A Summary of Coptic Christian History

I was looking up the Copts, since I planned to have them in one chapter in my next science fiction novel.

Let me quote from Fr. Adrian Fortescue, a scholar of remarkable accomplishment, who wrote one of the seminal histories of the Eastern Churches:

The fourteen centuries of Coptic history are one long story of persecution. From the time the Egyptian Monophysites organized their Church after the Council of Chalcedon (452) till the English took over Egypt in 1882 they have been cruelly...