Story of st Laura

Answer 1

Short answer: she was a Spanish nun who got moulded to death.

she was a nice person......

Long Answer: Spain was ruled by Muslims in the 9th century who imposed their own interpretation of the Quran and shariah law upon their subjects, who were mostly christians. Among these laws included prohibitions against trying to spread other religions than Islam, apostasy from Islam and cursing Mohammed or the Quran. Violating these restrictions often resulted in the death penalty.

In this environment, ca 850 AD, there was a man named Isaac who was a Christian (and is also a catholic saint) who had formerly served in the Emir's government in Cordoba, and it is recorded that one day he approached a Muslim magistrate to ask him some questions about Islam. The magistrate, perhaps thinking that Isaac was interested in conversion, answered the questions, and then Isaac unexpectedly denounced Islam in front of the magistrate, who slapped him in shock. Isaac was executed for this crime.

After this happened, a very strange series of events then played out wherein, one after another, Christians mimicked Isaac's example and went out into public places in Cordoba (Isaac himself did it at the royal palace) to denounce Islam and/or proclaim Christianity; there were also Muslim apostates who openly declared their conversion to Christianity. One after another, they were all executed.

This stream of martyrs confounded the Muslim authorities, who made efforts to get them to stop doing this. They put pressure on the rest of the Christian community, who had mixed reactions towards the martyrs. A number of Spanish Christians rejected what the martyrs were doing, believing that the martyrs of ancient Rome were people who did not court death like this, but rather they tried to stay hidden in times of persecution and only professed the truth when there was no other option available to them (eg. if they were found and told to worship the emperor). This also makes the martyrs of cordoba somewhat unique in comparison with Christian martyrs around the world who generally tried to avoid being caught; for example, St Thomas More famously kept silent about his real opinions and made great efforts to avoid being popularly labelled as being against Henry VIII's decision.

Many of their fellow Christians turned against the martyrs. With the support of the bishop of Cordoba, the Muslim Emir imprisoned the local clerical leadership, but when this failed to produce results, he released them and told them to have a church council to denounce the martyrs, which also did not produce a stop to the stream.

These 'suicide preachers' continued until at least ca 859 AD, when the person who recorded these events (St Eulogius) was himself executed for harbouring an apostate from Islam. It is not known how long they continued after that, although a tradition holds that a nun and abbess from cuteclara named St Laura (who may have been previously married to a husband that had died before she became a nun) was executed in Cordoba ca 864 AD, perhaps under similar conditions. Her manner of execution was extremely gruesome (she was lowered into a cauldron of molten lead), which may have suggested that whatever she did or said may have been found particularly offensive by the authorities in comparison with the other martyrs who were executed in less extreme fashions. Very little is known about her beyond this.

St Laura was canonized by the catholic church. The catholic church has officially canonized 48 other known martyrs as part of this whole event, including Isaac and Eulogius mentioned above. They are often called 'the martyrs of Cordoba'.