But, for Alexandria at least, the cup was now full. In the year 640 the
Alexandrians were tearing each other in pieces about some Jacobite and
Melchite controversy, to me incomprehensible, to you unimportant,
because the fighters on both sides seem to have lost (as all parties do
in their old age) the knowledge of what they were fighting for, and to
have so bewildered the question with personal intrigues, spites, and
quarrels, as to make it nearly as enigmatic as that famous contemporary
war between the blue and green factions at Constantinople, which began
by backing in the theatre, the charioteers who drove in blue dresses,
against those wild drove in green; then went on to identify themselves
each with one of the prevailing theological factions; gradually
developed, the one into an aristocratic, the other into a democratic,
religious party; and ended by a civil war in the streets of
Constantinople, accompanied by the most horrible excesses, which had
nearly, at one time, given up the city to the flames, and driven
Justinian from his throne.

In the midst of these Jacobite and Melchite controversies and riots,
appeared before the city the armies of certain wild and unlettered Arab
tribes. A short and fruitless struggle followed; and, strange to say, a
few months swept away from the face of the earth, not only the wealth,
the commerce, the castles, and the liberty, but the philosophy and the
Christianity of Alexandria; crushed to powder by one fearful blow, all
that had been built up by Alexander and the Ptolemies, by Clement and
the philosophers, and made void, to all appearance, nine hundred years
of human toil. The people, having no real hold on their hereditary
Creed, accepted, by tens of thousands, that of the Mussulman invaders.
The Christian remnant became tributaries; and Alexandria dwindled, from
that time forth, into a petty seaport town.