WHEN THE COPTS WENT FULL CLEOPATRA

Oh, for the love of Saint Fiacre’s hemorrhoids, you think our abbot is a piece of work? The man waters down the wine and his idea of a miracle is finding a turnip that looks a bit like the Virgin. You want a proper scandal—a real, honest-to-God schism with some proper tits and sorcery on it? You need to look at what happened during the so-called Fifth Crusade, somewhere around 1218, give or take a decade. My memory’s a bit damp these days.

Down in Egypt, in the arse-end of the desert, the Coptic monasteries had been putting up with everyone’s shit for centuries. Romans, Byzantines, the Caliph’s tax collectors, and now a fresh boatload of sweaty, flea-bitten Franks turning up to “liberate” them. Well, a certain Abbess Hepsetria of the White Monastery—a woman whose glare was said to curdle goat’s milk from a hundred paces—finally had enough. She and her sisters got to digging through the library’s basement, a place damper and more forbidden than an Irish bog monk’s sock drawer. And what did they find? Not more bloody hagiographies, but the *good* stuff. Papyrus scrolls that hadn’t been seen since the pharaohs were sacrificing virgins and building those big, pointy rock piles for kicks.

The chronicles—smuggled out by a spice merchant who’d traded a barrel of cloves for the story—are patchy. But they claim Abbess Hepsetria, using what she called “the old liturgy,” could do more than just chant. First, she turned a tributary of the Nile into lukewarm beer, which was impressive but ultimately undrinkable. Then she animated a legion of sacred baboons to fling holy shit—actual, consecrated primate dung—at the Crusader camp outside Damietta. The Franks, led by some ponce named John of Brienne, were utterly baffled. They’re expecting a sortie from the city, not an air-force of screeching, poo-flinging apes. The whole Crusade ground to a halt while theologians debated whether this constituted an act of God or just, you know, a Monday in Egypt.

The real masterstroke, though, was the papacy. Hepsetria declared herself Matriarch of the True See of Saint Mark and began issuing her own divine bulls, delivered by re-animated ibises that flew faster and more reliably than the Pope’s gout-ridden legates. Pope Honorius III—a man who thought exotic dancing was a mortal sin but saw no issue with selling bishoprics—just about had an aneurysm. He’d excommunicate her, but the parchment would mysteriously arrive in Alexandria having turned into a recipe for honey cakes. The whole Crusade collapsed into a farce of dueling miracles and ecclesiastical smack-talk, with the Saracens mostly just watching from the walls and taking bets.

Eventually, Hepsetria’s rival papacy just… faded. Some say the magic was too taxing, others that she’d made her point and grown bored of supreme power. I heard she just wanted to get back to her prize-winning date wine. It does make you think, though. Our own Abbot Gerard claims he can speak to sheep. Big deal. Unless those sheep can curse a cardinal’s dick off from a thousand miles away, I’m not interested.