Yet if gods could be created, then so too, of course, could they be killed. Eight centuries had passed since the founding of Alexandria, and in that time the cults that had once dominated the city had passed into oblivion. It was hardly to be wondered at, perhaps, in a place that had played host to the gods of both Olympus and the Nile for so long, that certain marks of paganism should still have lingered—but as memorials now to a toppled order. Sail into the easternmost of Alexandria’s harbours, for instance, and there, dominating the water-front, the traveller would see a massive temple precinct, originally built by a Greek queen, and fronted by plundered obelisks—but which had served the city’s bishop for more than a century now as his cathedral. Not that the birth pangs of a Christian Alexandria had been easy, though. The Alexandrians were notorious for their “rebellion and rioting,”24 and the convulsions that had accompanied the overthrow of paganism had been predictably bruising. In 391, when a mob of Christians had attempted to storm the Serapeum, the pagans had fought back. They had barricaded the gates of the temple and, so it was plausibly reported, nailed Christian prisoners to crosses on its walls. Such resistance, of course, had only made the eventual capture of the temple all the sweeter. Its 750-year-old statue of Serapis had been hacked to pieces, the contents of its libraries destroyed,b and its various buildings either converted to Christian worship or left as mouldering shells. Alexandria, once the intellectual powerhouse of paganism, had been reconsecrated as something new: as “the most glorious and Christ-loving city of the Alexandrians.”25
Christ-loving or not, though, it still maintained, in the opinion of a long succession of Christian emperors, its reputation as a nest of troublemakers. It had not gone unnoted, for instance, that Arius had originally been from Alexandria. In point of fact, however, the city’s tradition of enquiry into the nature of God—a uniquely brilliant and searching one—had always preferred to stress the opposite extreme to that of Arianism: downplaying the human nature of the Saviour, and emphasising the divine. Any hint of a counter-argument, any suggestion that Christ might after all have had two natures rather than one, would invariably prompt in the Alexandrians an explosion of mingled scorn and fury that was inimitably their own. One inheritance from their pagan forebears that they had most certainly not discarded was an unshakeable conviction that they were, quite simply, the cleverest people in the world. The Patriarch of Alexandria, with imperious immodesty, had even taken to calling himself the “Judge of the Universe.” Others, less flatteringly, labelled him “a new Pharaoh.”26 Certainly, the patriarchs had more than intellectual firepower at their fingertips. Intimidation might come physical as well. The trend-setter here was Athanasius, the bishop who had first definitively catalogued the books of the New Testament. Back in the fourth century, he had ruled Alexandria with a rod of iron, not hesitating to have his opponents beaten up or kidnapped if the situation demanded it. A century later, and it had been the turn of another patriarch, Dioscorus, to blend rarefied theology with the tactics of a gangland boss. Travelling to Ephesus in 449 for a showdown with the Nestorians of Antioch, he took with him an escort of paramilitaries so rowdy and intimidating that his fellow bishops, shocked to find themselves howled down every time they opened their mouths, termed the summit in outrage the “Robber Council.” Parabalani, these thugs of Dioscorus had been called: black-robed enforcers who worked ostensibly as hospital attendants, but who, whenever summoned by the patriarch, would cheerfully demonstrate their devotion to Christ through often spectacular displays of violence. Pagans, Jews, heretics: all felt their fists.
By introducing the Parabalani onto the international stage, however, Dioscorus had fatefully over-reached himself. The Council of Chalcedon, summoned two years after the debacle of Ephesus, pointedly refused to legitimise the Monophysite doctrines that had been so subtly honed in Alexandria. The result was a stand-off. As self-confident in the superiority of their own intellects as they had ever been, most Alexandrians dismissed Chalcedon’s resolutions with predictable contempt. The threat of violence continued to smoulder—and occasionally to burst into flames. In 457, for instance, after the distant emperor had ousted the disgraced Dioscorus and foisted a replacement on the Alexandrians, an indignant mob hacked down the wretched new patriarch in one of his own churches and paraded his mangled corpse in triumph through the streets. No mob like an Alexandrian mob for combining intellectual snobbery with a taste for atrocities. Nevertheless, in the sheer scale of hostility to Chalcedon, there was something new. Rarefied debates about the nature of the universe were no longer, as they had been in pagan times, the sole preserve of the metropolis. Across the whole, vast expanse of Egypt—whether in the churches of obscure provincial towns or in monasteries out in the desert—few were those who doubted that Christ had only the single nature. Indeed, the province was so teeming with Monophysites that they increasingly came to be known simply as “Copts,” an abbreviation of the Greek word for Egyptians. At last, after centuries of scorning and exploiting its hinterland, Alexandria had come to speak for the whole of Egypt.
The result was a display of mass disobedience fit to give even Justinian pause. Only in 536, buoyed by his successes in Italy, had he finally presumed to reprise the measure first attempted in 457, and impose his own choice of patriarch upon the recalcitrant Alexandrians: a step greeted by the Alexandrians themselves as “the opening up of the pit of the abyss.”27 Such hysteria was hardly surprising: for Justinian’s nominee, a monk from the Delta by the name of Paul, had known better than to take for granted the obedience of his new flock. Rather than risk the fate of his hapless predecessor, he had opted instead to get his own blows in first: a policy that had served to confirm for the Alexandrians all their darkest suspicions of the Chalcedonian Church. Their new patriarch, even by the autocratic standards of his predecessors, verged on the psychopathic: corrupt, brutal and with “a taste for spilling blood.”28 So uninhibited was his thuggery that Justinian, after a couple of years, was prepared to acknowledge something startling: that he might perhaps have made a mistake. Paul was duly sacked; a new patriarch, a Syrian by the name of Zoilus, was dispatched from Constantinople as his replacement; the Alexandrians, scorning their new leader as both a foreigner and a Chalcedonian, but finding him otherwise inoffensive, opted simply to ignore him. So ended Justinian’s project to reunite Egypt with the imperial Church: amid inglorious compromise.