Coptica v. 16 2017

The Story of Fakhr al-Dawlah ibn al-Muʾtaman: Priest’s Son, Muslim Grandee, Monk of St. Antony *

Mark N. Swanson

In the late 14 th century of the Common Era, the Coptic Orthodox Church witnessed an extraordinary “burst of holiness” marked by several remarkable saints. 1 In the first place, there is arguably the greatest Coptic patriarch of the Mamlūk and early Ottoman periods, and the only one for whom we possess a full biography: Matthew I, patriarch from 1378 through 1408. Patriarch Matthew presided over a difficult time in the life of the Church, and much of his greatness consists in the extraordinary energy that he brought to the consolidation of the Coptic Orthodox community at a time of conversion and demographic decline, often arbitrary and oppressive rule by the Mamlūk authorities, all made the worse by periods of runaway inflation and famine. But Patriarch Matthew was not alone in his ministry to the Coptic community. He himself was something of a disciple of the monk Marqus al-Anṭūnī, that is, Abba Mark of the Monastery of St. Antony, who contributed much to making his monastery (and the neighboring monastery of St. Paul, where he had been a novice) into a center of spiritual energy for the Coptic Orthodox community, until and beyond his death in 1386. Although the mature Abba Mark never left his monastery, even in times of famine, people from all walks of life came to him , including the rich and the poor, civil servants and laborers, men and women, Christians and Muslims—as we learn from his Sīrah and collection of thirty-some Miracles ( ʿajāʾib or aʿājīb ) that was composed shortly after his death. 2 (In what follows, I will refer to this entire collection as the Life or “biography.”) In * This paper is not much changed from a presentation made at the annual conference of the St. Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society at UCLA in July 2012. As always, I am grateful to the Society for its hospitality. I also want to express my thanks to Mr. Hany Takla and to Dr. Gawdat Gabra for their help in providing me access to the relevant manuscripts. 1 I reported on these saints in a series of papers given at the annual conferences of the St. Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society; much of this material eventually appeared in Mark N. Swanson, The Coptic Papacy in Islamic Egypt (641-1517) , The Popes of Egypt 2 (Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2010), Chapter Eight, “A Burst of Holiness.” See also my entries for “The Life and Miracles of Marqus al-Anṭūnī,” “The Life of the Hegumenos Abraʾām al-Fānī,” “The Life and Miracles of Anba Ruways,” and “The Life of Patriarch Matthew I,” in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History , Volume 5 (1350-1500) , ed. David Thomas et al . (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013); and watch now for the work of Asuka Tsuji, whose Japanese-language PhD thesis was Coptic Saints in Mamluk Egypt (University of Tokyo, 2014). 2 On Marqus al-Anṭūnī, see Mark N. Swanson, “‘Our Father Abba Mark’: Marqus al-Anṭūnī and the Construction of Sainthood in Fourteenth-Century Egypt,” in Christian Crossroads: Essays on the Medieval Christian Legacy , ed. Juan Pedro Monferrer Sala (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007), 217-28.

Coptica 16 (2017), 67 – 80.