Cultural assimilation across a generation alarmed Christian church authorities

Evidence

The chroniclers of 741 and 754 read Arabic chronicles: their greatgrandchildren were composing Arabic poems in Abd al-Rahmân’s Córdoba. This acculturation bode ill for the Latin church, according to the worried ruminations of Eulogius and Alvarus. While the bishops were being drawn into the politics and culture of the court, the monasteries remained steadfast bastions of Latinity and of resistance to acculturation. Speraindeo (hope in God), Eulogius’s and Alvarus’s teacher and abbot of the Cordovan basilica of Saint Zoilus, wrote a polemical disputation against Islam in the 820s or 830s, in which he reviled the Muslim idea of heaven as a brothel (lupanar); he also composed passiones of two Christians who had been put to death by Muslim authorities in the 820s, whom he considered 86 • Forging Polemical Images (Eighth-Twelfth Centuries) martyrs. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 502