The difficulty of defending Egypt from a power base in Constantinople was forcefully illustrated during the last three decades of Byzantine rule. First, the old enemy, the Persians, advanced to the Nile delta and captured Alexandria. Their occupation was completed early in 619 and continued until 628, when Persia and Byzantium agreed to a peace treaty and the Persians withdrew. This had been a decade of violent hostility to the Egyptian Coptic Christians; among other oppressive measures, the Persians are said to have refused to allow the normal ordination of bishops and to have massacred hundreds of monks in their cave monasteries. The Persian withdrawal hardly heralded the return of peace to Egypt.
In Arabia events were taking place that would soon bring momentous changes for Egypt. These were triggered by the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina and by his declaration in 632 ce of a holy war against Byzantium. A decade later, by September 29, 642, the Arab general ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ was able to march into Alexandria, and the Arab conquest of Egypt, which had begun with an invasion three years earlier, ended in peaceful capitulation. The invasion itself had been preceded by several years of vicious persecution of Coptic Christians by Cyrus, the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, and it was he who is said to have betrayed Egypt to the forces of Islam.
The Islamic conquest was not bloodless. There was desultory fighting at first in the eastern delta, then Al-Fayyūm was lost in battle in 640, and a great battle took place at Heliopolis (now a suburb of Cairo) in July 640 in which 15,000 Arabs engaged 20,000 Egyptian defenders. The storming and capture of Trajan’s old fortress at Babylon (on the site of the present-day quarter called Old Cairo) on April 6, 641, was crucial. By September 14 Cyrus, who had been recalled from Egypt 10 months earlier by the emperor Heraclius, was back with authority to conclude a peace. Byzantium signed Egypt away on November 8, 641, with provision for an 11-month armistice to allow ratification of the treaty of surrender by the emperor and the caliph. In December 641 heavily laden ships were dispatched to carry Egypt’s wealth to its new masters. Nine months later the last remnants of Byzantine forces left Egypt in ships bound for Cyprus, Rhodes, and Constantinople, and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ took Alexandria in the name of the caliph. The new domination by the theocratic Islamic caliphate was strikingly different from anything that had happened in Egypt since the arrival of Alexander the Great almost a thousand years earlier. Byzantine government of Egypt
The reforms of the early 4th century had established the basis for another 250 years of comparative prosperity in Egypt, at a cost of perhaps greater rigidity and more-oppressive state control. Egypt was subdivided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller provinces, and separate civil and military officials were established (the praeses and the dux, respectively). By the middle of the 6th century the emperor Justinian was eventually forced to recognize the failure of this policy and to combine civil and military power in the hands of the dux with a civil deputy (the praeses) as a counterweight to the power of the church authorities. All pretense of local autonomy had by then vanished. The presence of the soldiery was more noticeable, its power and influence more pervasive in the routine of town and village life. Taxes were perhaps not heavier than they had been earlier, but they were collected ruthlessly, and strong measures were sanctioned against those who tried to escape from their fiscal or legal obligations. The wealthier landowners probably enjoyed increased prosperity, especially as a result of the opportunity to buy now state-owned land that had once been sold into private ownership in the early 4th century. The great landlords were powerful enough to offer their peasant tenants a significant degree of collective fiscal protection against the agents of the state, the rapacious tax collector, the officious bureaucrat, or the brutal soldier. But, if the life of the average peasant did not change much, nevertheless the rich probably became richer, and the poor became poorer and more numerous as the moderate landholders were increasingly squeezed out of the picture. The advance of Christianity
The advance of Christianity had just as profound an effect on the social and cultural fabric of Byzantine Egypt as on the political power structure. It brought to the surface the identity of the native Egyptians in the Coptic church, which found a medium of expression in the development of the Coptic language—basically Egyptian written in Greek letters with the addition of a few characters. Coptic Christianity also developed its own distinctive art, much of it pervaded by the long-familiar motifs of Greek mythology. These motifs coexisted with representations of the Virgin and Child and with Christian parables and were expressed in decorative styles that owed a great deal to both Greek and Egyptian precedents. Although Christianity had made great inroads into the populace by 391 (the year in which the practice of the local polytheistic religions was officially made illegal), it is hardly possible to quantify it or to trace a neat and uniform progression. It engulfed its predecessors slowly and untidily. In the first half of the 5th century a polytheistic literary revival occurred, centred on the town of Panopolis, and there is evidence that fanatical monks in the area attacked non-Christian temples and stole statues and magical texts. Outside the rarefied circles in which doctrinal disputes were discussed in philosophical terms, there was a great heterogeneous mass of commitment and belief. For example, both the gnostics, who believed in redemption through knowledge, and the Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Mani, clearly thought of themselves as Christians. In the 4th century a Christian community, the library of which was discovered at Najʾ Ḥammādī in 1945, was reading both canonical and apocryphal gospels as well as mystical revelatory tracts. At the lower levels of society, magical practices remained ubiquitous and were simply transferred to a Christian context.
By the mid-5th century Egypt’s landscape was dominated by the great churches, such as the magnificent church of St. Menas (Abū Mīna), south of Alexandria, and by the monasteries. The latter were Egypt’s distinctive contribution to the development of Christianity and were particularly important as strongholds of native loyalty to the monophysite church. The origins of Antonian communities, named for the founding father of monasticism, St. Anthony of Egypt (c. 251–356), lay in the desire of individuals to congregate about the person of a celebrated ascetic in a desert location, building their own cells, adding a church and a refectory, and raising towers and walls to enclose the unit. Other monasteries, called Pachomian—for Pachomius, the founder of cenobitic monasticism—were planned from the start as walled complexes with communal facilities. The provision of water cisterns, kitchens, bakeries, oil presses, workshops, stables, and cemeteries and the ownership and cultivation of land in the vicinity made these communities self-sufficient to a high degree, offering their residents peace and protection against the oppression of the tax collector and the brutality of the soldier. But it does not follow that they were divorced from contact with nearby towns and villages. Indeed, many monastics were important local figures, and many monastery churches were probably open to the local public for worship.
The economic and social power of the Christian church in the Nile River valley and delta is the outstanding development of the 5th and 6th centuries. By the time of the Arab invasion, in the mid-7th century, the uncomplicated message of Islam might have seemed attractive and drawn attention to the political and religious rifts that successive and rival patriarchs of the Christian church had so violently created and exploited. But the advent of Arab rule did not suppress Christianity in Egypt. Some areas remained heavily Christian for several more centuries. Alan K. Bowman