Coptica v. 16 2017

Fakhr al-Dawlah ibn al-Muʾtaman

85

and to say, “How lengthy is our weeping for the days of Matthew and Barqūq.” 18

The text immediately goes on to say that this prediction came to pass; people did indeed mourn for the days of Matthew and Barqūq, the like of which they never saw again. 19

The Merciless Emir

If the saints’ lives of the period are unanimous in praising the sultan Barqūq, and look back at his days with something like nostalgia, other authorities who come into the stories of our saints are frequently portrayed as grasping and merciless, greedy for wealth and ready to use torture to extract it, or quick to mete out violence in response to anything that they saw as a sign of defiance. Our literature is full of occasions on which the saints of the period received a beating from one emir or another. Here I’ll mention just one example, which is of some interest because it appears both in in the Life of Marqus al-Anṭūnī and in the Life of Patriarch Matthew. The accounts take us back to the year 1365, a time when Matthew and Marqus were fellow monks at the Monastery of St. Antony. 20 That year, Latin Christians from Cyprus had sacked the city of Alexandria; according to the Lives , the emir Yalbughā [al-ʿUmarī], who was regent and de facto ruler of Egypt at the time, was filled with rage and unleashed a persecution against the Christians of Egypt in general, and the monasteries in particular. 21 As the Lives tell the story, Yalbughā sent an emir with a contingent of soldiers to the Monastery of St. Antony, where they ransacked the place and tortured the monk Mattā (the future patriarch would have been about 29 at the time), presumably to get him to betray the hiding places of the monastery’s Eucharistic vessels and other valuables. The much older monk Marqus (he would have been 69) rebuked the emir—who then ordered that Mattā be released and Marqus tortured in his place. Eventually, Mattā and Marqus and other monks were led off in chains across the desert, without any water to drink. When Marqus asked the emir for water, his response was to offer a little water to Marqus but to no one else. Marqus refused to drink without the others, and threw the water before the emir and rebuked him: “Behold, the Lord our God will give us to drink, because he is more merciful

18 Ibid., f. 139r. 19 Ibid.

20 Life of Marqus: MS Monastery of St. Paul, hist. 115, ff. 59r-61r (Miracle #7); Life of Matthew: HPEC 3.3, pp. 238-39 (in the English translation). The Life of Marqus makes Matthew (then the monk Mattā) the superior of the monastery. 21 See Robert Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluke Sultanate, 1250-1382 (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 143- 49.