One or two details are necessary, to complete this sketch of the conquest. It had been a humane affair, and no damage had been done to property; the library which the Arabs are usually accused of destroying had already been destroyed by the Christians. A few years later, however, some damage was done. Supported by an Imperial fleet, the city revolted, and Amr was obliged to re-enter it by force. There was a massacre, which he stayed by sheathing his sword; the Mosque of Amr or of Mercy was built upon the site. As governor of Egypt, he administered it well, but his interests lay inland not on the odious sea shore, and he founded a city close to the fort of Babylon—Fostat, the germ of the modern Cairo. Here all the life of the future was to centre. Here Amr himself was to die. As he lay on his couch a friend said to him: “You have often remarked that you would like to find an intelligent man at the point of death, and to ask him what his feelings were. Now I ask you that question.” Amr replied, “I feel as if the heaven lay close upon the earth and I between the two, breathing through the eye of a needle.” There is something in this dialogue that transports us into a new world; it could never have taken place between two Alexandrians.
COIN OF HERACLIUS, SHOWING CROSS: Museum, Room 4. ROSETTA GATE (Gate of the Sun): p. 121. MOSQUE OF AMR: p. 144.
Such were the chief physical events in the city during the Christian Period. We must now turn back to consider another and more important aspect: the spiritual.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Cleopatra died and Egypt became part of the Roman Empire, it seemed that the career of Alexandria was over. Her life had centred round the Ptolemies who had adorned her with architecture and scholarship and song, and when they were withdrawn what remained? She was just a provincial capital. But the vitality of a city is not thus measured. There is a splendour that kings do not give and cannot take away, and just when she lost her outward independence she was recompensed by discovering the kingdom that lies within. Three sections of her citizens—Jews, Greeks and Christians—were attracted by the same spiritual problem, and tried to solve it in the same way.