Between 850 and 859 officials of the Umayyad caliphs of Spain put to death forty-eight Christians. Their deaths inspired the warriors of the Reconquista, the long Christian military campaign to expel Muslim rule from the Spanish peninsula, which was at last brought to completion in 1492...

He Chose to Die for Christ: Saint Eulogius

by Robert Shaffern

Often buried within the international section of American national newspapers may be found accounts of Muslim vandalism against Christian churches, so say nothing of Muslim attacks on the Christians of the Middle East. 

Just last week a Muslim mob badly damaged a Coptic Christian church outside Cairo; local police merely watched. No prosecution of this crime may be expected. 

Such outrages belie the multicultural myth of a tolerant Islam. That myth is also often used to characterize medieval Spain, most of which Muslims ruled after 711 AD. 

Scholars often use the word conviviencia to refer to the common life of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in medieval Spain. The reality, however, was often harsher than conviviencia might suggest. 

An underlying tension between the three groups was ever-present, and both Jews and Christians suffered under the Umayyad caliphs of Córdoba. The reports of Christian suffering in today’s news are echoes of medieval Spain.

The priest St. Eulogius, whose feast day is March 11, descended from an ancient Spanish aristocratic family; indeed, his ancestors owned large estates in the days of the Roman emperors. He was probably born shortly before 819 near Córdoba. As a boy, Eulogius showed intellectual promise. The monks of the monastery of St. Zoilus educated him in the Christian and Greco-Roman classics. Bishop Recared of Córdoba ordained Eulogius a priest. He quickly emerged as a leader among Mozarabic Christians.

Around 850, the Muslim Umayyad caliph, for reasons that remain obscure, initiated a persecution of Christians within his realm. 

Muslim law (sharia) relegated Christians to subservient status. While Muslims enjoyed the freedom to worship and to make converts, Christians who evangelized Muslims or made disparaging remarks about Muhammad could be executed, as is also the case for Christians who reside in Muslim-majority countries today. 

The earliest convert from Islam to be murdered for the Christian faith was the Syrian Cyrus of Harran (died in 770). Cyrus was raised Christian, converted to Islam, and then reconverted to Christianity, for which he was put to death. Muslims martyred the Christians of medieval Spain for these same reasons. Scholars debate whether Spanish Christians ever publicly denounced either Islam or Muhammad so as to seek out persecution from the authorities.

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