An emperor's secrets - Jill Kamil

The Byzantine emperor Justinian, far from being an enlightened patron of the arts as his reputation suggests, was a tyrant. The man famous for founding great buildings all over the Christian world, including Santa Sophia in Constantinople, San Vitale in Ravenna and the Church of the Transfiguration on the site of the Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai; this powerful leader who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire from 527 to 565, was an autocrat who "... without hesitation... wrote decrees for the plundering of countries, sacking of cities, and slavery of whole nations for no cause whatever..." Justinian's actions were such that "... if one wished to take all the calamities which had befallen the Romans before this time, and weigh them against his crimes... it would be found that more men had been murdered by this single man then in all previous history."

Now, thanks to Procopius's Secret History, I know more about the drastic and merciless steps taken by Justinian to wipe out religious diversity, not only in Egypt but "to the ends of the earth", ordering expeditions of his forces into the Turkish mountains, to Lebanon and Syria, deep into the Sahara, to remote areas of the Libyan desert, and all along Egypt's Nile Valley. Procopius reveals the extent to which Justinian enforced his ruthless laws, and one can envision Egyptian Christians and emboldened zealous Egyptian monks fighting for their country's freedom from oppressive occupation. Little wonder that when the Arab general Amr Ibn Al-'As marched his army into Egypt in the seventh century, Copts (Egyptian Christians) aided him in expelling from the country, the despised foreign patriarch and his powerful Melkite army.