THE UMAYYAD REGIME 215became divided, with the boys retaining the paternal faith while the
daughters secretly adopted their mother's Christianity. This was the
case of Flora and an unnamed sister, whose brother denounced them
to the qadi as lapsed Muslims in 845, for which he had them flogged.
They then ran away from home to live secretly with Christian friends
at Martos.^76
While Muslim men could take Christian wives, the reverse was not
possible. Thus an unusual case was that of the parents of Maria and
Walabonsus, children of a humble Christian father from Elche and
an Arab mother, who was persuaded by her husband into accepting
his religion. As a result the family had to keep permanently on the
move and in hiding until the wife died. Then their father put Maria
into the convent of Cute clara, under the direction of its abbess
Artemia, herself the mother of two children, Adulphius and John,
who had been martyred in obscure circumstances in 822, and
Walabonsus was entrusted to the monastery of St Felix. Walabonsus
became a deacon and one of the spiritual directors of Cuteclara,
before volunteering himself for martyrdom in June of 851, amongst
the first wave of those taking up the example of Isaac. Maria, who had
a vision of her brother in which he told her that she too would soon
be a martyr, met Flora, the fugitive convert from Islam, praying in the
basilica of St Acisclus and the two women· thereupon decided to go
to the the qadi and publicly denounce MuQammad. Having done this
and resisting the attempt of the qadi to convert them, they were
executed in November of 851.^77
In several of the cases, notably that of Eulogius himself, as re-
corded in the Life by Alvar, it seems that the Muslim judges were
reluctant to press matters to their final conclusions, even when con-
version to Islam was the only admissible alternative to execution.
Eulogius was apparently offered the chance of a purely nominal con-
version: 'Say only a word in this hour of need, and afterwards practice
your faith where you will. We promise not to search for you. ,78 But in
all such cases attempts at compromise were resisted and if necessary
further insults were directed against Islam and its Prophet in order to
ensure that the qadi pronounced sentence of death.
Difficulties exist in the evaluation of these accounts, not least in
that they bear close resemblance to the early Christian passions of the
martyrs, and it is not possible to be sure how far purely literary par-
allels are being made or to what degree the Cordoban martyrs de-
liberately emulated the conduct of their third-and early fourth-century