was constantly overrun by raiders from
Nubia and the desert; and the authority of the imperial government was
too weak to interfere actively on behalf of the Christians. The
monasteries, however, were refuges that could bid defiance to the most
powerful of the pagan aristocracy as well as to barbarian hordes, and
became centres of united action that, at the summons of Shenoute, the
organizer of the national church, swept away the idols of the oppressors
in riot and bloodshed. In the course of the 5th century the Christians
reached a position in which they were able to treat the pagans
mercifully as a feeble remnant.

The Copts had little interest in theology; they were content to take
their doctrine as prepared for them by the subtler minds of their Greek
leaders at Alexandria, choosing the simplest form when disputes arose.
In 325 their elected patriarch, Athanasius, and his following of Greeks
and Copts, triumphed at the council of Nicaea against Arius; but in 451
the banishment of Dioscorus, patriarch of Alexandria, by the council of
Chalcedon created a great schism, the Egyptian church holding to his
Monophysite tenets (see COPTIC CHURCH, below), while the Catholic and
imperial party at Constantinople ever sought to further the "Melkite"
cause in Egypt at the expense of the native church. Thenceforward there
were generally two patriarchs, belonging to the rival communities, and
the Copts were oppressed by the Melkites; Heraclius, in 638 after the
repulse of the Persians, endeavoured to unite the churches, but, failing
in that, he persecuted the Monophysites more severely than ever before,
until 'Amr brought Egypt under the Moslem rule of 'Omar, as has been
related above. Under the persecution many Copts had gone over to the
Melkites, but now it was the turn of the Melkites, as supporters of the
emperor of Constantinople, to suffer, and they almost entirely
disappeared from Egypt, though a remnant headed by a patriarch of
Alexandria of the Orthodox Christians has survived to this day.

But after a few years of the mild rule of 'Amr the Egyptians began to be
squeezed for the benefit of the Moslem exchequer and persecuted for
their religion. Many of the more thoughtful and sober Christians must
long have been disgusted with religious strife, and had already embraced
the simple and congenial doctrines of Islam; others went over for the
sake of material gain. Conflicts arose from time to time between the
Mahommedan mino