and ordered to attend five prayers and the Friday assembly at the mosques and other places of gathering for prayer.[1]
In the course of the civil war that broke out after the death of the famous Caliph Aaron-al-Raschid, the Spanish Arabs of the house of the Ommiadæ, which had been superseded by the Abbasidæ, invaded Egypt and made slaves of their prisoners of war. Mark the Coptic patriarch offered to buy all these slaves, and his offer was gladly welcomed, so that 6,000 prisoners were liberated in this way.[2] Alexandria was captured, but while the besiegers were resting off their guard the Arabs rose and commenced an indiscriminate slaughter of Jews and Christians as well as Spanish troops. Mark escaped to the desert, where he remained in hiding for five years.
Much of the Coptic history of this period consists of little else than stories of the successive patriarchs, few of whom seem to have been men of any power or importance. The patriarch Jacob, who was at the head of the Coptic Church early in the ninth century, attained to some fame, which induced his brother patriarch at Antioch, Dionysius, the author of the Chronicle from the beginning of the World to his own times, to pay him a visit. Yucab, who became Coptic patriarch in or near the year 837,[3] consecrated bishops for the more remote parts of his diocese, especially by the borders of the Red Sea. He also cultivated an intimate friendship with the Melchite patriarch Sophronius. But though for the time being this may have softened the acerbity of sectarian animosity between the two parties, it did not lead to any steps towards bringing them together. Yucab died in the year 850, and was succeeded by Chail, the second Coptic patriarch of that name. Almost immediately after this the peace which the Church had enjoyed, broken only by temporary outbreaks, for nearly
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