The Coptic Papacy in Islamic Egypt, 641–1517: The Popes of Egypt, Volume 2

Mark N. Swanson traces the Coptic papacy from the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 to the Ottoman conquest in 1517, asking how successive patriarchs and their communities negotiated life under changing Islamic regimes. Drawing especially on the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, he treats accounts of the popes as evidence for the religious and social history of medieval Coptic Christians.

Swanson pays attention to the people who wrote those patriarchal biographies. George the Archdeacon connected the leaders of the seventh-century church to an older Coptic past; Michael of Damru, writing about a later period, was willing to portray patriarchs who fell short of saintliness. By the Mamluk era, many surviving accounts were brief and anonymous, requiring Swanson to turn to other sources to recover the community’s circumstances. The changing ways these lives were told are themselves part of the history: they reveal what Coptic writers wanted their community to remember.