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Vertrauenswürdige Glaubenszeugen?
Der Streit um religiöse Autorität im Umfeld der sogenannten Märtyrer von Córdoba
Abstract After the middle of the 9th century, several Christians in Córdoba were executed at the orders of Umayyad officials. The texts reporting these incidents were written by the educated layman Paulus Alvarus and the priest Eulogius, who was eventually executed, as well. Subsequently, Paulus Alvarus wrote a vita extolling his life and death. In their writings, both authors are eager to present the executions as acts of martyrdom, but no reader can overlook the fact that they feel obliged to contradict their critics, who doubt that the people executed were martyred for their faith, pointing to the fact that Islam is in their view a monotheistic religion, in contrast to the religious situation in the later Roman empire. What is more, the critics maintain that the executed Christians are unable to perform miracles. Therefore, the hagiographers propagating the martyrs’ cult had to resort to alternative ways to argue their case. The evidence they produce includes the exemplary life of the would-be martyrs on the one hand and the exposure of Islam as being allegedly based on seduction, error and lies on the other. In the long run, the most important piece of evidence turned out to be ecclesiastical tradition, which began on a modest scale with the veneration of the few relics that could be gathered by the propagandists; however, much more important was the veneration of the Cordoban martyrs in regions outside al-Andalus, where no eyewitness reports were available that might have contradicted any hagiographical reports. Remarkably, such reports were not preserved in al-Andalus, where no veneration of the martyrs prevailed.
Keywords Martyrdom; Truth of Faith; Hagiography; Christianity; Islam
