214 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINtheir deaths in Huesca, all of the executions took place in Cordoba,
though not all of the victims were native to the city.74 Several of them
came from other towns in the upper Guadalquivir valley, such as
Ecija and Carmona, and some, such as the priest Gumesind, from as
far off as Toledo. However in all such cases they had come to Cordoba
for other reasons, in some instances for the purposes of study, and
once there had been drawn into the martyr movement. Several of the
individuals are characterised as being of noble birth, some such as
Aurea, executed in 856, being of Arab descent, but others such as
Argemir clearly of Romano-Gothic origin. A common denominator
for many of them was association with a small group of monasteries
in the hinterland of Cordoba, of which that of Tabanos features most
prominently in the sources. This appears to have been, as were some
of the others, a double monastery, housing both monks and nuns
under the separate rule of an abbot and an abbess. It was a family
foundation, being the creation of a certain Jeremias and his wife
Elizabeth. Here the martyr Isaac, a relative by marriage of the found-
ing family, and the first voluntarily to seek his own death, spent three
years as a monk. A number of others associated with the monastery,
including the Palestinian monk George and also the founder of the
house, Jeremias, who, having installed his wife and her brother Mar-
tin as first abbot and abbess, had withdrawn to lead the life of a lay
hermit, were martyred in the early stages of the movement. However
after the voluntary immolation of the nun Digna in 853 the monas-
tery was destroyed by order of the amir MUQammad I on the grounds
that its creation had infringed the prohibition on the erection of new
churches.^75
In addition several of those who came forward to seek death by
martyrdom were secret Christians, in that they were either converts
from Islam or Christians who had lapsed into Islam only to reconvert
to their original faith. The existence of both such classes of Christian
who, for their ties to Islam however short-lived, were then liable to
execution as apostates in Muslim law, is indicative of the religious
fluidity that existed at least in certain sectors of society in mid ninth-
century Cordoba. The tide of conversion did not run in just one
direction. However most cases involving members of Muslim families
who converted to Christianity concern the products of mixed mar-
riages, in which the existence of a Christian mother or other female
relatives led to the conversion of the children, often after the death
of their Muslim father. In some such instances the children themselves