel suggests that Eulogius may have been "just an ambitious cleric who made himself the leader of a party and rose on the bodies of his victims to ecclesiastical preferment."(43) Daniel stops short of subscribing to this hypothesis, taking into account Eulogius' intense personal involvement with some of the confessors. Had he been aware of the difficulties involved in assigning a date to Eulogius' episcopal election -- which probably occurred in 852, thus predating the bulk of his literary activity -- he would never have suggested it.(44) Nevertheless, as we shall see, Daniel was on the right track. For Eulogius' complex motives do seem to include intense frustration with the local ecclesiastical hierarchy in Córdoba which [47] he perceived to be acting in the interests more of the Muslim government than the Christian community.

The attention of Waltz and Daniel to the mentality of Eulogius and Alvarus, independent of that of the martyrs, constitutes a major breakthrough in approach. Waltz's simple yet crucial observation that the two authors "wrote in response to the martyrdoms," which, as Waltz correctly observed, "is quite different from saying as some do, that they instigated or incited the martyrdoms," underscores an important distinction between the aims of the martyrs and those of the men who chose to bestow sanctifying honors upon them. Because it is, practically speaking, only through the writings of Eulogius that we know anything about the martyrs, it is absolutely essential that we understand the nature of this medium before we attempt to comprehend what drove the Cordoban martyrs to their deaths.