less than six hundred monasteries in the neighbourhood of Alexandria.[1] These monasteries were walled and fortified, and the inmates endeavoured to hold out against the Persians. They were all besieged, captured, and destroyed; and the monks were put to the sword, with great slaughter. The same cruel warfare was carried up the Nile as far as Syene, and many monks were slain all along the line of conquest. The Persian King Chosroes allowed Andronicus, the Coptic patriarch, to remain in Alexandria as he had allowed the patriarch Modestus to remain at Jerusalem. No doubt he had reasons of state for these conspicuous acts of leniency. It was well to mark the difference between the national patriarchs and the Byzantine officials.
On the other hand, the Copts were less inclined to join the enemies of the Byzantine Empire just now than at any other time. The Emperor Phocus had made himself hated by all his subjects—Greeks as well as Egyptians and Syrians. Accordingly, when Heraclius led the revolt against the brutal tyrant, the whole empire had been ready to rally to the standard of the great general and assist him in a course of ambition which promised to make for the common weal. After that the Copts were not likely to side with the enemies of the man whom they had helped to set on the throne. The notion that they had done so is a pure fabrication of their Melchite caluminators. Their own grievous sufferings from the sword should have saved them from this false charge.
After Heraclius had repelled the Persian invasion, he was still regarded in a more friendly way by the Copts than had been the case with other Byzantine emperors; and at first he took some pains to cultivate pleasant relations with them. He did not go so far as to refuse to appoint a Melchite patriarch. That would have been to give mortal offence to his Greek subjects all over the empire.
- ↑ "Six hundred glorious monasteries like dove-cotes," says the ancient writer of the "History of the Coptic Patriarchs of Alexandria," in Patrologia Orientalis, tome i. fasc. 4, p. 465.
