In the weak state of the empire, the Blemmyes, and Nubades, or Nobatæ, had latterly been renewing their inroads upon Upper Egypt; they had overpowered the Romans, as the Greek and barbarian troops of Constantinople were always called, and had carried off a large booty and a number of prisoners. Maximinus, the imperial general, then led his forces against them; he defeated them, and made them beg for peace. The barbarians then proposed, as the terms of their surrender, never to enter Egypt while Maximinus commanded the troops in the Thebaid; but the conqueror was not contented with such an unsatisfactory submission, and would make no treaty with them till they had released the Roman prisoners without ransom, paid for the booty that they had taken, and given a number of the nobles as hostages. On this Maximums agreed to a truce of a hundred years.
The people now called the Nubians, living on both sides of the cataract of Syênê, declared themselves of the true Egyptian race by their religious practices. They had an old custom of going each year to the temple of Isis on the isle of Elephantine, and of carrying away one of the statues with them and returning it to the temple when they had consulted it. But as they were now being driven out of the province, they bargained with Maximums for permission to visit the temple each year without hindrance from the Roman guards. The treaty was written on papyrus and nailed up in this temple. But friendship in the desert, says the proverb, is as weak and wavering as the shade of the acacia tree; this truce was no sooner agreed upon than Maximinus fell ill and died; and the Nubades at once broke the treaty, regained by force their hostages, who had not yet been carried out of the Thebaid, and overran the province as they had done before their defeat.
By this success of the Nubians, Christianity was largely driven out of Upper Egypt; and about seventy years after the law of Thedosius L, by which paganism was supposed to be crushed, the religion of Isis and Serapis was again openly professed in the Thebaid, where it had perhaps always been cultivated in secret. A certain master of the robes in one of the Egyptian temple came at this time to the temple of Isis in the island of Philæ, and his votive inscription there declares that he was the son of Pachomius, a prophet, and successor by direct descent from a yet more famous Pachomius, a prophet, who we may easily believe was the Christian prophet who gathered together so many followers in the island of Tabenna, near Thebes, and there founded an order of Christian monks. These Christians now all returned to their paganism. Nearly all the remains of Christian architecture which we meet with in the The-baid were built during the hundred and sixty years between the defeat of the Nubians by Diocletian, and their victories in the reign of Marcian.
The Nubians were far more civilised than their neighbours, the Blemmyes, whom they were usually able to drive back into their native deserts. We find an inscription in bad Greek, in the great temple at Talmis, now the village of Kalabshe, which was probably written about this time. A conqueror of the name of Silco there declares that he is king of the Nubians and all the Ethiopians; that in the upper part of his kingdom he is called Mars, and in the lower part Lion; that he is as great as any king of his day; that he has defeated the Blemmyes in battle again and again; and that he has made himself master of the country between Talmis and Primis. While such were the neighbours and inhabitants of the Thebaid, the fields were only half-tilled, and the desert was encroaching on the paths of man. The sand was filling up the temples, covering the overthrown statues, and blocking up the doors to the tombs; but it was at the same time saving, to be dug out in after ages, those records which the living no longer valued.
On the death of the Emperor Marcian, the Alexandrians, taking advantage of the absence of the military prefect Dionysius, who was then fighting against the Nubades in Upper Egypt, renewed their attack upon the Bishop Proterius, and deposed him from his office. To fill his place they made choice of a monk named Timotheus Ælurus, who held the Jacobite faith, and, having among them two deposed bishops, they got them to ordain him Bishop of Alexandria, and then led him by force of arms into the great church which had formerly been called Caesar’s temple. Upon hearing of the rebellion, the prefect returned in haste to Alexandria; but his approach was only the signal for greater violence, and the enraged people murdered Proterius in the baptistery, and hung up his body at the Tetrapylon in mockery. This was not a rebellion of the mob. Timotheus was supported by the men of chief rank in the city; the Honorati who had borne state offices, the Politici who had borne civic offices, and the Navicularii, or contractors for the freight of the Egyptian tribute, were all opposed to the emperor’s claim to appoint the officer whose duties were much more those of prefect of the city than patriarch of Egypt. With such an opposition as this, the emperor would do nothing without the greatest caution, for he was in danger of losing Egypt altogether. But so much were the minds of all men then engrossed in ecclesiastical matters that this political struggle wholly took the form of a dispute in controversial divinity, and the emperor wrote a letter to the chief bishops in Christendom to ask their advice in his difficulty. These theologians were too busily engaged in their controversies to take any notice of the danger of Egypt’s revolting from the empire and joining the Persians; so they strongly advised Leo not to depart from the decrees of the council of Chalcedon, or to acknowledge as Bishop of Alexandria a man who denied the two natures of Christ. Accordingly, the emperor again risked breaking the slender ties by which he held Egypt; he banished the popular bishop, and forced the Alexandrians to receive in his place one who held the Chalcedonian faith.
On the death of Leo, he was succeeded by his grandson, Leo the Younger, who died in 473, after a reign of one year, and was succeeded by his father Zeno, the son-in-law of the elder Leo. Zeno gave himself up at once to debauchery and vice, while the empire was harassed on all sides by the barbarians, and the provinces were roused into rebellion by the cruelty of the prefects. The rebels at last found a head in Basilicus, the brother-in-law of Leo. He declared himself of the Jacobite faith, which was the faith of the barbarian enemies, of the barbarian troops, and of the barbarian allies of the empire, and, proclaiming himself emperor, made himself master of Constantinople without a battle, and drove Zeno into banishment in the third year of his reign.
The first step of Basilicus was to recall from banishment Timotheus Ælurus, the late Bishop of Alexandria, and to restore him to the bishopric (A.D. 477). He then addressed to him and the other recalled bishops a circular letter, in which he repeals the decrees of the council of Chalcedon, and re-establishes the Nicene creed, declaring that Jesus was of one substance with the Father, and that Mary was the mother of God. The march of Timotheus to the seat of his own government, from Constantinople whither he had been summoned, was more like that of a conqueror than of a preacher of peace. He deposed some bishops and restored others, and, as the decrees of the council of Chalcedon were the particular objects of his hatred, he restored to the city of Ephesus the patriarchal power which that synod had taken away from it. Basilicus reigned for about two years, when he was defeated and put to death by Zeno, who regained the throne.
As soon as Zeno was again master of the empire, he re-established the creed of the council of Chalcedon, and drove away the Jacobite bishops from their bishoprics. Death, however, removed Timotheus Ælurus before the emperor’s orders were put in force in Alexandria, and the Egyptians then chose Peter Mongus as his successor, in direct opposition to the orders from Constantinople. But the emperor was resolved not to be beaten; the bishopric of Alexandria was so much a civil office that to have given up the appointment to the Egyptians would have been to allow the people to govern themselves; so he banished Peter, and recalled to the head of the Church Timotheus Salophaciolus, who had been living at Canopus ever since his loss of the bishopric.