a large latitude, and they were content to add their distinctive formulas to the ordinary Mohammedan ritual, and to set them conspicuously on their coinage, without entering upon a propaganda.  The bulk of the Egyptian Moslems apparently preserved their orthodoxy and suffered an heretical caliphate for two centuries with traditional composure.  The Christian Copts found the new regime a marked improvement.  Mysticism finds kindred elements in many faiths, and the Fatimid caliphs soon struck up relations with the local heads of the Christian religion.

The second Egyptian caliph, Aziz (975-996), was greatly influenced by a Christian wife, who encouraged his natural clemency.  Bishop Severus attended his court, and Coptic churches were rebuilt.  Throughout the Fatimid period we constantly find Christians and Jews, and especially Armenians, advanced to the highest offices of state.  This was partly due, of course, to their special qualifications as scribes and accountants, for Arabs and Turks were no hands at “sums.”  The land had rest under this wise and tolerant caliph.  If he set a dangerous example in his luxury and love of display, he unquestionably maintained law, enforced equity, punished corruption, and valiantly defended his kingdom.  He fitted out a fleet of 600 sail at Maks (then the port of Cairo, on the Nile), which kept the Emperor Basil at a distance and assured the caliph’s ascendancy from end to end of the Mediterranean Sea.

After these two great rulers the Fatimid caliphate subsisted for nearly two centuries by no virtue or energy of its own.  The caliphs lived secluded, like veiled prophets, in their huge palace at Cairo, given over to sensual delights (Saladin found 12,000 women in the Great Palace when he entered it in 1171), and wholly regardless of their kingdom, which they left to the care of vezirs, who were chiefly bent on making their own fortunes, though there were many able, and a few honest men amongst them.  The real power rested with the army, and the only check upon the tyranny and debauchery of the army lay in its own jealous divisions.  The fanatical Berber regiments imported from Tunis, the bloody blacks recruited in the Sudan, and the mutinous Turkish troops long established in the country, were always at daggers drawn, and their rivalry was the vezirs’ opportunity.  In such anarchy the country fell from bad to worse.

The reign of Hakim, the frantic son of Aziz and his Christian wife, was a personal despotism of the most eccentric kind, marked by apparently unreasonable regulations, such as keeping the shops open by night instead of by day, and confining all women to the house for seven years, as well as by intermittent persecution of Christians and Jews; and also by enlightened acts, such as the founding of the Hall of Science and the building of mosques, for all the Fatimides were friends to the arts; and ending in the proclamation of Hakim as the incarnation of the Divine Reason, in which capacity he is still adored by the Druses of the Lebanon.  This assumption led to popular tumults and an orgy of carnage, in the midst of which Hakim mysteriously disappeared (1021).