ABSTRACT

In the eleventh century, the Lower Egyptian bishops confronted Pope Cyril II (1078-1092) about his ill repute and exhorted him to dismiss his companions from their offi ce of service to the pope. The disgruntled bishops had decided that the ecclesiastic servants and companions of the pope and patriarch of Alexandria should be more virtuous, more pious, and, in some cases, less sexually promiscuous. The pope promised, in writing, to send these companions away but, upon further rumination, decided that no group of bishops would dictate the affairs of the papacy and dismissed only one of his ungodly companions: Abu al-Karam, a monk who had lived an unbecoming monastic existence. Upon hearing of the pope’s ruse and his dismissal of their written contract rather than his ungodly companions, the bishops made recourse to civil authority, where they brought complaints of their leader before the Fatimid wazir, Amir al-Juyush Badr al-Jamali. The wazir, originally a freed Armenian slave who had come to Cairo at the request of the caliph al-Mustansir in 1073, was dismayed by the fi ssure and disturbed by the bishops’ recourse to civil authority regarding an ecclesiastical matter. In turn, Amir al-Juyush summoned the pope and his dissatisfi ed bishops and reprimanded the bishops for demeaning their leader’s authority by making recourse to the wazir. He praised Cyril for his virtue and ordered him to write laws by which he might order the affairs of the clergy and laity, so as to avoid such an occurrence in the future; thus were written the canons of Pope Cyril II in 1086. This account of Cyril and his dissatisfi ed bishops is given as a preface to the pope’s canons; however, the author of the account is very careful to point out that Cyril was, in fact, a pious man and innocent of the charges set against him. Nonetheless, in compliance with the wazir’s request, the pope compiled a total of thirtyfour canons, which are part of a larger body of medieval Copto-Arabic canons. These canons would come to play an important foundational role in the establishment of personal status laws for Coptic Christians in the medieval and modern periods in Egypt.