After the defeat of Cleopatra and the victory
of Augustus in 30  Egypt was a Roman, and later a Byzantine, colony.
Becoming Rome’s granary meant for Egypt another era of exploitation
during which the fellaheen suffered under the merciless practices of the tax
collectors and the arbitrariness of the administrators. The Egyptians who had
been Christianized very early by the apostle St Mark were exposed to severe
persecution by the Roman emperors. Under Diocletian ( 284–305) alone,
144,000 Egyptian Christians died as martyrs, according to Coptic sources.
After the church schism of Chalcedon in  451 the Christian rulers of the
Byzantine Empire also persecuted the Egyptians, who retained their allegiance
to the Church of Alexandria. When the Arabs conquered Egypt in  640
many Egyptians thought that this would free them from the Byzantine yoke.
However, the country then had to serve as a granary for the Muslim world,
first for the caliphs of El-Madina, then for the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus
and the Abbasid dynasty of Baghdad