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