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Rh force the wretched patriarch to make still further efforts at obtaining the rest of the money.

The practice of taking money for appointments to bishoprics invented by Chail was often adopted by subsequent patriarchs. The Alexandrian tribute and the exactions of the government were the excuses for a custom that the Church has always condemned as simoniacal. The money was not taken for the personal advantage of the vendors. It was requisitioned as an absolute necessity for the payment of obligatory dues. Still, the practice was owned to be a scandalous evil, and the better patriarchs endeavoured to break it off. Chail himself ended his days as a penitent mourning for his double offence of violating the canons and alienating the property of the Church.

The condition of Egypt under the Mohammedan rule was now going from bad to worse. The caliphs endeavoured to retain their power over it by a frequent change of emirs, so that no one governor should have time to establish himself in independence. Emirs would bribe the caliphs for appointment and reappointment, and, of course, wring the money for this backshish from their miserable subjects, the Christians always being the greatest sufferers. But, on the occasion of one of these emirs imposing a new tribute on bishops and monks, a deputation of Christians went to Bagdad to represent to the caliph the intolerable condition of affairs, and succeeded in obtaining an order that nothing beyond the usual tax should be exacted from them. While they were being bled the Christians were also being starved. One emir ordered that neither Christians nor Jews should be employed in any other way than as physicians and tradesmen.

Eutychius, commonly known as Said, the chronicler of this period of Coptic history, was a Melchite patriarch early in the ninth century. He was a man of some culture, who had studied and practised medicine and written a treatise on that subject. He was also the author of a disputation between a Christian and a heretic, and a