And here not only is the fall of the three patriarchates under conquerors who strive to destroy the Christian faith to be noted as following upon two centuries of incessant heresy, but another divine judgment also. No sooner have the three patriarchs lost their original position, the two elder as second and third bishops of the whole Church in virtue of their descent from Peter, and taken definitively a position subordinate to the upstart at Byzantium, who in the last decade of the fifth century, in the time of Pope Gelasius, was proclaimed in his Council at Rome no patriarch at all, than they fall under a domination which is not merely infidel but antichristian. The aim of the chalifate is to supplant Christ by Mohammed. The patriarchs, who accepted as superior one who rose above them simply because he was bishop of the imperial residence, had from that time forward to live under a despot who reigned in the name of the false prophet. From being subjects of the Greek Basileus, who, by means of the bishop exalted by him in successive generations, strove to hamper in the exercise of his office the successor of St. Peter, even to the point of making him subject to the guidance of the Byzantine crown in spiritual matters, which was the meaning of the Ecthesis of Heraclius, they passed to be subjects of the Mohammedan chalif, who claimed the supremacy of both powers in the name of the falsehood just invented. In the diminished territory of Byzantium, which during the rest of the century after Heraclius could but just keep the Mohammedan conqueror outside its walls, the bishop of the royal residence became in fact the sole patriarch. Sergius and Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter, the first four of those so exalted, were branded as heretics by the Sixth Council. Those who still bore the names of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem appeared at times, or were deemed to appear, at a Byzantine Council, but the hundred bishops of the Alexandrine, and the hundred and sixty bishops of the Antiochene waned and wasted more and more with every generation miserably spent under the absolute rule of the Prophet’s chalif, who had for Christians only two modes of treatment, the one a noxious patronage of their heresy, if such prevailed; the other, persecution of their faith, if they were faithful and zealous.