When the Patriarch Michael I (743-767) was imprisoned, they attacked Egypt and forced the Government to let him go.[1] But the Moslems, on the whole, did succeed in asserting some kind of supremacy over Nubia. They made the Nubians pay a yearly tribute of money and slaves. The king had to tolerate Islam in his domain, and to keep a mosque in good repair on the outskirts of his city.[2] In the 11th century Nubia began to lose ground and to decline. There was a revival; but at last, about the 15th century, Islam swept this Christian State away. The Nubians had no mountains in which they could take refuge, like the Abyssinians. As late as the 17th century, Vansleb says that there are still churches in Nubia, not used because there are no priests.[3] Now nothing is left but ruins all over Northern Sudan;[4] the descendants of these valiant Christian warriors are the savages who rose for the Mahdi.
We have, then, the picture of this extinct Christianity lasting over a thousand years. From about the 4th to the 15th century Nubia was Christian. Of its theology and rites we know little or nothing directly; but we may deduce fairly safely that they were based on those of the Copts; though Abū Ṣāliḥ's "Greek" books are rather surprising. Did they keep a Greek (St. Mark?) liturgy, or does he take Coptic characters for Greek (a pardonable mistake in an Arab)? The mass of ruins the Christians have left give us an idea of the prosperity of their Church. They had a large hierarchy and a flourishing civilization. Ibn Sulaim says he "passed through nearly thirty towns with fine houses, monasteries, numberless palm-groves, vineyards, gardens
- ↑ Lequien: op. cit. ii. 662.
- ↑ See the terms granted by 'Abdu-llāh ibn Sa'd to the Nubians in 652, after he had defeated them, in S. Lane-Poole: Hist. of Egypt in the Middle Ages, pp. 21-23.
- ↑ Hist. du Patr. d'Alexandrie, p. 30.
- ↑ These are described by Rosellini: I monumenti dell' Egitto e della Nubia, Pisa, 1832-1844; Champollion: Monuments de l'Egypte et de la Nubie, Paris, 1844; G. Mileham: Churches in Lower Nubia (E. B. Coxe, Jr., Expedition to Nubia, vol. ii.), Univ. Museum, Philadelphia, 1910.
There is an essay on Christian Nubia and its relation to the Coptic Patriarch in Renaudot: Liturg. Orient. Coll. (ed. cit.) i. 416-417. See also Abū Ṣāliḥ: Churches and Monasteries of Egypt (ed. Evetts and Butler), pp. 262-274.
