Heraclius, now at the height of his power and with a mind now vigorous, turned next to the religious problem. He desired that his empire should be spiritually as it was physically one, and in particular that the feud in Egypt should cease. He was not a bigot. He believed in tolerance, and sought a formula that should satisfy both orthodox and Copts—both the supporters and the opponents of the Council of Chalcedon. A disastrous search. He had better have let well alone. The formula that he found—Monothelism—was so obscure that no one could understand it, and the man whom he chose as its exponent was a cynical bully, who did not even wish that it should be understood. This man was Cyrus, sometimes called the Mukaukas, the evil genius of Egypt and of Alexandria. Cyrus was made both Patriarch and Imperial Viceroy. He landed in 631, made no attempt to conciliate or even to explain, persecuted the Copts, tried to kill the Coptic Patriarch and at the end of ten year’s rule had ripened Egypt for its fall. There was a Greek garrison in Alexandria and another to the south of the present Cairo in a fort called “Babylon.” And there were some other forces in the Delta and the fleet held the sea. But the mass of the people were hostile. Heraclius ruled by violence, though he did not realise it; the reports that Cyrus sent him never told the truth. Indeed, he paid little attention to them; he was paralysed by a new terror: Mohammedanism. His nerve failed him again, as at the Persian invasion. Syria and the Holy Places were again lost to the Empire, this time for ever. Broken in health and spirits, the Emperor slunk back to Constantinople, and there, shortly before he died, Cyrus arrived with the news that Egypt had been lost too. What happened was this. The Arab general Amr had invaded Egypt with an army of 4000 horse. Amr was not only a great general. He was an administrator, a delightful companion, and a poet—one of the ablest and most charming men that Islam ever produced. He would have been remarkable in any age; he is all the more remarkable in an age that was petrified by theology. Riding into Egypt by the coast where Port Said stands now, he struck swiftly up the Nile, defeated an Imperial army at Heliopolis and invested the fort of Babylon. Cyrus was inside it. His character, like the Emperor’s, had collapsed. He knew that no native Egyptian would resist the Arabs, and he may have felt, like many of his contemporaries, that Christianity was doomed, that its complexities were destined to perish before the simplicity of Islam. He negotiated a peace, which the Emperor was to ratify. Heraclius was furious and recalled him to Constantinople. But the mischief had been done; all Egypt, with the exception of Alexandria, had been abandoned to the heathen.