It was far otherwise with the rich valley irrigated by the Nile. Emerging from the environs of the luxurious city, the traveller dropped at once from the pinnacle of civilisation to the very depths of poverty and squalor. Egypt was then, as ever, the servant of nations. The overflowing produce of its well-watered fields was swept off by the tax-gatherers to feed the great cities of the empire. And the people of the soil, ground down by oppression, were always ready to rise in insurrection. They bore the foreign yoke uneasily. Hatred was embittered here, as in other lands, by the never-ceasing endeavour of the Court to convert the inhabitants to orthodoxy, while the Copts held tenaciously by the Monophysite creed. Thus chronic disaffection pervaded the land, and the people courted deliverance from Byzantine rule. There were here, it is true, no Bedouin tribes, or Arabian sympathies, as in the provinces of Syria. But elements of even greater weakness had long been undermining the Roman power in Egypt. [Sidenote: Amru invades Egypt, A.H. XIX., XX. A.D. 640, 641.] It was in the nineteenth or twentieth year of the Hegira that Amru, having obtained the hesitating consent of the Caliph, set out from Palestine for Egypt. His army, though joined on its march by bands of Bedouins lured by the hope of plunder, did not at the first exceed four thousand men. Soon after he had left, Omar, concerned at the smallness of his force, would have recalled him; but finding that he had already gone too far to be stopped, he sent heavy reinforcements, under Zobeir, one of the chief Companions, after him. The army of Amru was thus swelled to an imposing array of from twelve to sixteen thousand men, some of them warriors of renown.[367] [Sidenote: And reduces Misr and Upper Egypt.]