Apocalypse and Martyrdom in Ninth-Century Cordoba

This study investigates a mid-ninth-century apocalyptic polemic, the Indiculus Luminosus, written by a Christian layman living in Umayyad Cordoba. The author, Paulus Alvarus, used the actions of certain Christian "voluntary martyrs," to condemn those accommodating the prevailing Islamic culture. Explicating the social, political, ethnic and religious conflicts fracturing the Cordoban population during the 850s, this study investigates the tenuous place of the Christian elites within the political system of the Umayyad emirate, itself riven by partisan conflicts for power which employed and obscured the internal identity conflicts within the vaguely defined Muslim and Christian communities. In this context, one can better understand the apocalypticism within the Indiculus, and more importantly, why the author chose it in order to galvanize his contemporaries.