Chapter II: The Christian Period in Egypt (4)

Those Persian forces which in the last reign overran the Delta were chiefly Arabs from the opposite coast of the Red Sea. To make an end of these attacks, and to engage their attention in another quarter, was the natural wish of the statesmen of Constantinople; and for this purpose Anastasius had sent an embassy to the Homeritæ on the southern coast of Arabia, to persuade them to attack their northern neighbours. The Homeritæ held the strip of coast now called Hadramout. They were enriched, though hardly civilised, by being the channel along which much of the Eastern trade passed from India to the Nile, to avoid the difficult navigation of the ocean. They were Jewish Arabs, who had little in common with the Arabs of Yemen, but had frequent intercourse with Abyssinia and the merchants of the Red Sea. Part of the trade of Solomon and the Tyrians was probably to their coast. To this distant and little tribe the Emperor of Constantinople now sent a second pressing embassy. Julianus, the ambassador, went up the Nile from Alexandria, and then crossed the Red Sea, or Indian Sea as it was also called, to Arabia. He was favourably received by the Homeritæ. Arethas, the king, gave him an audience in grand barbaric state. He was standing in a chariot drawn by four elephants; he wore no clothing but a cloth of gold around his loins; his arms were laden with costly armlets and bracelets; he held a shield and two spears in his hands, and his nobles stood around him armed, and singing to his honour. When the ambassador delivered the emperors letter, Arethas kissed the seal, and then kissed Julianus himself. He accepted the gifts which Justin had sent, and promised to move his forces northward against the Persians as requested, and also to keep the route open for the trade to Alexandria.

Justinian, the successor of Justin in 527, settled the quarrel between the two Alexandrian bishops by summoning them both to Constantinople, and then sending them into banishment. But this had no effect in healing the divisions in the Egyptian church; and for the next half-century the two parties ranged themselves, in their theological or rather political quarrel, under the names of their former bishops, and called themselves Gaianites and Theodosians. Nor did the measures of Justinian tend to lessen the breach between Egypt and Constantinople. He appointed Paul to the bishopric, and required the Egyptians to receive the decrees of the council of Chalcedon.

After two years Paul was displaced either by the emperor or by his flock; and Zoilus was then seated on the episcopal throne by the help of the imperial forces. He maintained his dangerous post for about six years, when the Alexandrians rose in open rebellion, overpowered the troops, and forced him to seek safety in flight; and the Jacobite party then turned out all the bishops who held the Greek faith.

When Justinian heard that the Jacobites were masters of Egypt he appointed Apollinarius to the joint office of prefect and patriarch of Alexandria, and sent him with a large force to take possession of his bishopric. Apollinarius marched into Alexandria in full military dress at the head of his troops; but when he entered the church he laid aside his arms, and putting on the patriarchal robes began to celebrate the rites of his religion. The Alexandrians were by no means overawed by the force with which he had entered the city; they pelted him with a shower of stones from every corner of the church, and he was forced to withdraw from the building in order to save his life. But three days afterwards the bells were rung through the city, and the people were summoned to meet in the church on the following Sunday, to hear the emperors letter read. When Sunday came the whole city flocked to hear and to disobey Justinians orders. Apollinarius began his address by threatening his hearers that, if they continued obstinate in their opinions, their children should be made orphans and their widows given up to the soldiery; and he was as before stopped with a shower of stones. But this time he was prepared for the attack; this Christian bishop had placed his troops in ambush round the church, and on a signal given they rushed out on his unarmed flock, and by his orders the crowds within and without the church were put to rout by the sword, the soldiers waded up to their knees in blood, and the city and whole country yielded its obedience for the time to bishops who held the Greek faith.

Henceforth the Melchite or royalist patriarchs, who were appointed by the emperor and had the authority of civil prefects, and were supported by the power of the military prefect, are scarcely mentioned by the historian of the Koptic church. They were too much engaged in civil affairs to act the part of ministers of religion. They collected their revenues principally in grain, and carried on a large export trade, transporting their stores to those parts of Europe where they would bring the best price. On one occasion we hear of a small fleet belonging to the church of Alexandria, consisting of thirteen ships of about thirty tons burden each, and bearing ten thousand bushels of grain, being overtaken by a storm on the coast of Italy. The princely income of the later patriarchs, raised from the churches of all Egypt under the name of the offerings of the pious, sometimes amounted to two thousand pounds of gold, or four hundred thousand dollars. But while these Melchite or royalist bishops were enjoying the ecclesiastical revenues, and administering the civil affairs of the diocese and of the great monasteries, there was a second bishop who held the Jacobite faith, and who, having been elected by the people according to the ancient forms of the Church, equally bore the title of patriarch, and administered in his more humble path to the spiritual wants of his flock. The Jacobite bishop was always a monk. At his ordination he was declared to be elected by the popular voice, by the bishops, priests, deacons, monks, and all the people of Lower Egypt; and prayers were offered up through the intercession of the Mother of God, and of the glorious Apostle Mark. The two churches no longer used the same prayer-book. The Melchite church continued to use the old liturgy, which, as it had been read in Alexandria from time immemorial, was called the liturgy of St. Mark, altered however to declare that the Son was of the same substance with the Father. But the Koptic church made use of the newer liturgies by their own champions, Bishop Cyril, Basil of Cæsaræ, and Gregory Nazianzen. These three liturgies were all in the Koptic language, and more clearly denied the two natures of Christ. Of the two churches the Koptic had less learning, more bigotry, and opinions more removed from the teachings of the New Testament; but then the Koptic bishop alone had any moral power to lead the minds of his flock towards piety and religion. Had the emperors been at all times either humane or politic enough to employ bishops of the same religion as the people, they would perhaps have kept the good-will of their subjects; but as it was, the Koptic church, smarting under its insults, and forgetting the greater evils of a foreign conquest, would sometimes look with longing eyes to the condition of their neighbours, their brethren in faith, the Arabic subjects of Persia.

The Christianity of the Egyptians was mostly superstition; and as it spread over the land it embraced the whole nation within its pale, not so much by purifying the pagan opinions as by lowering itself to their level, and fitting itself to their corporeal notions of the Creator. This was in a large measure induced by the custom of using the old temples for Christian churches; the form of worship was in part guided by the form of the building, and even the old traditions were engrafted on the new religion. Thus the traveller Antonius, after visiting the remarkable places in the Holy Land, came to Egypt to search for the chariots of the Egyptians who pursued Moses, petrified into rocks at the bottom of the Red Sea, and for the footsteps left in the sands by the infant Jesus while he dwelt in Egypt with his parents. At Memphis he enquired why one of the doors in the great temple of Phtah, then used as a church, was always closed, and he was told that it had been rudely shut against the infant Jesus five hundred years before, and mortal strength had never since been able to open it.

The records of the empire declared that the first Cæsars had kept six hundred and forty-five thousand men under arms to guard Italy, Africa, Spain, and Egypt, a number perhaps much larger than the truth; but Justinian could with difficulty maintain one hundred and fifty thousand ill-disciplined troops, a force far from large enough to hold even those provinces that remained to him. During the latter half of his reign the eastern frontier of this falling empire was sorely harassed by the Persians under their king Chosroes. They overran Syria, defeated the army of the empire in a pitched battle, and then took Antioch. By these defeats the military roads were stopped; Egypt was cut off from the rest of the empire and could be reached from the capital only by sea. Hence the emperor was driven to a change in his religious policy. He gave over the persecution of the Jacobite opinions, and even went so far in one of his decrees as to call the body of Jesus incorruptible, as he thought that these were the only means of keeping the allegiance of his subjects or the friendship of his Arab neighbours, all of whom, as far as they were Christians, held the Jacobite view of the Nicene creed, and denied the two natures of Christ.

As the forces of Constantinople were driven back by the victorious armies of the Persians, the emperors had lost, among other fortresses, the capital of Arabia Nabataæ, that curious rocky fastness that well deserved the name of Petra, and which had been garrisoned by Romans from the reign of Trajan till that of Valens. On this loss it became necessary to fortify a new frontier post on the Egyptian side of the Elanitic Gulf. Justinian then built the fortified monastery near Mount Sinai, to guard the only pass by which Egypt could be entered without the help of a fleet; and when it was found to be commanded by one of the higher points of the mountain he beheaded the engineer who built it, and remedied the fault, as far as it could be done, by a small fortress on the higher ground. This monastery was held by the Egyptians, and maintained out of the Egyptian taxes. When the Egyptians were formerly masters of their own country, before the Persian and Greek conquests, they were governed by a race of priests, and the temples were their only fortresses.

The temples of Thebes were the citadels of the capital, and the temples of Elephantine guarded the frontier. So now, when the military prefect is too weak to make himself obeyed, the emperor tries to govern through means of the Christian priesthood; and when it is necessary for the Egyptians to defend their own frontier, he builds a monastery and garrisons it with monks.

Part of the Egyptian trade to the East was carried on through the islands of Ceylon and Socotra; but it was chiefly in the hands of uneducated Arabs of Ethiopia, who were little able to communicate to the world much knowledge of the countries from which they brought their highly valued goods. At Ceylon they met with traders from beyond the Ganges and from China, of whom they bought the silk which Europeans had formerly thought a product of Arabia. At Ceylon was a Christian church, with a priest and a deacon, frequented by the Christians from Persia, while the natives of the place were pagans. The coins there used were Roman, borne thither by the course of trade, which during so many centuries carried the gold and silver eastward. The trade was lately turned more strongly into this channel because a war had sprung up between the two tribes of Jewish Arabs, the Hexumitæ of Abyssinia on the coast of the Red Sea near Adule, and the Homeritæ who dwelt in Arabia on the opposite coast, at the southern end of the Red Sea. The Homeritæ had quarrelled with the Alexandrian merchants in the Indian trade, and had killed some of them as they were passing their mountains from India to the country of the Hexumitae.

Immediately after these murders the Hexumitæ found the trade injured, and they took up arms to keep the passage open for the merchants. Hadad their king crossed the Red Sea and conquered his enemies; he put to death Damianus, the King of the Homeritse, and made a new treaty with the Emperor of Constantinople. The Hexumitæ promised to become Christians. They sent to Alexandria to beg for a priest to baptise them, and to ordain their preachers; and Justinian sent John, a man of piety and high character, the dean of the church of St. John, who returned with the ambassadors and became bishop of the Hexumitae.

It was possibly this conquest of the Homeritae by Hadad, King of the Hexumitae, which was recorded on the monument of Adule, at the foot of the inscription set up eight centuries earlier by Ptolemy Euergetes. The monument is a throne of white marble. The conqueror, whose name had been broken away before the inscription was copied, there boasts that he crossed over the Red Sea and made the Arabians and Sabaaans pay him tribute. On his own continent he defeated the tribes to the north of him, and opened the passage from his own country to Egypt; he also marched eastward, and conquered the tribes on the African incense coast; and lastly, he crossed the Astaborus to the snowy mountains in which that branch of the Nile rises, and conquered the tribes between that stream and the Astapus. This valuable inscription, which tells us of snowy mountains within the tropics, was copied by Cosmas, a merchant of Alexandria, who passed through Adule on his way to India.

Former emperors, Anastasius and Justin, had sent several embassies to these nations at the southern end of the Red Sea; to the Homeritae, to persuade them to attack the Persian forces in Arabia, and to the Hexumitae, for the encouragement of trade. Justinian also sent an embassy to the Homeritae under Abram; and, as he was successful in his object, he entrusted a second embassy to Abrams son. Nonnosus landed at Adule on the Abyssinian coast, and then travelled inward for fifteen days to Auxum, the capital. This country was then called Ethiopia; it had gained the name which before belonged to the valley of the Nile between Egypt and Meroë. On his way to Auxum, he saw troops of wild elephants, to the number, as he supposed, of five thousand. After delivering his message to Elesbaas, then King of Auxum, he crossed the Red Sea to Caisus, King of the Homeritæ, a grandson of that Arethas to whom Justin had sent his embassy. Notwithstanding the natural difficulties of the journey, and those arising from the tribes through which he had to pass, Nonnosus performed his task successfully, and on his return home wrote a history of his embassies.

The advantage gained to the Hexumitæ by their invasion of the Homeritæ was soon lost, probably as soon as their forces were withdrawn. The trade through the country of the Homeritae was again stopped; and such was the difficulty of navigation from the incense coast of Africa to the mouths of the Indus, that the loss was severely felt at Auxum. Elesbæs therefore undertook to repeat the punishment which had been before inflicted on his less civilised neighbours, and again to open the trade to the merchants from the Nile. It was while he was preparing his forces for this invasion that Cosmas, the Alexandrian traveller, passed through Adule; and he copied for the King of Auxum the inscription above spoken of, which recorded the victories of his predecessor over the enemies he was himself preparing to attack.

The invasion by Elesbæs, or Elesthæus as he is also named, was immediately successful. The Homeritæ were conquered, their ruler was overthrown; and, to secure their future obedience, the conqueror set over these Jewish Arabs an Abyssinian Christian for their king. Esimaphæus was chosen for that post; and his first duty was to convert his new subjects to Christianity. Political reasons as well as religious zeal would urge him to this undertaking, to make the conquered bear the badge of the conqueror. For this purpose he engaged the assistance of Gregentius, a bishop, who was to employ his learning and eloquence in the cause. Accordingly, in the palace of Threlletum, in the presence of their new king, a public dispute was held between the Christian bishop and Herban, a learned Jew. Gregentius has left us an account of the controversy, in which he was wholly successful, being helped, perhaps, by the threats and promises of the king. The arguments used were not quite the same as they would be now. The bishop explained the Trinity as the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Mind or Father, and resting on the Word or Son, which was then the orthodox view of this mysterious doctrine. On the other hand, the Jew quoted the Old Testament to show that the Lord their God was one Lord. It is related that suddenly the Jews present were struck blind. Their sight, however, was restored to them on the bishops praying for them; and they were then all thereby converted and baptised on the spot. The king stood godfather to Herban, and rewarded him with a high office under his government.

Esimaphasus did not long remain King of the Homeritæ. A rebellion soon broke out against him, and he was deposed. Elesbaas, King of Auxum, again sent an army to recall the Homeritæ to their obedience, but this time the army joined in the revolt; and Elesbæ then made peace with the enemy, in hopes of thus gaining the advantages which he was unable to grasp by force of arms. From a Greek inscription on a monument at Auxum we learn the name of Æizanas, another king of that country, who also called himself, either truly or boastfully, king of the opposite coast. He set up the monument to record his victories over the Bougoto, a people who dwelt between Auxum and Egypt, and he styles himself the invincible Mars, king of kings, King of the Hexumito, of the Ethiopians, of the Saboans, and of the Homerito. These kings of the Hexumito ornamented the city of Auxum with several beautiful and lofty obelisks, each made of a single block of granite like those in Egypt.

Egypt in its mismanaged state seemed to be of little value to the empire save as a means of enriching the prefect and the tax-gatherers; it yielded very little tribute to Constantinople beyond the supply of grain, and that by no means regularly. To remedy these abuses Justinian made a new law for the government of the province, with a view of bringing about a thorough reform. By this edict the districts of Menelaites and Mareotis, to the west of Alexandria, were separated from the rest of Egypt, and they were given to the prefect of Libya, whose seat of government was at Parotonium, because his province was too poor to pay the troops required to guard it. The several governments of Upper Egypt, of Lower Egypt, of Alexandria, and of the troops were then given to one prefect. The two cohorts, the Augustalian and the Ducal, into which the two Boman legions had gradually dwindled, were henceforth to be united under the name of the Augustalian Cohort, which was to contain six hundred men, who were to secure the obedience and put down any rebellion of the Egyptian and barbarian soldiers. The somewhat high pay and privileges of this favoured troop were to be increased; and, to secure its loyalty and to keep out Egyptians, nobody was to be admitted into it till his fitness had been inquired into by the emperors examiners. The first duty of the cohort was to collect the supply of grain for Constantinople and to see it put on board the ships; and as for the supply which was promised to the Alexandrians, the magistrates were to collect it at their own risk, and by means of their own cohort. The grain for Constantinople was required to be in that city before the end of August, or within four months after the harvest, and the supply for Alexandria not more than a month later. The prefect was made answerable for the full collection, and whatever was wanting of that quantity was to be levied on his property and his heirs, at the rate of one solidus for three artabo of grain, or about three dollars for fifteen bushels; while in order to help the collection, the export of grain from Egypt was forbidden from every port but Alexandria, except in small quantities. The grain required for Alexandria and Constantinople, to be distributed as a free gift among the idle citizens, was eight hundred thousand artabo, or four millions of bushels, and the cost of collecting it was fixed at eighty thousand solidi, or about three hundred thousand dollars. The prefect was ordered to assist the collectors at the head of his cohort, and if he gave credit for the taxes which he was to collect he was to bear the loss himself. If the archbishop interfered, to give credit and screen an unhappy Egyptian, then he was to bear the loss, and if his property was not enough the property of the Church was to make it good; but if any other bishop gave credit, not only was his property to bear the loss, but he was himself to be deposed from his bishopric; and lastly, if any riot or rebellion should arise to cause the loss of the Egyptian tribute, the tribunes of the Augustalian Cohort were to be punished with forfeiture of all property, and the cohort was to be removed to a station beyond the Danube.

Such was the new law which Justinian, the great Roman lawgiver, proposed for the future government of Egypt. The Egyptians were treated as slaves, whose duty was to raise grain for the use of their masters at Constantinople, and their taskmasters at Alexandria. They did not even receive from the government the usual benefit of protection from their enemies, and they felt bound to the emperor by no tie either of love or interest. The imperial orders wrere very little obeyed beyond those places where the troops were encamped; the Arabs were each year pressing closer upon the valley of the Nile, and helping the sands of the desert to defeat the labours of the disheartened husbandmen; and the Greek language, which had hitherto followed and marked the route of commerce from Alexandria to Syênê, and to the island of Socotra, was now but seldom heard in Upper Egypt. The Alexandrians were sorely harassed by Haephasstus, a lawyer, who had risen by court favour to the chief post in the city. He made monopolies in his own favour of all the necessaries of life, and secured his ill-gotten gains by ready loans of part of it to Justinian. His zeal for the emperor was at the cost of the Alexandrians, and to save the public granaries he lessened the supply of grain which the citizens looked for as a right. The city was sinking fast; and the citizens could ill bear this loss, for its population, though lessened, was still too large for the fallen state of Egypt.

The grain of the merchants was shipped from Alexandria to the chief ports of Europe, between Constantinople in the east and Cornwall in the west. Britain had been left by the Romans, as too remote for them to hold in their weakened condition; and the native Britons were then struggling against their Saxon invaders, as in a distant corner of the world, beyond the knowledge of the historian. But to that remote country the Alexandrian merchants sailed every year with grain to purchase tin, enlightening the natives, while they only meant to enrich themselves. Under the most favourable circumstances they sometimes performed the voyage in twenty days. The wheat was sold in Cornwall at the price of a bushel for a piece of silver, perhaps worth about twenty cents, or for the same weight of tin, as the tin and the silver were nearly of equal worth. This was the longest of the ancient voyages, being longer than that from the Red Sea to the island of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean; and it had been regularly performed for at least eight centuries without ever teaching the British to venture so far from their native shores.

The suffering and riotous citizens made Alexandria a very unpleasant place of abode for the prefect and magistrates. They therefore built palaces and baths for their own use, at the public cost, at Taposiris, about a days journey to the west of the city, at a spot yet marked by the remains of thirty-six marble columns, and a lofty tower, once perhaps a lighthouse. At the same time it became necessary to fortify the public granaries against the rebellious mob. The grain was brought from the Nile by barges on a canal to the village of Chaereum, and thence to a part of Alexandria named Phialæ, or _The Basins_, where the public granaries stood. In all riots and rebellions this place had been a natural point of attack; and often had the starving mob broken open these buildings, and seized the grain that was on its way to Constantinople. But Justinian surrounded them with a strong wall against such attacks for the future, and at the same time he rebuilt the aqueduct that had been destroyed in one of the sieges of the city.

In civil suits at law an appeal had always been allowed from the prefect of the province to the emperor, or rather to the prefect of the East at Constantinople; but as this was of course expensive, it was found necessary to forbid it when the sum of money in dispute was small. Justinian forbade all Egyptian appeals for sums less than ten pounds weight of gold, or about two thousand five hundred dollars; for smaller sums the judgment of the prefect was to be final, lest the expense should swallow up the amount in dispute.

In this reign the Alexandrians, for the first time within the records of history, felt the shock of an earthquake. Their naturalists had very fairly supposed that the loose alluvial nature of the soil of the Delta was the reason why earthquakes were unknown in Lower Egypt, and believed that it would always save them from a misfortune which often overthrew cities in other countries. Pliny thought that Egypt had been always free from earthquakes. But this shock was felt by everybody in the city; and Agathias, the Byzantine historian, who, after reading law in the university of Beirut, was finishing his studies at Alexandria, says that it was strong enough to make the inhabitants all run into the street for fear the houses should fall upon them.

The reign of Justinian is remarkable for another blow then given to paganism throughout the empire, or at least through those parts of the empire where the emperors laws were obeyed.

Under Justinian the pagan schools were again and from that time forward closed. Isidorus the platonist and Salustius the Cynic were among the learned men of greatest note who then withdrew from Alexandria. Isidorus had been chosen by Marinus as his successor in the platonic chair at Athens, to fill the high post of the platonic successor; but he had left the Athenian school to Zenodotus, a pupil of Proclus, and had removed to Alexandria. Salustius the Cynic was a Syrian, who had removed with Isidorus from Athens to Alexandria. He was virtuous in his morals though jocular in his manners, and as ready in his witty attacks upon the speculative opinions of his brother philosophers as upon the vices of the Alexandrians. These learned men, with Damascius and others from Athens, were kindly received by the Persians, who soon afterwards, when they made a treaty of peace with Justinian, generously bargained that these men, the last teachers of paganism, should be allowed to return home, and pass the rest of their days in quiet.

After the flight of the pagan philosophers, but little learning was left in Alexandria. One of the most remarkable men in this age of ignorance was Cosmas, an Alexandrian merchant, who wished that the world should not only be enriched but enlightened by his travels. After making many voyages through Ethiopia to India for the sake of gain, he gave up trade and became a monk and an author. When he writes as a traveller about the Christian churches of India and Ceylon, and the inscriptions which he copied at Adule in Abyssinia, everything that he tells us is valuable; but when he reasons as a monk, the case is sadly changed. He is of the dogmatical school which forbids all inquiry as heretical. He fights the battle which has been so often fought before and since, and is even still fought so resolutely, the battle of religious ignorance against scientific knowledge. He sets the words of the Bible against the results of science; he denies that the world is a sphere, and quotes the Old Testament against the pagan astronomers, to show that it is a plane, covered by the firmament as by a roof, above which he places the kingdom of heaven. His work is named _Christian Topography_, and he is himself usually called Cosmas Indicopleustes, from the country which he visited.

During the latter years of the government of Apollinarius, such was his unpopularity as a spiritual bishop that both the rival parties, the Gaianites and the Theodosians, had been building places of worship for themselves, and the more zealous Jacobites had quietly left the churches to Apollinarius and the Royalists. But on the death of an archdeacon they again came to blows with the bishop; and a monk had his beard torn off his chin by the Gaianites in the streets of Alexandria. The emperor was obliged to interfere, and he sent the Abbot Photinus to Egypt to put down this rebellion, and heal the quarrel in the Church. Apollinarius died soon afterwards, and Justinian then appointed John to the joint office of prefect of the city and patriarch of the Church. The new archbishop was accused of being a Manichean; but this seems to mean nothing but that he was too much of the Egyptian party, and that, though he was the imperial patriarch, and not acknowledged by the Koptic church, yet his opinions were disliked by the Greeks. On his death, which happened in about three years, they chose Peter, who held the Jacobite or Egyptian opinions, and whose name is not mentioned in the Greek lists of the patriarchs. Peters death occurred in the same year as that of the emperor.

Under Justinian we again find some small traces of a national coinage in Egypt. Ever since the reign of Diocletian, the old Egyptian coinage had been stopped, and the Alexandrians had used money of the same weight, and with the same Latin inscriptions, as the rest of the empire. But under Justinian, though the inscriptions on the coins are still Latin, they have the name of the city in Greek letters. Like the coins of Constantinople, they have a cross, the emblem of Christianity; but while the other coins of the empire have the Greek numeral letters, E, I, K, A, or M, to denote the value, meaning 5, 10, 20, 30, or 40, the coins of Alexandria have the letters 1 B for 12, showing that they were on a different system of weights from those of Constantinople. On these the head of the emperor is in profile. But later in his reign the style was changed, the coins were made larger, and the head of the emperor had a front face. On these larger coins the numeral letters are [A r] for 33. We thus learn that the Alexandrians at this time paid and received money rather by weight than by tale, and avoided all depreciation of the currency. As the early coins marked 12 had become lighter by wear, those which were meant to be of about three times their value were marked 33.

During the period from 566 to 602 Justin II. reigned twelve years, Tiberius reigned four years, and Mauricius, his son-in-law, twenty; and under these sovereigns the empire gained a little rest from its enemies by a rebellion among the Persians, which at last overthrew their king Chosroes. He fled to Mauricius for help, and was by him restored to his throne, after which the two kingdoms remained at peace to the end of his reign.

The Emperor Mauricius was murdered by Phocas, who, in 602, succeeded him on the throne of Constantinople. No sooner did the news of his death reach Persia than Chosroes, the son of Hormuz, who had married Maria, the daughter of Mauricius, declared the treaty with the Romans at an end, and moved his forces against the new emperor, the murderer of his father-in-law. During the whole of his reign Constantinople was kept in a state of alarm and almost of siege by the Persians; and the crimes and misfortunes of Phocas alike prepared his subjects for a revolt. In the seventh year Alexandria rebelled in favour of the young Heraclius, son of the late prefect of Cyrene; and the patriarch of Egypt was slain in the struggle. Soon afterwards Heraclius entered the port of Constantinople with his fleet, and Phocas was put to death after an unfortunate reign of eight years, in which he had lost every province of the empire.

During the first three years of the reign of Heraclius, Theodoras was Bishop of Alexandria; but upon his death the wishes of the Alexandrians so strongly pointed to John, the son of the prefect of Cyprus, that the emperor, yielding to their request, appointed him to the bishopric. Alexandria was not a place in which a good man could enjoy the pleasures of power without feeling the weight of its duties. It was then suffering under all those evils which usually befall the capital of a sinking state. It had lost much of its trade, and its poorer citizens no longer received a free supply of grain. The unsettled state of the country was starving the larger cities, and the population of Alexandria was suffering from want of employment. The civil magistrates had removed their palace to a distance. But the new bishop seemed formed for these unfortunate times, and, though appointed by the emperor, he was in every respect worthy of the free choice of the citizens. He was foremost in every work of benevolence and charity. The five years of his government were spent in lightening the sufferings of the people, and he gained the truly Christian name of John the Almsgiver. Beside his private acts of kindness he established throughout the city hospitals for the sick and almshouses for the poor and for strangers, and as many as seven lying-in hospitals for poor women. John was not less active in outrooting all that he thought heresy.

The first years of the reign of Heraclius are chiefly marked by the successes of the Persians. While Chosroes, their king, was himself attacking Constantinople, one general was besieging Jerusalem and a second overrunning Lower Egypt. Crowds fled before the invading army to Alexandria as a place of safety, and the famine increased as the province of the prefect grew narrower and the population more crowded. To add to the distress the Nile rose to a less height than usual; the seasons seemed to assist the enemy in the destruction of Egypt. The patriarch John, who had been sending money, grain, and Egyptian workmen to assist in the pious work of rebuilding the church of Jerusalem which the Persians had destroyed, immediately found all his means needed, and far from enough, for the poor of Alexandria. On his appointment to the bishopric he found in its treasury eight thousand pounds of gold; he had in the course of five years received ten thousand more from the offerings of the pious, as his princely ecclesiastical revenue was named; but this large sum of four million dollars had all been spent in deeds of generosity or charity, and the bishop had no resource but borrowing to relieve the misery with which he was surrounded. In the fifth year the unbelievers were masters of Jerusalem, and in the eighth they entered Alexandria, and soon held all the Delta; and in that year the grain which had hitherto been given to the citizens of Constantinople was sold to them at a small price, and before the end of the year the supply from Egypt was wholly stopped.

When the Persians entered Egypt, the patrician Nicetas, having no forces with which he could withstand their advance, and knowing that no succour was to be looked for from Constantinople, and finding that the Alexandrians were unwilling to support him, fled with the patriarch John the Almsgiver to Cyprus, and left the province to the enemy. As John denied that the Son of God had suffered on the cross, his opinions would seem not to have been very unlike those of the Egyptians; but as he was appointed to the bishopric by the emperor, though at the request of the people, he is not counted among the patriarchs of the Koptic church; and one of the first acts of the Persians was to appoint Benjamin, a Jacobite priest, who already performed the spiritual office of Bishop of Alexandria, to the public exercise of that duty, and to the enjoyment of the civil dignity and revenues.

The troops with which Chosroes conquered and held Egypt were no doubt in part Syrians and Arabs, people with whom the fellahs or labouring class of Egyptians were closely allied in blood and feelings. Hence arose the readiness with which the whole country yielded when the Roman forces were defeated. But hence also arose the weakness of the Persians, and their speedy loss of this conquest when the Arabs rebelled. Their rule, however, in Egypt was not quite unmarked in the history of these dark ages.

At this time Thomas, a Syrian bishop, came to Alexandria to correct the Syriac version of the New Testament, which had been made about a century before by Philoxenus. He compared the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles with the Greek manuscripts in the monastery of St. Anthony in the capital; and we still possess the fruits of his learned labour, in which he altered the ancient text to make it agree with the newer Alexandrian manuscripts. From his copy the Philoxenian version is now printed. A Syriac manuscript of the New Testament written by Alexandrian penmen in the sixth year of Heraclius, is now to be seen in the library of the Augustan friars in Rome. At the same time another Syrian scholar, Paul of Tela, in Mesopotamia, was busy in the Alexandrian monastery of St. Zacchæus in translating the Old Testament into Syriac, from the Septuagint Greek; and he closes his labours with begging the reader to pray for the soul of his friend Thomas. Such was now the reputation of the Alexandrian edition of the Bible, that these scholars preferred it both to the original Hebrew of the Old and to the earlier manuscripts of the New Testament. Among other works of this time were the medical writings of Aaron the physician of Alexandria, formerly written in Syriac, and afterwards much valued by the Arabs. The Syrian monks in numbers settled in the monastery of Mount Nitria; and in that secluded spot there remained a colony of these monks for several centuries, kept up by the occasional arrival of newcomers from the churches on the eastern side of the Euphrates.

For ten years the Egyptians were governed by the Persians, and had a patriarch of their own religion and of their own choice; and the building of the Persian palace in Alexandria proves how quietly they lived under their new masters. But Heraclius was not idle under his misfortunes. The Persians had been weakened by the great revolt of the Arabs, who had formed their chief strength on the side of Constantinople and Egypt; and Heraclius, leading his forces bravely against Chosroes, drove him back from Syria and became in his turn the invader, and he then recovered Egypt. The Jacobite patriarch Benjamin fled with the Persians; and Heraclius appointed George to the bishopric, which was declared to have been empty since John the Almsgiver fled to Cyprus.

The revolt of the Arabs, which overthrew the power of the Persians in their western provinces and for a time restored Egypt to Constantinople, was the foundation of the mighty empire of the caliphs; and the Hegira, or flight of Muhammed, from which the Arabic historians count their lunar years, took place in 622, the twelfth year of Heraclius. The vigour of the Arab arms rapidly broke the Persian yoke, and the Moslems then overran every province in the neighbourhood. This was soon felt by the Romans, who found the Arabs, even in the third year of their freedom, a more formidable enemy than the Persians whom they had overthrown; and, after a short struggle of only two years, Heraclius was forced to pay a tribute to the Moslems for their forbearance in not conquering Egypt. For eight years he was willing to purchase an inglorious peace by paying tribute to the caliph; but when his treasure failed him and the payment was discontinued, the Arabs marched against the nearest provinces of the empire, offering to the inhabitants their choice of either paying tribute or receiving the Muhammedan religion; and they then began on their western frontier that rapid career of conquest which they had already begun on the eastern frontier against their late masters, the Persians.