A striking proof of this assertion is the peculiar manner in which Monophysitism was introduced into Egypt. The people of the Nile Land readily embraced it because they were under the impression that it was the teaching of St. Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria. As the chief opponent of Nestorius and the valiant champion of Our Lady’s title of Mother of God at the Council of Ephesus, he was regarded by the Egyptians as their national hero and acclaimed their Christian Pharaoh. They were confirmed in this view because Dioscur, Cyril’s successor as Patriarch of Alexandria, was an avowed advocate of Monophysitism. When his teaching was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon and he was deposed from the office of bishop, the people of Egypt, who were always loyal to their ecclesiastical Pharaoh, rallied to his support. They did not stop to examine the merits of the case. The fact that the doctrine, for which their Patriarch was deposed, was known to be opposed to “the faith of the tyrant of the Bosphorus”--as the Byzantine Emperor was called--was an additional reason why it approved itself to the ever patriotic Egyptians. “Lurking under the dispute about one or two natures in Christ was the old national feeling, the old hatred of the Roman power.”[329] The decree of Chalcedon and the consequent deposition of their Patriarch gave occasion for a recrudescence of this hatred of Cæsar and Cæsar’s religion and for an anti-imperialistic outbreak in Alexandria such as this great city had never before witnessed. Thenceforth Monophysitism in its opposition to Byzantine imperialism was identified with Egyptian nationalism. And when the Mohammedans under Amru swept over Egypt, so great was the hatred of the Copts for the Melkites that they sided with the Arabs against the forces of Byzantium. But this with Monophysitism was the cause of their downfall. “The great days when the Christian Pharaoh was the chief bishop of the East have gone forever.”[330] And by a strange irony of fate it was Constantinople, Alexandria’s detested rival, that was eventually to hold the second place among the patriarchates of the Church--a position which, since the days of St. Mark, had been held by the world-famous metropolis of Egypt.