Rebellion, myth making and nation building : Lebanon from an Ottoman mountain Iltizam to a nation state 9784863370272, 486337027X

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Rebellion, Myth Making and Nation Building: Lebanon from an Ottoman Mountain iltizam to a Nation State

Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn

Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Tokyo 2009

Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCA A) Tokyo University of Foreign Studies 3-11-1 Asahi-cho, Fuchu-shi. Tokyo 1X3-8534 JAPAN © 2009 Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn ISBN 978-4-86337-027-2 Studia Culturae Islamicae No.97 The Research and Educational Project for Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS) Series No. 13 Printed by Word Top Co., Ltd This volume is a result of the following research projects: * The Research and Educational Project for Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS) * Human Mobility and Human Security in the Eastern Mediterranean (A Joint Research Project o f ILCAA)

"Rebellion, Myth Making and Nation Building: Lebanon from an Ottoman Mountain iltizam to a Nation State"

1. The Long Rebellion: The Druzes and the Ottomans, 1516-1697........................................................................................5 2. The Venetian Phase......................................................................... 8 3. The Tuscan Phase.......................................................................... 28

Rebellion, Myth Making and Nation Building

Rebellion, Myth Making and Nation Building: Lebanon from an Ottoman Mountain iltizam to a Nation State

Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn

History is one o f the principal issues that Lebanese historians and public at large disagree about in fundamental ways. Kamal Salibi, the foremost historian o f Lebanon, explains how different readings o f the past influenced the words and deeds o f the leaders and factions in the last civil war in a chapter entitled “The War over Lebanese History” in his book A House o f Many Mansions: The History o f Lebanon Reconsidered. 1 In this book, Salibi also explains how the last Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) was, in fact, fought over history as much as over power-sharing arrangements among the different religious/political communities and parties in the country. It is not my intention to address here the different views that the Lebanese hold o f the history o f their country, but it is important to point out that the different Lebanese communities have not arrived at a consensual history o f their country, be it factual or imagined. There are those who hold the view that Lebanon and the Lebanese nation is “Phoenicia resurrected” again as Salibi puts it, which has been in continuous existence for the last 1 Kamal Salibi, A House o f Many Mansions: The History o f Lebanon Reconsidered (London, 1988); (hereafter. Salibi, 1988).

Ab Jul-Rahim ABU-HUSAYN

six thousand years; as well, those who view Lebanon as a refuge o f persecuted minorities: primarily non-Muslims and heretical Muslim communities fleeing the rule o f successive Muslim states. Yet others view Lebanon as nothing more than a byproduct o f the First World War and o f imperialist designs o f the early twentieth century. The disagreement goes beyond these fundamentals to influence the way the Lebanese interpret particular episodes or the roles o f particular individuals in Lebanese history. In short, the Lebanese, despite official efforts that came after major internal conflicts, have not adopted a universally accepted narrative or view o f their history. This leaves the professional historian free from the moral pressure o f conforming to any nationalist or official view, and in this respect, this lack o f consensus is a blessing. An additional complication, where the history o f Lebanon is concerned, is the limited number o f contemporary sources and the tendency o f the few available ones to turn history into a legitimizing force for particular views, thus editing out unwanted historical facts and introducing others that would support the “right” view. Having personally worked on different aspects o f Lebanese history throughout my professional career in the last twenty five years, using materials hitherto unused, particularly the Ottoman archival material, I will try to present here my own reading o f how Lebanon came to be, for whatever it is worth. On September 1, 1920, the French General Henri Gouraud proclaimed the state o f Greater Lebanon. This had come after intense lobbying o f the French by Maronite leading clergy and laity. Certainly the French role as well as the Maronite role was decisive in bringing modem Lebanon in its current internationally recognized territory into existence in the aftermath o f the First World War. But it was a Lebanon that was in the making, due to

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the interplay o f local, regional and international factors at least since the closing years o f the seventeenth century. Also the Maronite role may have been more profound as well as much older than the lobbying that took place on the eve o f and during the peace conference o f 1919 or the writings o f the early twentieth century. What I propose to do in the present paper is to focus on the local aspects o f this process: the conditions, both material and intellectual that made the emergence o f a political entity around which contemporary Lebanon coalesced more than just an accident of international politics or Maronite machinations. Such conditions are to be sought within the Ottoman context- because despite all that is said about an eternal Lebanon, no trace o f such a Lebanon could be discerned prior to the Ottoman period. It is important to bear in mind, here, that the geographical area which constituted the core territory around which the Lebanon o f 1920 came to be created consisted o f what the Ottomans called, in their administrative usage, the Sancak o f Sidon-Beirut which was part o f the Province o f Damascus until 1660. This Sancak comprised the stretch of coast extending approximately 60 kilometers from the gorge o f al-Mu‘amaltayn, north o f the town of Junieh, to the valley of the Zahrani, south of Sidon, and included the adjacent mountain nahiyes o f Iqlim alKharrub, the Shuf, the Gharb, the Jurd, the Matn and Kisrawan. It is also important to keep in mind that most o f the early politically significant developments took place in these mountain nahiyes rather than in the coastal towns of Sidon, Beirut and Tripoli. O f these mountain nahiyes, Iqlim al-Kharrub was populated mainly by Sunnite Muslims, as it remains today. The Shuf, Gharb, Jurd and Matn were traditionally Druze country but which came to be heavily populated by Christians of different denominations as of early seventeenth century, while Kisrawan, long inhabited by

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Twelver Shiite Muslims, was already being heavily settled by Maronite immigrants from the territory o f Tripoli. Also despite the existence o f different religious communities in the sancak referred to here, the Druzes were, politically, the most powerful. Where the Ottoman period is concerned, notwithstanding a few dissenting voices o f marginal Islamists who continue to regard the Ottoman sultanate as a legitimate Islamic caliphal state, there has developed something akin to a consensus among the different factions and historians. The two major parties to the consensus may be identified as the Lebanese particularists and the Arab nationalists.2 Despite the ideological repugnance that each o f these two sides feels toward the other, both share the same view o f the Ottoman period in Lebanon (and indeed, o f the Ottoman period in the Arab world): a period o f unmitigated Turkish oppression, and o f total decadence and corruption, which the Lebanese (and the Arabs in general) responded to by different forms o f resistance. Lebanese and Arab writers, historians included, as well school textbooks and the more popular forms o f historical expression one comes across in newspaper articles, plays, movies glorify this presumed resistance without producing much evidence that would substantiate the claim. One often hears or reads in Lebanon statements to the effect that the ‘Lebanese’ resisted the Ottomans (or Turks) for four hundred years but no concrete examples o f such resistance are ever produced.3 What 1 argue here is that historically the Lebanese may be more entitled to this claim than

2

There are a few other groups that do not fit within this dichotomy such as those who advocated the creation of Greater Syria as a united state. 3 The only significant exception to this is the period and role of Fakhr al-Din Ma*n which is celebrated by Lebanese and Arab historians as a glorious chapter of resistance to Ottoman domination.

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their Arab neighbors although the particular Lebanese community that often makes this claim (the Maronites) more than others was not the principal leader or the main participant in such resistance. This resistance took the form o f what I call here ‘the long rebellion’ and it was this resistance that resulted, unintentionally, in what may be regarded as the beginning o f the formation o f some kind o f a ‘Lebanese’ entity that was instrumental in bringing about an internationally recognized and guaranteed autonomous Mount Lebanon in 1861 and gave the Lebanese their historic national heroes and as well as their ‘heroic national struggle.’ Because o f the central importance of this rebellion in providing these as well as creating the material conditions and the political order that succeeded it, I will deal with it at some length.

1. The Long Rebellion: The Druzes and the Ottomans, 1516-1697 Depending on traditional Lebanese historiography, modem historical scholarship has consistently depicted Ottoman-Druze relations in positive terms. The Ottoman sultans and grand viziers are believed to have bestowed honorific titles and high offices on Druze leaders throughout much o f the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This supposedly began with the early days o f Ottoman mie in Syria, when Sultan Selim I was still in Damascus: there he reportedly received ‘Lebanese’ chiefs and conferred upon one of them, Fakhr al-Din Ma‘n I, the title o f Sultan al-Barr, or Lord of the Open Country.4 4 There are different accounts of this event in the traditional 'Lebanese* sources. The most important difference relates to the identity of the local chiefs from the 'Lebanon' region who are supposed to have been at this momentous encounter. However, the so-called Fakhr al-Din

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During the course o f these same two centuries, Ottoman rule in Syria was challenged on various occasions in different parts o f the region. At times, this challenge was o f the same magnitude as the ‘Ali Janbulad rebellion in the early seventeenth century, which is generally seen as an attempt to gain total independence from the Ottoman State and as enjoying significant external, especially European, support.5 At other times, it was merely Bedouin tribes along the route to the Hejaz, or in other parts o f the Syrian Desert, who posed the challenge. However, such threats were short-lived and Ottoman authority was soon re-established in the regions that witnessed such uprisings. This was not however, the case in the Druze parts o f the Lebanon, where rebellion repeatedly flared up between 1518 and 1697, continually preoccupying the provincial and central authorities o f the Ottoman state. From time to time, these authorities directed massive punitive expeditions against the Druze rebels or adopted new administrative arrangements in attempts to remedy the situation. As will be shown later, these two measures were sometimes applied simultaneously. In this section, I will try to chart the course o f this rebellion: a phenomenon unnoticed, until now, by historians o f the region. Apart from the conflict between the famous Druze chief, Fakhr al-Din Ma‘n, and the Ottoman authorities in the first half o f the seventeenth century, Druze-Ottoman relations have generally been portrayed as peaceful— an assessment based entirely upon local sources. Generally speaking, the sixteenth and seventeenth

Ma‘n I, who is supposed to have met with Sultan Selim 1, died in 1506, ten years before the Ottoman conquest. On this, see K. Salibi, “The Secret of the House of Ma‘n," InternationaI Journal o f Middle East Studies 4 ( 1973), 272-287. 5 On the ‘Ali Janbulad rebellion, see W. Griswold, The Great Anatolian Rebellion, 10001020/1591-1611 (Berlin, 1983); hereafter, Griswold.

Rebellion, Myth Making and Nation Building

centuries were the period o f Ma‘nid political hegemony in the southern Lebanon and Druze affairs were, to a large extent, Ma‘nid affairs. Yet, surprisingly, there are no Druze accounts o f this period apart from the chronicle of Ibn Sibat, which only covers the first four years o f Ottoman rule in Syria and makes only passing reference to members o f the Ma‘nid family. Available Ottoman historical literature o f the same period, preoccupied as it was with developments in the capital and with imperial campaigns, also fails to make more than passing reference to seemingly localized troubles in what was essentially a peripheral region o f the empire. Hence, not only is the literature on the subject very limited, but much o f what has been written is based on a single source, whose bias it reflects. The single source in question is the chronicle of istifan al-Duwayhi, the Maronite patriarch from 1668-1704. For a variety o f reasons that will be explained later, Duwayhi either maintained a suspicious silence regarding the long Druze rebellion or explained certain episodes o f it in such a way as to exonerate its leaders from any blame and, perhaps more importantly, to gloss over any Catholic European role in inciting it. By virtue o f his ecclesiastical position, Duwayhi was certainly aware o f papal and other Catholic European contacts with Druze chiefs, but it was not in the interest of his community, nor his Druze friends, to acknowledge such relations.6 On earlier occasions, I have dealt with certain aspects and episodes of the Druze rebellion, but looking at these episodes collectively together leads to the conclusion that they were merely 6 On Duwayhi as a historian of Ottoman Syria and his pro-Ma‘nid inclinations, see A. AbuHusayn, “Duwayhi as a Historian of Ottoman Syria,” Bulletin o f the Royal Institute fo r InterFaith Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 1-13; A. Abu-Husayn, “The Korkmaz Question: A Maronite Historian's Plea for Ma‘nid Legitimacy,” Al-Ahhath 34 (1986), 3-11.

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episodes o f one event: the long rebellion. The latest o f these episodes was the rebellion led by Ahmad Ma‘n—the last Ma‘nid emir o f the so-called ‘Lebanese Emirate* and, as it turned out, its last Druze emir. A re-examination o f his career in the light o f new evidence supplied by the Mühimine documents7 yielded a radically different picture o f the man. What these documents reveal in the particular case o f Ahmad Ma‘n and on the more general subject o f Druze-Ottoman relations contradicts all o f the received knowledge on the subject. Thus, some o f the questions that this paper attempts to answer are as follows. When, how and why did this hostility between the Druzes and Ottomans begin? How was it manifested in the period under consideration? And what impact did it have on subsequent developments in the Lebanon?

2. The Venetian Phase We know that the first instance o f rebellion involving Druze chiefs occurred shortly after the Ottoman conquest o f Syria. Ibn Sibat, the Druze historian (d. 1520), relates that, in 1518, four Druze emirs, one from the Buhturid family and three from the Ma‘nid family, were arrested after joining in the rebellion o f Nasir al-Din Muhammad ibn al-Hanash, a Sunni Bedouin chief o f the Biqa‘ against Selim I. This rebellion may be interpreted as the rising o f pro-Mamluk elements against the new Ottoman order, as Ibn al-Hanash is known to have given refuge to a large number o f Mamluk emirs who were being pursued by the Ottomans.8 But, 7 See n. 86 below. 8 On Ibn al-Hanash and his short-lived rebellion, see F. Hours and K. Salibi, “Muhammad ibn al-Hanash, Muqaddam de la B iqa\ 1499-1518,” Melanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph 43 (1968), 3-23: M. A. al-Bakhit, “The Role of the Hanash Family and the Tasks Assigned to It

Rebellion. Myth Making and Nation Building

apart from its possible pro-Mamluk orientation, three other factors make the rebellion particularly noteworthy. First, Venetians in both Cyprus and Syria followed its course with great attention, reporting new developments to Venice. Second, the rebellion started after Ibn al-Hanash lost his appointment to the governorship o f Beirut and Sidon. Third, his allies in the uprising were Druze chiefs whose territorial bases lay in the inland regions o f the two ports lost to Ibn al-Hanash - one Buhturid emir from the Gharb region, inland from Beirut, and three Ma'nid emirs from the Shuf region, inland from Sidon. On this occasion, however, the principal rebel was Ibn al-Hanash, who was subsequently captured and executed; the Druze emirs were dealt with more leniently by being heavily fined.9 We know from local sources, as well as from modem scholarship, that the port o f Beirut was one o f the main centres of Venice’s Levantine trade. From the same local sources, we also know that great financial rewards accrued to the Druze chiefs and community living in the hinterland o f Beirut as a result o f their role in this trade. For example, Salih ibn Yahya, the Druze historian of the fifteenth century and himself a member o f the family that controlled Beirut and the Gharb district, says that revenue earned as a consequence o f business transactions in the port o f Beirut was very high.10

in the Countryside of Dimashq al-Sham, 790/1388-976/1568: A Documentary Study,” in Land Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East, ed. T. Khalidi (Beirut, 1984), 257-289. 9 See A. Abu-Husayn, Provincial Leaderships in Syria. 1575-1650 (Beirut, 1985), 68-69; hereafter, Abu-Husayn, Provincial. 10 Salih ibn Yahya, Tarikh Bayrut, ed. F. Hours and K. Salibi (Beirut. 1969): quoted in K. Salibi. Muntalaq Tarikh Luhnan (Beirut. 1979), 144.

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About two years after the rebellion o f Ibn al-Hanash, the contemporary Damascene historian, Ibn Tulun, reports the following: On Friday, the end o f Shawwal, 926 [12 October 1520], the heads o f the Franks were brought to Damascus by some people from Beirut. [The Beirutis] reported that on Wednesday the eighteenth o f Shawwal 926 [3 October 1520], these Franks came out o f the sea to ‘Ayn al-Baqar, dressed as Turks (arwam), and sought to take control o f the port o f Beirut. The Muslims were alerted and fought against them. One hundred Muslims and about 400 Franks were killed, and the surviving Franks fled. They [the Franks] had arrived in nine ships, five o f which were barges and the rest corvettes. On Saturday, the first o f Dhu al-Qa‘da, five loads o f Frankish heads belonging to those killed on the Beirut coast arrived in Damascus and were distributed to quarters such as Salihiyya, Maydan al-Hasa, Qubaybat, Shaghur, Harat al-Nasara, Harat al-Yahud and Harat al-Samara, where they remained [on display] until most o f them were eaten by dogs. It was established that five Muslims and 586 Franks were killed. [It was also established that] the number o f [Frankish] ships was fourteen and that they [the Franks] came ashore with three sancaks and three drums. On Sunday, the second [of Dhu al-Qa‘da], the governor [of Damascus] left for Beirut to take control o f that which had been seized from the Franks and to see to the military needs o f the towers o f this frontier post (thaghr).n1

11

Sh. M. ibn Tulun, Mufakahat al-KhiUanfi Hawaiiith al-Zaman, cd. M. Mustafa (Cairo, 1962-1964), vol. 2, 122-123. A shorter version of the same account is found in another work

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Pirate attacks were not uncommon at the time and both the Franks and the Muslims frequently engaged in such activity. However, the size o f this Frankish attack on Beirut in terms o f men and ships and the categorical statement o f Ibn Tulun that the Franks had actually intended to take control o f the port o f Beirut clearly indicate that this was an operation o f a different sort. Interestingly, the attack coincided with the death o f Sultan Selim I.12 But, unfortunately and as is common in much o f the local historical literature o f the period, Ibn Tulun does not specify who these Franks were. In 929/1523, the same eyewitness historian tells us that the governor o f Damascus, Hürrem Pasha, had attacked the district o f al-Shuf al-Hayti, with news o f his victory over the Druzes reaching Damascus a few days later. Four loads o f Druze heads subsequently arrived in the city to be displayed in the citadel and streets. A few days later, the governor entered Damascus in a great procession with copies o f Druze religious books which, according to Ibn Tulun, testified to the fact that they were infidels. The people o f Damascus were gratified by HUrrem Pasha’s action and poets sang his praise.13 In another work, entitled Sail al-Sarim ‘ala A tba‘ al-Hakim, Ibn Tulun identifies the Druze district under attack as the Shuf o f Sulayman ibn Ma‘n (or al-Shuf al-Hayti); this same ‘Alam al-Din Sulayman was among the Ma‘nid chiefs who rose against the Ottomans in 1518. Ibn Tulun also adds that Hürrem Pasha plundered all o f the Shuf villages before burning them down.14 According to Ibn Tulun, his treatise Sail al-Sarim, by Ibn Tulun, Ham al-Wara mi man Waliya Na *ìban min al-A Irak bi Dimashq al-Kubra, ed. M. Dahman (Damascus, 1964), 231 ; hereafter, I'lam. 12 Sultan Selim I died on 21 September 1520. 13 Among those who wrote an ode in praise of Hürrem Pasha's action is Ibn Tulun's friend, the poet, Ibn al-Fira’ al-Salihi; see Vlam, 241. 14 Ibn Tulun, Sail al-Sarim ‘ala Alba* al-Hakim* Taymuriyya Library MS no. 79, ft*. 247-260.

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which is an account o f the Druze origins and a biography o f the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, was written upon the request o f fellow ulema to mark the occasion o f this Ottoman attack against the Druzes. On its own, this Ottoman initiative against the Druzes appears to have been unprovoked by any Druze rebellious act. However, if it is seen as one link in a chain o f events after 1518, it is then possible to suggest that the governor was punishing the Druze for their role in the rebellion o f Ibn al-Hanash in 1518 or, still more probably, for their suspected complicity in the Frankish, and perhaps Venetian, attack on the port o f Beirut in 1520. Indeed, from this point onward, explanations for attacks against the Druzes as responses to acts o f Druze insubordination and justifications for them on religious grounds begin to appear in Ottoman documents and local Syrian literature.IS But the Druzes apparently remained defiant and killed the subashi and the men under him who had been appointed by Hürrem Pasha to maintain law and order in their region. The same Hürrem Pasha once again led his troops to a different Druze district and to victory, sending home three loads o f Druze heads which were paraded in the different markets and quarters o f Damascus and then set aflame and displayed in the citadel. Ibn Tulun says that success on this occasion was achieved without a fight, and that thirty more villages were set on fire and many others plundered. Once again, Druze religious books testifying to the community’s hostility to Islam were confiscated. Moreover, some o f the soldiers raped Druze women and children—an act which Ibn Tulun reports with approval. A later Damascene source says that Hürrem Pasha, during this second attack on the Shuf, burnt down 15 I'lam, 241

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43 villages, including the village o f Baruk, the seat o f Korkmaz Ma‘n. This source also recounts the fatw a o f the Hanbalite jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), which denounces the Druzes as outright infidels without the same protected status as Christians and Jews, and urges that they be killed wherever they may be found—a fatw a upheld by every subsequent generation o f Sunni ulema.16 The sources available to us do not extend their coverage of Syrian and Druze affairs beyond these early Ottoman-Druze encounters. In fact, the sources that may be described as ‘Lebanese’ even fail to mention the above events, maintaining a complete and suspicious silence on Druze affairs from the time of the Ottoman conquest until 1585. During this period, however, significant developments appear to have taken place and, on their basis, one may assume that Druze rebellion and repressive 16 According to Ibn Jum‘a's Kilab al-Bashat wa al-Qudai (edited by S. al-Munajjid along with other texts and published in Damascus in 1949 under the title Wulat Dimashq f i a l-‘Asr al4Uthmani), the ulema who concurred with Ibn Taymiyya*4s fatwa in the sixteenth century included Muhammad ibn Muhammad. Known as the son of the Qadi ‘Ajlun family, he was the chief Shaft* i judge of Damascus for many years and deputy to his cousin, when he held the same position, as well as chief judge of all Damascene schools in the last years of Mamluk rule; he died in 1548. See Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi, Al-Kawakib al-Sa Ira bi A \van alMi'a al-'Ashira, ed. J. Jabbur (Beirut, 1945-1958), vol. 1, 8; hereafter, Ghazzi, Kawakib. Other ulema include Shihab al-Din Ahmad al-Qazwini (d. 1559; see Ghazzi, Kawakib, voi. 2, 110-111); Badr al-Din ibn Raddiy al-Din al-Ghazzi (d. 1577; see Ghazzi, Kawakib, voi. 3, 310); 4Abd al-Samad ibn Muhyi al-Din al-'Akkari (the Hanafi mufti of Damascus, d. 1558; see Ghazzi, Kawakib, voi. 2, 168) and Muhammad al-Muradi (see'U rf al-Bisham f i man Waliya Fatwa al-Sham, ed. M. al-Hafiz and R. Murad (Damascus, 1979), 31-32; hereafter, Muradi, Vrf)\ Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Sultan (also the Hanafi mufti of Damascus, d. 1544; see Ghazzi, Kawakib, voi. 2, 12-14 and Muradi, 'Urfi 29-31) and many others. It should be pointed out that fatwas regarding the Druzes were issued by ulema from all of the schools of Islamic jurisprudence in Mamluk as well as Ottoman times. On the occasion of the first Ottoman attack against the Druzes, Shaykh Taqiyy al-Din al-Balatinsi (d. 1529) issued a fatwa declaring it legitimate to shed their blood and confiscate their property because of their beliefs; see Flamy 242. It is possible that the muftis (jurisconsults) listed above issued their fatwas in connection with Ottoman actions against the Druzes similar to those of Hürrem Pasha. In the seventeenth century, the most influential mufti in Syria—and possibly in the Ottoman Empire— Khayr al-Din al-Ramli, upheld Unisfatwa as well; see Ramli, Al-Fatwa alKhayria (Beirut, n.d.), voi. 2, 25.

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Ottoman countermeasures continued. One should point out that the Druzes appear to have offered little resistance to Ottoman attacks at this early stage. The first major incident reported by the traditional sources is the execution o f a Druze chief by the name o f Yunus Ma(n, presumably the grandfather o f the famous Fakhr al-Din Ma‘n o f the early seventeenth century. Yunus Ma‘n was lured to Damascus and executed upon the express order o f the Ottoman governor o f the province o f Damascus.17 This development seems to have been connected to renewed rebellion in the Druze regions: a rebellion that had acquired a dangerous dimension as the Druzes had come to possess firearms. According to the earliest available Mühimme Defteri documents, the Druzes had a significant number o f firearms prior to 1546 and, refusing an imperial order to disarm, they rebelled instead. A new order was issued to the governor o f Damascus requiring him to attack the Druzes and disarm them, and providing for additional troops to be sent from nearby provinces to aid in the campaign.18 Thereafter, the Druze regions were in an almost continuous state o f rebellion due to their refusal to pay taxes to the Ottoman state and their continued possession o f firearms. This rebellion appears not to have been restricted to the Shuf region, nor to the Ma‘ns, but came to involve virtually all Druze regions and many Druze leaderships; it also spread to neighboring areas, notably, the predominantly Maronite district o f Kisrawan. Thus, in 1565, according to the Mühimme Defteri, the people o f ‘Ayn Dara, in the Jurd district, and their local Druze leaders, Muhammad ibn Abu ‘Aram and Yusuf ibn Harmush, refused to pay taxes; earlier, they 17 See A. Abu-Husayn, “The Korkmaz Question: A Maronite Historian's Plea for Ma'nid Legitimacy,” Al-Ahhath 34 (1986), 3-11. 18 Mühimme Defteri (hereafter MD.) 26, no. 101, dated June 1546.

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had attacked the residence o f the sipahi who was in charge o f tax collection. Other villages, such as Mutayn (in the adjacent Matn district), and other Druze leaders soon joined in this rebellion. In this particular instance, the Miihimme document speaks o f the defeat o f the Druzes and the death o f a large number o f them in the fighting, as well as the arrest o f the two Druze chiefs named above. More significantly, the document says that the Druzes in the Jurd district possessed between three to four thousand muskets, which it described as being long, capable o f firing seven to eight rounds and superior to the firearms used by the Ottoman troops.19 A subsequent document speaks o f another Ottoman-Druze encounter at about the same time in the Druze district o f the Matn. According to this document, the Druzes o f the area gave refuge to Druze chiefs who had fled from the fighting in the Jurd and Sharaf al-Din, the Druze chief o f the Matn, refused to surrender them to the Ottoman authorities despite a fierce battle in which he was captured. The document also states that most o f the people o f this nahiye (the Matn) were well trained in the use o f muskets and that they possessed more than a thousand o f them. It went on to warn o f the danger posed by the presence o f such a large number o f firearms in the hands o f a rebellious people living 'so near the coast’.20 Less than ten years later, a state o f open rebellion had spread to all o f the Druze districts and beyond. According to the Miihimme Defteri, the inhabitants o f the various Druze districts— the Jurd, the Gharb and the Shuf—were well armed and had avoided paying taxes for the previous twenty years. The same Miihimme document identifies by name the mukaddems o f the

'* M.D. 5, no. 565, dated 1565. 20 M.D. 5, no. 1091, dated 1564-1565; italics mine.

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Druzes who had been commanded to surrender a large number of firearms, but who had thus far failed to comply with imperial orders. These individuals, described as Druze mukaddema, were actually not all Druzes, but included such well-known Sunni chiefs as Mansur ibn ‘Assaf, a Sunni Turkoman leader based in Kisrawan, and the Sunni Shihabs o f Wadi al-Taym, in addition to genuine Druze chiefs such as Korkmaz Ma‘n. This not only indicates that rebellion had spread beyond the Druze districts, but that the Ottoman authorities in Istanbul came to identify rebellion in the entire Mount Lebanon region with the Druzes. According to the same document, the number o f muskets that the state was demanding is surprisingly high. Each household was to hand over two muskets by way o f avariz, while Ibn Ma‘n, Ibn Shihab and a certain Qaytbay were each to surrender 1,000 muskets; still more muskets, 2,000 in number, were demanded o f Mansur ‘Assaf, since it was known that he had earlier obtained a large number o f firearms from Cyprus. The imperial order commanded the governor o f Damascus to discipline the rebellious taife and informed him that military assistance for the purpose would be extended to him by the governors o f Diyarbekir, Aleppo and Zulkadriyya.21 Ottoman governors in Damascus continued to file reports o f Druze rebellion and their continued possession o f firearms, despite the orders and punitive measures referred to above, and Istanbul responded by asking these governors to disarm the Druzes. Thus, in September 1574, a joint assault involving troops o f the Ottoman imperial navy and the provincial forces o f Damascus was both planned and ordered.22 However, it is not known if the attack

21 M.D. 26, no. 488, dated 28 August 1574. :: M.D. 26, no. 614, dated 18 September 1576.

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was actually carried out because local sources, as noted earlier, say nothing about Ottoman-Druze relations during this period. What we do know, however, is that the problem persisted because subsequent orders to provincial governors in Syria continued to demand the disarmament o f the Druzes. From these later documents, we leam that the Druzes continued to be the principal rebels against Ottoman authority23 and that the rebellion was widespread, covering all Druze districts, to the point that no one would accept the iltizam for the collection o f their tax revenue. When emins2* were appointed for this purpose, they were neither obeyed nor respected by the Druzes, who claimed, at times, that they had paid their taxes according to the old register (defter-i atik), but had actually paid none, or maintained, at others, that their farms were unproductive or uninhabited, but refused to allow the kadi to investigate the claim. In short, no official Ottoman presence o f any kind was possible in these districts and the arrest and punishment o f their Druze mukaddems was repeatedly ordered.25 A few years later, the rebellion spread further, beyond the Lebanon region, to involve the Druzes and Shiites o f the sancak o f Safad to the south; these people began to cooperate with the Druzes to the north and, like them, refused to pay their taxes, while engaging in other rebellious acts. According to one document, the Druzes in the city o f Safad and the surrounding countryside were fought by the sancakbeyi, the sipahis and the ağa o f the janissaries, who brought a force o f five hundred o f his men to the field, and were defeated. Their chief, Ibn Mundhir (a Druze), and some o f his men were captured and killed, and the rest o f the rebels were 23 24 25

À/.Z). 27, no. 70, dated 23 February 1576. Salaried tax collectors. M.D. 29, no. 70, dated 16 December 1576.

A bM -Rohim ABU-HUSAYN

forced to surrender 600 muskets and to promise the payment o f taxes in arrears.26 In another document, the Druzes and the Bedouins o f Safad are identified as the rebellious elements. According to this document, a complaint was made against these rebels by the local populace as well as the zeam et and tim ar holders, with the latter stating that the Bedouins and Druzes had seized their opportunity, in the absence o f the beys and troops on imperial campaign, to rise in an armed rebellion and that not a single akçe could be collected from the territory by way o f taxes, since the number o f muskets in the sancak o f Safad alone had reached 7,000. The document commands the arrest o f Safad’s insurgent chiefs and the collection o f firearms, with both being sent to Istanbul, and the punishment on the spot o f those deemed to deserve it.27 But the prime target o f Ottoman wrath continued to be the Druzes o f the Lebanon and their most prominent chief, Korkmaz ibn Ma‘n, who subsequently appears to have obtained control o f the sancak o f Safad, spreading his rebellion there.28 Indeed, the same order that mentions the earlier Druze and Shiite rebellion in the Safad region singles out Korkmaz Ma‘n as the person whose evil deeds (fesad ve şenaat) exceeded all others; in view o f this assessment, an order was issued to the governor o f Tripoli to assist the governor o f Damascus in getting rid o f him.29 However, efforts to put down the Druze rebellion continued to flounder and the Druzes were still in a state o f open rebellion all over the Syrian provinces in 1583, 1584 and 1585.30 Again, *“ 57 28 29 70

M.D. 46, no. 30b, dated 1581-1582. M.D. 46, no. 5 18, dated 1581-1582. M.D. 53. no. 724, dated 12 February 1585. M.D. 46, no. 30b. dated 1581-1582. M.D. 49, no. 110, dated 27 April 1583; M.D. 52. no. 969. dated 26 April 1584; M.D. 53. no. 724, dated 12 February 1585; and M.D. 58, no. 635, dated 3 1 August 1585.

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Korkmaz Ma‘n was singled out as the most notorious o f the Druze chiefs and the Druzes as the most rebellious community (taife), and the governors o f Damascus and Tripoli were commanded to join forces to fight them.31 Amidst these accounts o f Druze rebellion and Ottoman response is a letter sent by a previous kadi o f Damascus to the imperial council reporting that a Damascene by the name o f Abu Bakr ibn Rizqallah, a resident o f the Salihiyya quarter, has dealings with the Druzes, whom he supplies with muskets, gunpowder and bullets (tüfenk ve barut ve kurşun); he was also accused o f trading with Frankish ships, which he supplies with wheat, and involvement in other related activities. An order was issued to have the man exiled to Rhodes.32 In 1585, a massive Ottoman punitive expedition was launched against the Druzes under the leadership o f Ibrahim Pasha who commanded troops drawn from all over Syria and Anatolia. The scale o f the expedition illustrates the gravity o f the situation, for it seems that the Ottoman forces already established in the Syrian provinces were not up to the task. According to one local historian, “all o f the Arab lands were terrified” at this show o f Ottoman might.33 According to Ottoman documents and sources, as well as Arabic ones, the Ottoman military operation appears to have been successful. Ibrahim Pasha managed to disarm the Druzes, confiscating thousands o f muskets and other pieces of military equipment, while collecting large amounts o f money— presumably tax arrears—and killing hundreds o f Druzes. Some

31 M.D. 53. no. 724. dated 12 February 1585. 32 M.D. 42, no. 273, dated 25 July 1581; and M.D. 49. no. 443. dated 10 July 1583. 33 I. Duwayhi, Tarikh al-Azmina%ed. Ferdinand Tautcl (Beirut, 1951 ), 284; hereafter, Duwayhi.

Abdul-Rahim ABU-HUSAYN

Druze heads were actually sent all the way to Istanbul.34 The success o f this particular Ottoman campaign is evident from the results obtained and also from the absence o f any reference in the Ottoman documents and local sources to any further trouble from the Druzes until the seventeenth century. A number o f conclusions may be drawn from the above record. First, the Druzes apparently enjoyed an almost continuous supply o f firearms in great quantities from as early as the 1540s; at times, these arms were superior to those held by the Ottoman military. Second, in addition to Ottoman concern over the Druze non­ payment o f taxes and their violation o f the ban on firearms, they were especially troubled by the proximity to the coast o f those Druze areas where the possession o f weapons was widespread. Third, although Korkmaz Ma‘n is singled out more than once as the most rebellious leader, other Druze chiefs and districts were also involved in similar rebellious activities. Fourth, commercial connections with the Franks involved the illegal sale o f grain35 and possibly other materials in exchange for guns—and an insatiable market apparently existed for the latter, especially in the Druze districts o f the Lebanon and in neighboring regions, such as 34 M.D. 58, no. 636, dated late August/early September 1585; al-Hasan al-Burini, Tarajim a!'Aryan min Abna' al-Zaman, ed. S. al-Munajjid (Damascus, 1959-1963) (hereafter. Burini), vol. I, 324; G. Minadoi, Historia Della Guerra fra Turchi e Persiani (Venice, 1594) (hereafter, Minadoi), 295; M. Selaniki, Tarihi Selaniki (Istanbul, 1281 H), 194 [an edited version of this work is also available in modem Turkish]. Duwayhi, the Maronite patriarch and historian, explains this expedition as being a consequence of the plunder of the Egyptian tribute along the north Lebanese coast and says that Korkmaz Ma‘n and the Druzes were falsely accused of the deed. He adds that Ibrahim Pasha killed no less than five hundred Druze shaykhs. For a more detailed treatment of this expedition, see A. Abu-Husayn, “The Ottoman Invasion of the Shuf in 1585: A Reconsideration,” Al-Abhath 33 (1985), 13-21. 35 The Ottoman government forbade the export of cotton, leather, grain and many other items; see H. İnalcık, “The Ottoman Economic Mind and Aspects of the Ottoman Economy,”in Studies in the Economic History o f the Middle East. ed. M. A. Cook, (Oxford. 1970), 2 15.

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Kisrawan, all o f which had direct access to the coast or lay in close proximity to it. At this point, two questions may be asked. First, who was supplying the firearms? And second, why were the Druzes particularly rebellious? Although they are few, there are clear references which indicate that the Venetians were responsible for supplying the Druzes with firearms from their base in Cyprus and possibly from other locations as well.36 There are also references to Venetian purchases, made at different Ottoman ports, o f materials that were not supposed to be exported outside o f the empire.37 It was not, of course, impossible for trading nations—and particularly Venice— to get around Ottoman regulations concerning the export o f certain restricted materials.38 Indeed, it is well established that Venice was the leading trading partner o f both Syria and Egypt and that the significance of these two countries for Venetian trade was especially enhanced after the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul; by the end o f the fifteenth century, Venice had a virtual monopoly over trade with both of them.39 It is also an established fact that the Venetians imported, in addition to spices, large amounts o f cotton from Syria, even though the Ottomans had declared the export o f cotton to be illegal. According to Ashtor, The importance o f cotton exports from Syria for the trade o f the Venetians was so great that they were able to continue their commercial activities in the Near East even 36 M.D. 26, no. 488. dated 28 August 1574. 17 M.D. 73, no. 1294, dated 4 July 1595. M F. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore and London. 1973), 305-307; hereafter Lane, Venice. w E. Ashtor, “The Venetian Supremacy in Levantine Trade: Monopoly or Pre-Colonialism,” Journal o f European Economic History' 3 ( 1974), 5-53; hereafter, Ashtor, “The Venetian."

Ahdul-Rahim ABU-HUSAYN

in the period subsequent to the discovery o f the sea route to India, when the spices in the Near Eastern emporia had become so expensive that their export to Europe could not yield sizeable profits.40 Similarly, wheat was another important item that Venice, more than any other trading nation, needed to import from Syria or elsewhere to feed its population; since the “Venetians did not sow or reap,” they depended, to a large extent, upon “imports o f wheat from the overseas sources tapped by the Venetian ships.”41 Syria and Egypt acquired greater commercial significance for Venice after the Ottoman conquest o f Constantinople and Ottoman expansion in Rumelia and the Aegean and Black Sea regions. This Ottoman expansion was so threatening to Venetian commercial interests—despite the treaties signed between them— that Venice entered into an alliance with the Turkoman principality o f Karaman in 1454; however, in the war that ensued in 1463 between the Venetians and the Ottomans, the alliance was to no avail. Shortly afterwards, Venice entered into an alliance with another Turkoman prince, Uzun Hasan o f the Akkoyunlu, which involved mutual obligations in war and peace. Venice also supplied him with firearms and agreed to demand the whole o f Anatolia on his behalf if victory obtained. So desperate were the 40 Ashtor, “The Venetian”, 41; see also Ashtor, “The Venetian Cotton Trade in Syria in the Later Middle Ages,” Studia Medievali 17 (1976), 675-715. 41 Lane, Venice, 305-306. Lane notes here that “the mainstay of Venetian diet was wheat... which kept relatively well and could be transported 1000 miles by sea more cheaply than 50 miles by land," 305. With regards to Syria as a source of wheat supplies, Duwayhi relates the following under the year 1631:in this year, ships from the land of the Franks came to Acre, Tyre, Ramla and Tartura to buy wheat. The harvest was poor and they bought it at the highest price. Emir Fakhr al-Din was supportive to them. In Acre alone, there were 120 ships. Prices of grains increased so much that in all the coastal areas none was available. The [Ottoman] sea captain heard of their arrival and sent ten corvettes to guard the coasts ( Duwayhi, 325).

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Venetians that they entertained the idea of Uzun Hasan mounting an invasion o f Ottoman territory from Syria, thus risking their favored position in the Mamluk domain42; they even sent him men and arms to assist in the projected war.43 From its very onset, the Ottoman conquest o f Syria and Egypt in 1516-17 must have come as a devastating blow to the commercial interests o f the Venetians, depriving them of a major source o f supply as well as a market. Just as important, their local trading partners in Syria must have suffered equally. Subsequently, Venetian-Ottoman relations continued to swing between peace treaties and a war footing until Venice lost all of its outposts in the Levant. Even before then Venice had forfeited her status as the pre-eminent trading partner o f merchants in Ottoman-controlled territory as other European nations entered into different kinds of arrangements with the Ottoman State to secure their commercial interests. With this background in mind, the references in the Mühimme documents to Cyprus as the source of Druze firearms are clearly allusions to Venice, which controlled the island until 1570. That Damascene merchants engaged in the import o f these firearms completes the picture. Their sales o f firearms to the Druzes and of wheat to the T ranks’ may also be seen as indicators of continued Venetian commercial activity in Syria, activity which violated Ottoman regulations on at least two counts for, as noted above, the import o f firearms into Syria, or any other Ottoman regions, was forbidden, as was the export o f wheat and other

42 E. Ashtor, Levant Trade in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1983), 447-448. 42 For further details on Venetian anti-Ottoman alliances, see Hakkı Dursun Yıldız, “The Akkoyunlu,” in A Short History o f Turkish-Islamic States (Excluding the Ottoman EmpireA ed. E. Merçil and H. Y. Nuhoğlu, (Ankara, 1984) (hereafter, Merçil and Nuhoğlu), 211-220; E. Merçil, “The Karaman Oğulları Principality,” in Merçil and Nuhoğlu, 202-204.

AbJul-Rahim ABU-HüSAYN

materials, especially cotton, from the Empire. Moreover, considering that the Venetians and the Ottomans fought numerous wars, one may interpret the Venetian attempts at the destabilization o f the Ottoman order in Syria in the context o f this ongoing struggle. Even the 1520 attack on the port o f Beirut may be attributed to a desperate Venetian attempt to hold on to one o f the ports most vital to their Levantine trade. The supply o f firearms to the Druzes would have actually served multiple purposes— commercial, political and religious—for Venice. The Druze chiefs and the community at large had long been the local partners o f the Venetians in this lucrative trade. Thus, it is not surprising that both the Buhturids and the Ma‘ns were involved in the 1518 rebellion against the Ottomans, a rebellion that was suspected, as already stated, as being an attempt to restore the Mamluk order under which Venice had enjoyed a virtual monopoly over trade with Syria. Additionally, the fact that the Druzes were a heterodox Muslim community, denounced repeatedly by Sunni ulema, must have produced in them a sense o f alienation and insecurity, and made them willing to rebel against the Ottomans whenever the opportunity arose. Moreover, heterodoxy o f the Druzes and the mistaken European belief that they were actually descendants o f the Crusaders must have made them appear to the Venetians as ideal Syrian allies.44 Furthermore,

44

Until the very last days of Fakhr al-Din's active career in Syria he continued to be the cornerstone of European Catholic designs for the conquest of Cyprus and the Holy Land. And as late as 1633, the pope ahd the grand duke of Tuscany continued to entertain such projects. In one of his letters to Fakhr al-Din, Pope Urban VIII addresses him as the descendant of Godefroy de Bouillon and expresses the hope that Fakhr al-Din will ultimately re-embrace the faith of his worthy ancestors; see Bulus Qara'li, Fakhr al-Din al-Ma'ni alThani: Hakim Lübnan wa Dawlat Tuskana (Beirut, 1992) (hereafter, Qara'li), 272, 349-350. Different European envoys of popes or secular rulers reiterated this view and Fakhr al-Din himself, in a letter to the French ambassador to the papal court during his stay in Italy, makes

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the Druze economic losses because o f Ottoman restrictions on import and export trade in certain items must have had a most negative impact on them and made them willing to connive with the Venetians not only to evade trade restrictions but also to be part o f the Venetian covert, and occasionally overt war against the Ottomans. As well, the tribal nature of Druze society, its cohesiveness, the ruggedness of the Druze mountains and the arms the Druzes so easily received were all undoubtedly key factors in the longevity o f their rebellion.45 In 1585, the Ottoman success in ending more than six decades of continuous Druze rebellion was only partly due to the overwhelming military force that Ibrahim Pasha was able to muster against them. But the Druzes had been defeated on earlier occasions, only to rise again shortly afterwards in renewed rebellion. On this occasion, the definitive success o f Ibrahim Pasha in pacifying the Druze regions, and imposing a degree o f law and order which could last until the second decade of the seventeenth century, may be attributed to the fact that Cyprus by then had come under Ottoman control (1570), so that Venice could no longer use the island as a base o f operations close by the Lebanese coast, from which military supplies could be readily sent to the Druze mountain. For some time, then, supply o f firearms to the Druzes was largely interrupted, if not entirely discontinued.46 Furthermore, the claim that his family is actually descended from the Crusader leader Godefroy de Bouillon; see below. 45 On this, see A. Abu-Husayn, “The Feudal System of Mount Lebanon as Depicted by Nasif al-Yaziji,” in Quest For Understanding, Arabic and Islamic Studies in Memory o f Malcolm Kerr, ed. S. Seikaly et al. (Beirut, 1991), 33-42; and A. Abu-Husayn, “Problems in the Ottoman Administration in Syria during the 16th and 17th Centuries: The Case of the Sanjak of Sidon-Beirut,” International Journal o f Middle East Studies 24 (1992), 665-675; hereafter Abu-Husayn, “Problems.” 46 Of course, there were other sources of firearms available, primarily local janissaries and fief holders; see U. Heyd, Ottoman Documents on Palestine: 1552-1615: A Study o f the Firman

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in an attempt to minimize their losses, the Venetians signed a peace agreement with the Ottomans following the war o f the Holy League in 1571; by that date, Venice, in fact, was no longer the powerful naval power it had once been. It might be pointed out here that the Venetians followed the progress o f Ibrahim Pasha’s 1585 expedition against the Druzes very closely, much as they had followed the course o f the Ibn alHanash rebellion against the Ottomans in 1518. Their consul in Aleppo detailed his deputy, Chrestofero Boni, to accompany Ibrahim Pasha’s campaign and report back on it. Boni’s reports were not only sent to Aleppo, but also to Istanbul and, presumably, to Venice. In general, Ottoman affairs and wars were carefully monitored in Venice and, in 1594, a book on the subject was actually published there.4748 The Ottomans, for their part, justified their action against the Druzes on religious grounds, making no mention o f their Venetian connection. And such a justification was readily invoked by contemporary ulema and historians, both in the capital, Istanbul, and in Syria. Thus, the Ottoman historian Selaniki writes: And when... [Ibrahim Pasha] had travelled from Egypt to Damascus... he stopped in that... province where the Druze community has been settled for a long time. [They are] not at all a pure [halis, meaning true, good] nation, [but are rather] like sheep and even worse [ka al-an ‘am bai hum adali], their infamy, corruption and straying being well-

According to the Mühimme Defteri (Oxford, I960), 79, 82. Such supplies, however, must have been very small in quantity and perhaps poor in quality, unlike the superior firearms referred to in the Mühimme documents that must have come from an external source. 47 Minadoi, especially 277-278, 295. 48 This comes from a Quranic verse, see A‘raf, 179.

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known. His ultimate aim was to eliminate their villainy and trouble and eradicate them from the soil o f that land o f earthly paradise. He attacked them with the soldiers... defeated, killed and slaughtered them all by the sword o f Islam and sent many heads o f their villainous leaders to the threshold o f felicity. And when he arrived in [Istanbul] with glory and felicity, he brought with him thousands o f their guns, swords and axes, and other arms and munitions.49501* The Damascene historian al-Hasan al-Burini, echoes the same sentiments on the same occasion: “[Ibarahim Pasha] attacked the Shuf mountain, a nahiye o f Damascus near the coast... which is inhabited by the batini Druzes, a people who follow no religion [milla] and refer to no doctrine [ ‘aqida\.”so Such religious denunciations o f the Druzes were not only voiced on occasions o f Ottoman-Druze confrontation, and Ottoman persecution o f the Druzes may not always have been connected to their suspected collusion with outside powers. The Aleppine biographer, al-‘Urdi, for example, says that the Druzes o f al-Jabal al-A‘la in the Aleppo region repeatedly had their property confiscated because o f the corruption (inhilat) of their doctrine. Governors, according to him, would fine them and then let them 51 go. The 1585 Ottoman expedition against the Druze mountain appears to have been the last such campaign o f the sixteenth century, as neither the Ottoman chancery documents nor the local literature refer to further Druze rebellion and Ottoman 49 Mustafa Selaniki, Tarih-i Selaniki (Freiburg reprint. 1970). 194. 50 Burini, vol. 1,324. 51 Abu al-Wafa al-‘Urdi, Ma'adin al-Dhahah fi al-Ri/al al-Musharra/a hihim Hahıh, ed. M. alTunji (Aleppo, 1986). 295-296.

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countermeasures. As already indicated, this quiescence may be ascribed to the success o f the Ottoman campaign as well as the growing weakness o f Venice as a naval and trading power in the Mediterranean.52 Moreover, the Ottomans appear to have followed up their military success with administrative changes that involved the creation o f a vilayet-i D uruzP But this vilayet-i Duruz was short-lived. The Ottomans instead transferred the sancak o f Sidon-Beirut from the jurisdiction o f Damascus to that o f Tripoli, apparently in the hope that such an arrangement would bring the area under firmer control.*54 This measure was also short-lived and, in the early seventeenth century, the Druze rebellion was renewed. This time, and until the end of the century, the Druzes would enjoy the material and moral support o f Tuscany and the Papacy.

3. The Tuscan Phase The weakened state o f the Venetian Republic opened the way for another aspiring Italian power to become an active party in Ottoman Syria as early as the first decade o f the seventeenth century—and among the Druzes for the whole o f the century. This development coincided with the second phase o f Druze rebellion; and since Tuscany now took the leading European role it seems appropriate to call it the Tuscan phase.

On this, see Alberto Teneti. Piracy and the Decline o f Venice. I5H0-16I5 ( Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), xii-xiv. ” M.D. 50. no. 123. dated 1585. 54 On these transfers of the sancak of Sidon-Beirut between the provinces o f Tripoli and Damascus, see Abu-Husayn. •’Problems.”

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During the first four decades o f the seventeenth century, this second phase o f Druze rebellion was dominated by Fakhr alDin Ma‘n and his repeated wars with the Ottomans. Fakhr al-Din, as is well known, supported the large-scale rebellion o f ‘Ali Janbulad in the province of Aleppo (1605-1607), despite Ottoman orders to the contrary. This failed rebellion marks the apparent point o f entry for Tuscany into Syrian affairs, for Tuscany and the Papacy gave it full political and material support. Certainly, the Tuscans had been actively engaged in piratical attacks against the Ottomans in the Eastern Mediterranean for some time. But they and the other Christian powers—most notably, the Papacy—were much emboldened by their victory at Lepanto (1571), which may be seen, according to Braudel, as “the end o f a genuine inferiority complex on the part o f Christendom“ and a historical turning point that “seemed to open the door to the wildest hopes.” 55 In the circumstances, it is not surprising that the Medicis o f Tuscany and the Papacy began to entertain the idea of a Christian re-conquest of Cyprus, to use the island as a base for joint action against the Ottomans in Syria, particularly in connection with a project for the re-conquest o f the Holy Land. During the rule o f the ambitious and well-connected Grand Duke Ferdinand I (1587-1609), Tuscany was particularly poised, for a variety of reasons—again, commercial, political and religious in nature—to play an increasingly active role in Ottoman Syria. Ferdinand I had close relations with Pope Clement VIII (15921605) and the pope “supported Tuscan objectives in the Middle East” 56 by pursuing an aggressive anti-Ottoman policy. His activities in this regard included cultivating the friendship o f Shah 55 F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age o f Philip II (New York, 1973), 1103; hereafter, Braudel.

56 Griswold, 83.

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‘Abbas o f Persia (1587-1629), in the hope that the latter would aid Catholic anti-Ottoman initiatives by the Roman Catholic powers, offering subsidies to the Holy Roman emperor, to enlist his support for a crusade against the Ottomans undertaken by a coalition o f Italian cities (which excluded V enice),57 and giving specific permission for Christian governments to supply arms to regions such as Syria, to enable Christians and heretic Muslim communities to fight the Ottomans.58 It should further be noted that Tuscany did not enjoy capitulation privileges with the Ottomans, as did Venice and other European states; accordingly, Tuscan relations with the Porte had to be processed through France, which charged “a five percent ad valorem tax on all Tuscan transactions.”59 The Tuscan grand duke saw the ‘Ali Janbulad rebellion as an ideal opportunity to advance his state’s commercial and other interests in the Levant. After exploratory contacts, a Tuscan envoy, accompanied and aided by an Aleppine Christian dragoman were dispatched late in 1606 to negotiate a treaty with the rebel Ottoman Pasha. The negotiations were successful and ‘Ali Pasha Janbulad actually signed a draft treaty which pledged Tuscan military assistance to the Kurdish chief in return for his promise o f extensive trading privileges. These included the opening o f all Syrian ports to unlimited imports and exports by the Tuscans and all those operating under their umbrella, free access to Jerusalem not only for pilgrims, but also for Tuscan subjects in Syria as well,

5,1 P. Canili, Fakhr ad-din II, Principe de! Libano, e la Corte di Toscana: 1605-1635 (Rome, 1936), voi. 1, 117, as quoted in Griswold, 83: hereafter, Carali. Griswold. 82-83.

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the exemption o f resident Tuscans from the jurisdiction of local courts and numerous other guarantees.60 Tuscany actually did mobilize significant naval forces in support o f ‘Ali Janbulad, and also attempted an invasion of Cyprus in August 1607, without success. However, ‘Ali Janbulad was not the only Syrian chief seen as a likely ally in the Tuscan quest for the commercial, political and religious penetration o f Syria. Ferdinand I and Pope Clement VIII appear to have been already in contact with Fakhr al-Din Ma‘n by 1605, if not earlier.61 Since the Druze emir was on particularly good terms with the Maronites (who were Uniate Christians) in his own territory, as in its neighbourhood, the grand duke renewed an old friendship with the Maronite patriarch Yusuf al-Ruzzi, whom he had met in his younger days in Rome. Next, Ferdinand I’s envoys were instructed to visit Fakhr al-Din and seek his support for the re-conquest of the island o f Cyprus by arguing that this would be in his own interest. The envoys were further instructed to deliver to the Druze emir the 1,000 muskets—but not the five guns—earlier promised to ‘Ali Janbulad, but only if it appeared that the latter’s defeat by the Ottomans was irreversible. It is likely that Tuscany and the Papacy only turned their full attention to Fakhr al-Din once the ‘Ali Janbulad rebellion had clearly failed.62 From 1607, the year o f ‘Ali Janbulad’s defeat, or possibly even a short while earlier, Fakhr al-Din became Tuscany’s best hope for the success o f their envisaged projects for the conquest of Cyprus and the Holy Land. One report written by Rafael

*° For the correspondence between the pope and the grand duke of Tuscany, see B. Qara'li, 'Ali Basha Junblat, Wali Halab (Beirut, 1939); the text of the draft treaty is included in the same work, 47-51.

41 Qara’li, 160. 62 Qara’li, 164, 169.

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Cacciamari, an envoy o f Ferdinand I originally from Venice, recommended the dispatch o f ten thousand Tuscan troops to support the Druzes. The report further suggests that an additional force o f ten thousand men could be recruited from among the Maronites o f Mount Lebanon. In Cacciamari’s estimate, Tuscany might thus raise a total o f forty to fifty thousand troops- ten thousand Tuscans, with the balance drawn from among the Druzes and Maronites o f the Lebanon. With such an inexpensive army, he concluded, the grand duke would be able to conquer Syria and Jerusalem and be crowned king o f both. Cacciamari then proceeded to outline the best way o f getting Fakhr al-Din to cooperate in this project.63 The grand duke acted on the recommendations o f his envoy and obtained a commitment from Fakhr al-Din that was contingent upon the success o f the Tuscans in occupying the Cypriot seaport o f Famagusta. If the Tuscans succeeded, Fakhr al-Din pledged to conquer the rest o f the island and assist them in retaining it, considering that the Tuscan presence in Cyprus, so close to his territory, would guarantee his own security.64 As noted above, this projected Tuscan occupation o f Cyprus failed and unconfirmed reports o f ‘Ali Janbulad’s defeat preceded the return to Florence o f the Tuscan envoy who had negotiated the treaty with him. The grand duke rushed naval and military assistance to ‘Ali Janbulad, and once more dispatched his envoy to the East with secret instructions to contact Fakhr al-Din should ‘Ali Janbulad’s situation prove hopeless. The envoy favored this plan, being convinced that Fakhr al-Din preferred the Christians to the Turks,

61 For the text of the report, sec Qara'li, 161-162. 64 Qara’li. 163

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whom he hated; as the Druze emir was o f Christian descent.656 By the time the Tuscan delegation had traveled as far as Cyprus, ‘Ali Janbulad's defeat and his flight and submission to the Ottoman sultan had been confirmed. Consequently, the Tuscan delegation proceeded to Sidon to meet with Fakhr al-Din, give him the 1,000 muskets originally intended for ‘Ali Janbulad and conclude a treaty which promised Tuscan military assistance to the Druze emir. During the negotiations, Fakhr-al-Din insisted that the pope issue an order to all o f the Christians o f the East coming under his authority requiring them to come to the emir’s assistance whenever he requested their help, under threat o f excommunication. He also asked for permission to seek refuge in Tuscany should the need 66 anse. In January 1609, Pope Pius V addressed a letter to Fakhr alDin, “the emir o f the Druzes, Nicomedia, Palestine and Phonecia,” commending him for his good treatment o f the Christians in general, and the Maronites in particular, and promising him assistance against “the oppressive Turks so that when the territory [Syria] is rid o f their rule, its inhabitants can go back to the true religion.” A number o f gifts were also conveyed to the emir with the letter. Another letter was addressed by Pius V to the Maronite patriarch and secular Maronite chiefs, commanding them to cooperate with Fakhr al-Din.67 The Druze emir’s alliance with Tuscany, and its significance, does not appear to have escaped the attention o f the Ottomans or o f other interested observers in the region. The 4$ Qara’li, 168. This is. of course, a reference to the mistaken belief in certain Catholic quarters that the Druzes were the descendants of the Crusaders and that Fakhr al-Din was actually the descendant of the Crusader leader, Godefroy de Bouillon; see n. 39 above. 66 For the full text of the treaty, see Qara'li, 171-172. 67 For the full text of the letter and the names of Maronite chiefs addressed by the pope, see Qara'li, 174-175.

Abdul-Rahim ABU-HUSAYN

English traveler, George Sandys, who visited Syria in 1610 shortly after the treaty with the Tuscans had been concluded, says the following: It is said for a certainty that the Türke will turn his whole forces upon him [Fakhr-al-Din] the next summer [1611]: and therefore more willingly condescends to a peace with the Persian. But the Emer [Fakhr al-Din] is not much terrified with the rumor (although he seekes to divert the tempest by continuance o f gifts, the favor o f his friends, and professed integrity) for he not a little presumeth o f his invincible forts, well stored for a long warre; and advantage o f the mountaines: having besides fortie thousand expert souldiers in continuali pay, part o f them Moores, and part o f them Christians: and if the worst should fall out, hath the sea to friends and the Florentine.... He further says: The Grand Signior [the Sultan] doth often threaten his [Fakhr al-Din’s] subversion which he puts off with a jest, that he knowes that he will not this yeare trouble him: whose displeasure is not so much provoked by his incroching, as by the revealed intelligence which he holds with the Florentines; whom he suffers to harbour within his haven o f Tyrus, (yet excusing it as a place lying waste, and not to be defended) to come ashore for fresh-water, buyes o f him underhand his prizes, and fiimisheth him with necessaries. But designs o f a higher nature have bene treated o f between them, as is well known to certain merchants imployed in that businesse. And I am verily perswaded that if the occasion were laid hold of, and freely

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pursued by the Christians, it would terribly shake if not Aft utterly confound the Ottoman Empire. Although the alliance and cordial relations between Fakhr al-Din and Tuscany did not yield immediate results, they did, however, survive the death o f Grand Duke Ferdinand I in 1609. Ferdinand’s son and successor, Cosimo II (1609-1621), pursued the same antiOttoman policy as his father, relying on the same Syrian allies: the Druzes under the leadership of the Ma‘ns, and the Maronites. Meanwhile in the summer o f 1609, an unexpected development took place, which seemed to augur well for the Tuscan projects. Prince Yahya, a pretender to the Ottoman throne (gran principe Ottomano) — the presumed son o f Sultan Mehmet III (1595-1603) and the brother o f the reigning sultan, Ahmet I (1603-1617) —took refuge in the Medici court, to become the centre of new crusading designs on the Ottoman lands.*69 Cosimo II dispatched his navy to the Levant in the company o f Prince Yahya, hoping that all the rebels in the Ottoman lands could be brought together under the prince’s banner. At the same time, he wrote to Fakhr al-Din invoking the friendship between the Druze emir and his late father, and informing him that the admiral o f his navy would apprise him o f the details o f an important project under way which he was urged to join, as it promised to bring him and his country great ** G. Sandys, A Relation o f a Journey An Dom 1610, Sth ed. (London, I6S2), 212. Qara'li believes that Sandys knowledge of Fakhr al-Din's dealings with the Tuscans was passed to him by an English merchant by the name of Brocches who saw the emir's letter to the grand duke which was written by none other than the Tuscan envoy to Fakhr al-Din; see Qara'li, 172. 69 This recalls the affair of Prince Cem in the late fifteenth century who spent a long period as a captive at the papal court with a view of using him in anti Ottoman projects. On Prince Yahya, other claimants and crusading designs in general, see V. J. Parry, “The Period of Murad IV,” in A History o f the Ottoman Empire to 1730, ed. M. A. Cook (Cambridge, 1976), 150.

AMul-Rahim ABU-HUSAYN

benefit. The project, however, never materialized, and Prince Yahya and Fakhr al-Din never met.70 The good relations between Fakhr al-Din and the Papacy also continued. In a letter dated 25 September 1610 from Pope Paul V to the Maronite patriarch, Yuhanna Makhluf, the pope reiterated an earlier papal bull o f 15107' and commended the Maronites for their steadfastness in the true faith despite being in the midst o f heretics, “like a rose among the thorns.“ He also praised Fakhr al-Din, “the emir o f the Druzes, for we have been informed o f his courage and military prowess, his strong enmity to the Turks and his love for you [the Maronites] and for all Christians, and his pride in being the descendent o f a Crusader leader.“ The pope then commanded the patriarch to cherish Fakhr al-Din’s friendship so that the latter would continue to extend his protection to the Maronite Church and community. The letter includes the pious wish that Fakhr al-Din’s hatred o f the Turks and his love for the Maronites might one day bring him over to Christianity. The pope concluded by pressing the patriarch to take advantage o f the emir’s disposition and to exert his efforts towards this end.72 The Maronites also had strong connections to the Medici of Tuscany, and correspondence flowed back and forth between Florence and the Maronite patriarch residence at Qannubin in the northern Lebanon. The Maronites offered their assistance in serving Tuscan interests in the East in exchange for favors extended to them by the Medici. They also offered their good

70 71

72

Qara'li, 176-177. K. Salibi, A House o f Many Mansions: The History o f Lebanon Reconsidered (London, 1988), 72. For the full text of the papal letter, see Carati, vol. 1, 155-159. An abridged version can be found in Qara'li, 177-178.

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offices in the negotiation o f a new treaty o f alliance between Fakhr al-Din and Tuscany. For his part, Fakhr al-Din was primarily interested in the papal support that the Maronite patriarch could ensure; he believed that such support would guarantee assistance from all Roman Catholic powers. In consultation with the patriarch, a draft treaty was actually proposed by Fakhr al-Din, and forwarded to Florence and the papal court by the Maronite bishop o f Cyprus. In the draft, the Maronites o f Mount Lebanon asserted that they had no less than 8,000 Maronite troops awaiting the opportunity to rid themselves o f (Turkish slavery,’ and claimed that willing Maronite fighters were also to be found in Tripoli, Aleppo, Damascus, Phoenecia, Nicomedia, Jerusalem and other parts o f Palestine, and Antioch. They added that they were only in need o f arms to join in the projected military action against the Ottomans. The draft treaty then says that Fakhr al-Din possessed an army o f 70,000 troops and had agreed with other local chiefs to allow a Christian army to land in the ports o f Tyre, Sidon and Tripoli. The document also includes a plan to conquer the island o f Cyprus with the help o f its Christian inhabitants, including the Maronites.73 It is important, at this point, to mention again that in dealing with Fakhr al-Din’s career, in particular, and the Ma‘ns in general, the later Maronite patriarch and historian, istifan alDuwayhi, who certainly had access to the correspondence between his predecessors and both the papacy and the grand dukes of Tuscany, maintains a seemingly deliberate silence on the whole issue o f Ma‘nid-Tuscan relations and on the Maronite role in the projects to conquer Cyprus and the Holy Land.74 Likewise, the

73 For the text of the cited documents, see Qara'li, 182-186. 74 See n. 3 above.

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personal historian o f Fakhr al-Din, Ahmad al-Khalidi, a Contemporary eyewitness to the events o f the first three decades o f the seventeenth century, avoids the entire issue and portrays the subsequent conflicts between Fakhr al-Din and the Ottoman authorities as the consequence o f petty intrigues by the em ir's opponents, both locally and at the Ottoman court.75 Subsequent developments, such as the Ottoman military campaign against Fakhr al-Din and his flight to Tuscany in 1613, his pardon and return to Syria five years later, and the final Ottoman military expeditions against him that ended with his defeat, capture and subsequent execution need not be covered here.76 What needs to be noted, however, is the fact that Fakhr alDin used his time in Europe to try to mobilize Roman Catholic military might against the Ottomans. Cosimo II wrote on his behalf to the pope, in the hope that the latter would use his authority to persuade Spain to support the efforts o f Fakhr al-Din and Tuscany in Syria and the Holy Land. Fakhr al-Din, growing increasingly desperate, wrote to the French envoy at the papal court, Comte François Savary, Seigneur de Brèves, in an effort to enlist his support in obtaining an Ottoman pardon.77 Fakhr al-Din referred, in this letter, to his good treatment o f the Christians, particularly the Maronites, the facilities he offered to Christian pilgrims and travellers, and his alleged descent from the Crusader leader Godefroy de Bouillon.78 Meanwhile, in anticipation o f a possible joint Catholic effort against the Ottomans, Grand Duke Cosimo II dispatched, in 1614, a mission o f experts disguised as merchants to 75 On Khalidi, see A. Abu-Husayn, “Khalidi on Fakhr al-Din: Apology as History," Al-Abhath 39(1993), 3-15. 76 See A. Abu-Husayn. Provincial, 87-128. 77 He had served previously as the French ambassador to Istanbul, passed through Lebanon and met Fakhr al-Din there. 78 For the full text of the letter, see Qara'li, 197-199.

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report on the conditions in Syria, the strength o f Fakhr al-Din’s army and fortifications, the ports in his territory, the emir's revenue, and related affairs. Many reports were written by the different members o f the mission; one o f them, authored by Giovan-Battista Santi, reiterated the Crusader origin o f the Druzes and o f the Ma‘ns.79 The efforts o f Fakhr al-Din and his Tuscan host to mobilize a general Roman Catholic crusade against the Ottomans in Syria were unsuccessful.80 Subsequently, the grand duke tried to secure an Ottoman pardon for his, by then, unwelcome guest,81 offering peace between Tuscany and the Ottoman Empire in return. His offer was met by a letter from Grand Vezier Nasuh Pasha, who wrote back with the Ottoman conditions for both the peace with Tuscany and the pardon for Fakhr al-Din. The Ottomans demanded that the Tuscans end their naval presence in Ottoman waters to eliminate the risk o f piracy; the negotiation, at a later date, o f an agreement regulating the number o f Tuscan ships permitted to anchor in the ports o f Istanbul, Alexandria and İskenderun in any given year, as well as the guarantee that such ships would not stop at any other port or island; as well, the return o f Ottoman prisoners, who had presumably been taken captive in piratical attacks. As for Fakhr al-Din, the Ottomans refused to restore him to his homeland “as this would be cause for unrest.” Instead, they demanded that he travel to Istanbul to give an account o f the money which he had collected from the territories which were under his control. Due to 74 For the reports, see Qara'li, 200-216. For Santi's report, which is the most detailed, see Qara’li, 205-216. 80 In his quest for Christian support. Fakhr al-Din travelled to Sicily to meet with the viceroy of the king of Spain. It should be noted that Fakhr al-Din's sojourn in the West came on the eve of the Thirty Years War ( 1618-1648). 81 On the deteriorating relations between Fakhr al-Din and the Tuscan court, see Qara'li. 220225.

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Tuscan intercession on his behalf, he would be pardoned and appointed to a sancak in Rumelia.82 Ultimately, Fakhr al-Din was indeed pardoned and restored to his homeland, and Tuscan commercial interests in Syria prospered as a result. Silk, wheat and other commodities were imported by Tuscany from the region, while Tuscan exports included muskets, munitions and cloth— not to mention experts in making guns. Needless to say, Tuscany also continued to pursue its political ambitions. In fact, Tuscan, papal and Spanish contacts with Fakhr al-Din intensified after the latter’s return to Lebanon and new projects were entertained for the re-conquest o f the Holy Land until his final days as emir in Lebanon. The Maronite patriarch and other Maronite notables played an important role in these contacts and were, at times, the very envoys who negotiated on behalf o f Fakhr al-Din or carried his messages to the pope, the king o f Spain, or the latter’s viceroy in Sicily. Members o f the Franciscan mission in the Holy Land also supported such projects and testified to Fakhr al-Din’s sincere intentions regarding them. The last documented exchange o f correspondence took place in 1633, the year Fakhr al-Din was defeated and taken prisoner by the Ottoman beylerbeyi o f Damascus, Küçük Ahmet Pasha. Through the Maronite patriarch, Fakhr al-Din proposed a plan for the conquest o f Cyprus, which would then come under the control o f Pope Urban VIII’s brother, as well as the Holy Land, where the grand duke o f Tuscany, Ferdinand II, would subsequently be crowned King o f Jerusalem. Fakhr al-Din also promised in the same letter to convert with his family to Christianity and to allow all o f his subjects to do the same. Fakhr

For the full text of Nasuh Pasha's letter to Cosimo II. sec Qara'li. 235-237. An interesting parallel is ‘Ali Janbulad's appointment to a Rumelian sancak after his pardon by the sultan.

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al-Din undertook to provide the Christian army with men and provisions, to furnish the Christian navy with one or more safe harbours from those under his control, to surrender the city of Jerusalem and to render all possible assistance. In exchange for these and other commitments, he expected the pope and the Tuscan grand duke to dispatch a naval force o f no less than fifty vessels for the conquest o f Cyprus and to supply him with a quantity o f military equipment and other war-related m aterials.81*83 The Maronite archbishop o f Cyprus appeared before the pope in early November 1634 to present the case for the proposed alliance, which was well-received; however, this intervention came too late, since Fakhr al-Din was already in Ottoman hands by then.84 Ma‘nid-Tuscan relations continued after the capture and subsequent execution o f Fakhr al-Din in 1635. The only Ma‘nid survivor left in Lebanon after the Ottoman onslaught o f 1633 was Fakhr al-Din’s nephew, Emir Mulhim. To save him from capture by the Ottomans, Ferdinand II dispatched a galleon to take him away from Syria, but the Druze emir was in hiding and could not be easily located.85 Plans to conquer Cyprus and Syria continued to be entertained by the Tuscans, the Druze Ma‘ns, their partisans and the Maronites remaining the cornerstone o f these Tuscan plans.86 In the meantime, the Ottomans allowed Mulhim Ma‘n to assume control o f the Shuf, Gharb, Jurd, Main and Kisrawan districts o f

81 For this last effort at securing an alliance and the text of the draft treaty, see Qara'li, 346-3S4. For prior correspondence between Fakhr al-Din and Christian powers, see Qara'li, 263-290. There are also reports that indicate the emir's conversion to Catholicism had already taken place earlier in the same year; see Qara'li, 340-342. 84 For the meeting between the pope and Fakhr al-Din's envoy, see Qara'li. 353. 85 Qara'li produces the letters written by Maronite chiefs in connection with this; see Qara'li, 358-364. 86 Qara’li, 365-367.

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‘Lebanon’ as a mültezim. According to the contemporary Damascene biographer, Muhibbi, Mulhim slept during the day and stayed awake at night for fear o f attack, as had his ancestors.87 Mulhim had one major encounter with the Ottomans in 1060/1642 when he successfully fought the beylerbeyi o f Damascus, Mustafa Pasha, and defeated h im .88 According to Muhibbi, he was otherwise “fully obedient to the Sultanate.” 89 The Damascene biographer’s assessment appears to be generally accurate, especially if one compares the career o f Mulhim Ma‘n with that o f his uncle Fakhr al-Din, or his son Ahmad. For apart from his confrontation with the beylerbeyi o f Damascus and his early struggle for power in the Shuf against a rival Druze chief, ‘Ali ‘Alam al-Din, subsequent to Fakhr al-Din’s defeat, no antiOttoman rebellions by him are reported in any o f the local, Ottoman, or European sources.90 Nonetheless, the Tuscans continued to carefully monitor the situation in the Lebanon in his time through envoys and also through correspondence with Maronites which showered praise upon the Ma‘nid emir for continuing his uncle’s policy o f protecting the Maronite Church and community.91 While Emir Mulhim is not known to have corresponded directly with Tuscany or with any other European

87

88 89 90 91

M. A. ibn Fadlallah al-Muhibbi, Kliulasat ul-Athar f i A ‘van al-Qurn al-Hadi Ashar (hereafter. Muhibbi), vol. 4, 408-409. The same observation regarding the Ma'nid practice of sleeping by day and staying awake by night is also made by the English traveller, Henry Maundrell, who passed through Beirut in March 1697. According to him, they did so “lest the darkness, aided by their sleeping, should give traitors both opportunity and encouragement to assault their person, by a dagger or a pistol, to make them continue their sleep longer than they intended when they lay down." See Henry Maundrell, Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem {Beirut, 1963), 57-58. Muhibbi, vol. 4, 396. Muhibbi, vol. 4,409. On these early conflicts, which involved Mulhim, see Abu-Husayn, Provincial. 59, 127. Qara'li. 370-373.

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power, his Maronite protégés always conveyed his regards to the Tuscan and papal courts.92 Emir Mulhim died in 1658. He was survived by two sons, Ahmad and Korkmaz, who quickly became involved in a local power struggle and a concurrent rebellion against the Ottoman beylerbeyi o f Damascus. During the course o f these disturbances, Korkmaz was treacherously killed in 1662—so according to Duwayhi.93 Meanwhile, the Ottomans separated the sancaks of Sidon-Beirut and Safad from the province o f Damascus and reorganed their territories as the province o f Sidon (as had happened once before in 1614). From the Ottoman perspective, this arrangement was intended to bring Druze areas under direct and hopefully more effective imperial control. Locally, however, this was interpreted as an attempt on the part o f the Ottomans “to break the arm o f the Arabs”.94 By 1667, however, Ahmad Ma‘n had ultimately succeeded in establishing himself against his local rivals as the paramount mültezim in the Druze mountain.95 Ahmad and his Maronite advisers thereupon resumed correspondence with Tuscany, but this correspondence contains no indication o f specific plans o f action against the Ottomans.96 The Ottoman-Habsburg war o f 1683-1699, however, provided Ahmad Ma’n with the opportunity to resume the anti-Ottoman activity o f his great uncle’s time. The Druze emir, summoned, as other Ottoman functionaries in Syria, to participate in the ’holy war’ (gaza) against the Habsburgs, failed to do so. Instead, he joined the Shiite Himadas o f the Jubayl district (described by the Mühimme

92 93 94 95 99

Sec Qara’li, 369-373. On Ihese power struggles and rebellions, see Duwayhi, 357-360. Duwayhi, 359. Duwayhi, 363. As published in Qara'li, 374-376.

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documents as kizilbash) and became the leader o f a large scale revolt against the Ottomans lasting until his death in 1697. The Ottomans repeatedly instructed their governors in different Syrian provinces to have him removed from office and the region and executed, but he invariably managed to evade arrest. The extent to which the Ahmad Ma‘n rebellion could have received external support cannot be determined. The motive for such support, however, was certainly there.97* It thus appears that the Druze rebellion against the Ottomans, certainly until 1633, and probably to the very end, was fuelled, to a large extent, by European political, commercial and religious designs upon Syria. In the sixteenth-century phase o f the rebellion, the leading European role was played by Venice. In the seventeenth-century phase, ‘giants’ such as Venice were replaced by ‘upstarts’ such as Tuscany, not only as pirate powers in the Eastern Mediterranean, as Braudel suggests, but still more as sponsors o f much bolder designs, as the cases o f the Janbulad and the Ma‘nid rebellions tend to indicate. At the local level, this long rebellion made possible the establishment o f the emirate o f the Sunni Shihabs, a local arrangement by Druze initiative which the Ottomans, finally rid o f the Ma‘ns, found expedient to accommodate especially as their ability to impose or coerce was significantly diminished, not only because o f the preceding ‘long rebellion’ but also because o f the ongoing war then on the Hungarian front and the eventual Ottoman defeat in it. This was the arrangement that gave to the central and southern parts o f Mount Lebanon, from 1697 until 1841, the ,7

For this rebellion by Ahmad Ma‘n. sec A. Abu-Husayn, "The Unknown Career o f Ahmad Ma‘n ( 1667-1697 ).'* Archivum Ottomanicum 17(1999), 241 -247. "* Braudel. 865.

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appearance o f a hereditary principality. The Shihabs, it should be pointed out, were the descendants o f the Ma‘ns in the female line since the Ma‘nid line had become extinct with the death o f Ahmad Ma‘n in 1697." In addition to this significant political development, the ‘long rebellion* gave the ‘Lebanese’ their national hero; and their founding dynasty. Thus despite the fundamental disagreements among Lebanese historians referred to above regarding the nature and historicity o f Lebanon, and in the context o f the Ottoman period, there has developed among these historians a shared reverence for Fakhr al-Din Ma‘n (d. 1635) and other members of the Ma‘n dynasty as founding heroes o f one thing or another. To Arab nationalists, Fakhr al-Din’s phenomenal career was an early manifestation o f Arab nationalism, and his clashes with the Ottoman state were Arab national uprisings against Turkish tyranny. To Lebanese particularists, the same Fakhr al-Din was a Lebanese national hero fighting the Turks, as were his ancestors before him as well as his successors after him. More than any of them, however, he stands out as the father o f modem Lebanon. This second view o f Fakhr al-Din has become the quasi-official (if not the official) view o f him in Lebanon, in the sense that it is what Lebanese school textbooks teach in all elementary and secondary Lebanese schools in the country. One might add here that the Ma‘ns, in general, as a dynasty, occupy the place o f honor in the Lebanese nationalist narrative. They appear either as heroes o f the struggle against the Ottomans, or victims o f their oppression and caprice, or both. This is the view 9

99

For a detailed discussion of the Shihab succession, see A. Abu-Husayn. “The Shihab Succession: A Reconsideration,” Archive Orientalni, Supplémenta VIII, 1998,9-16.

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one comes across in scholarly works, school textbooks and the more popular forms o f historical expression such as newspaper articles, plays, movies...etc.: a nationalist narrative o f a “Lebanese history” o f the Ottoman period in the above sense. History textbooks used in the Lebanese schools was, as a matter o f fact, one o f the many bones o f contention among the different Lebanese political and/or religious leaders. In the Ta’if accord which put an end to last civil war, it was agreed to have a joint committee representing all the parties look into the history component o f the school curriculum with a view to rewriting it so that it would be acceptable to all parties and would nurture a sense o f Lebanism that would supersede sectarian affiliations. Thus far, nothing o f the kind has been arrived at yet and the nationalist narrative relating to Fakhr al-Din, and to the Ma(ns, remains the part o f the Lebanese story o f Lebanon on which there is least disagreement. Let us see how this nationalist narrative is presented and how it was constructed. The story begins with the presumed great-grandfather o f the historical Fakhr al-Din, (known as Fakhr al-Din II), referred to above who is also called Fakhr al-Din (known as Fakhr al-Din I). After the battle o f Maij Dabiq and the arrival o f Sultan Selim I in Damascus, Lebanese histories describe an audience this sultan gave to a delegation o f “Lebanese” emirs. One o f them, this presumed Fakhr al-Din I, allegedly rose and delivered the following prayer: O Lord, perpetuate the life o f him whom Thou hast chosen to administer Thy domain, installed as the successor (ikhalifa) o f Thy covenant, empowered over Thy worshippers and Thy land and entrusted with Thy precept (sunna) and Thy command; he who is the supporter o f Thy

Rebellion, Myth Making and Nation Building

luminous Shari‘a and the leader o f Thy righteous and victorious nation (umma), our lord and master o f our favors, the commander o f believers (amir al-m u'm inin).... Padishah, may he live long. May God respond to our prayer for the perpetuity o f his dynasty, in happiness and felicity and in might and glory. Amen. “Impressed by the dignified bearing and seeming sincerity o f the Druze emir, Salim bestowed on him the title o f ‘sultan o f the mountain' (Sultan al-Barr).” Thus one historian sums up the outcome o f this m eeting.100 Here, the Ottoman arrival on the Syrian scene is depicted as confirming a political entity which is Lebanon and a Lebanese ruling dynasty, the Ma‘ns. This, I believe, is the significance attached to the meeting that is supposed to have taken place between Sultan Selim I and the Ma(nid leader, whether it the presumed Fakhr al-Din I or someone else from the Ma‘nid clan. “Lebanese” historians o f the nineteenth century worked out an elaborate and illustrious genealogy for the Ma‘ns which goes back to pre-lslamic times; they transported them to Lebanon in the early twelfth century in an attempt to give the dynasty a time-depth and other necessary qualifications that it obviously lacked. It is important to point out here that the historians o f the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries who provided the source material for this and other accounts that appear in modem scholarly works o f Ottoman-Ma‘nid relations were keen on providing the Ma‘ns with Ottoman legitimacy rather than

100 As quoted and translated in Phillip Hitti. Lebanon in History from the Earliest Times to the Present (London, 1957), 357.

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‘nationalist’ credentials; also, the interpretations given to such episodes may have gone beyond what these earlier historians intended. For example, the title sultan al-barr which has become the established title o f the presumed Fakhr al-Din I who is supposed to have met Sultan Selim I, and subsequently the title of his great-grandson the celebrated Fakhr al-Din II, does not occur in connection with any other local chief, was originally introduced by the early nineteenth century historian Haydar al-Shihabi in the following tentative way: The Sultan inquired of Khayir bey as to who this person was.[Khayir bey] informed him that he is an emir who lives in the wilderness and controls villages and [such] places in narrow (sic) Mountains in the iqta" o f Damascus. Sultan Selim liked the man...and said this man must actually be called sultan al-barr. Since then he came to known by this name. At that time any one who was put in charge o f a district (wilaya) was called sultan.101* Needless to say, that such was not the case. But more importantly, Shihabi does not imply that such a title was exclusive to this Fakhr al-Din but common to all other district governors. Moreover, modem historians appear to have gone beyond what Shihabi intended and made this into an almost a hereditary title (reappearing after about two centuries in connection with the so called Fakhr al-Din II) with specific territorial association exclusive to the Ma‘nid dynasty.

101 Haydar al-Shihabi. Al-Ghurar al-Hisan. Cairo, IWM), 561. C f this with how it is generally presented as in Hitti. see above.

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In 1973, Kamal Salibi, who had accepted this account o f this meeting in earlier writings published an article entitled “the Secret o f the House o f Ma‘n” in which he argued convincingly on the basis o f inscriptions as well as literary sources that the presumed Fakhr al-Din I had actually died ten full years before the Ottoman conquest o f Syria, and that the Maronite patriarch-historian istifan al-Duwayhi (d.1704) had suppressed the memory o f other Ma‘nid emirs in the interest o f the Ma‘nid branch which had extended so many favors to the Maronite church and community and whose last member was a personal friend and protector o f Duwayhi personally.102 Obviously the account was a nineteenth century attempt on the part o f historians closely associated with the Shihab dynasty, successors to the Ma‘ns in Mount Lebanon, to bolster the legitimacy o f the Shihab emirate which was facing increased Druze opposition in its last decades. Thus a dent was made in the nationalist narrative. The second Ma‘nid emir to be depicted by this narrative as a victim o f Ottoman oppression is Korkmaz Ma(n, believed to be the father o f the so-called Fakhr al-Din II and the presumed son o f Fakhr al-Din I. This Korkmaz died in 1585 while fleeing before an advancing Ottoman force which was directed against his stronghold in the Shuf Mountains. The alleged reason for this Ottoman punitive action involved false accusations brought against this Korkmaz Ma’n o f the Shuf by his political enemies to the effect that he was responsible for an alleged robbery o f the Egyptian tribute o f that year while it was traveling along the coastal area o f Jun ‘Akkar in northern Lebanon, a considerable 103

103 Kama! Salibi, “The Secret of the house of Ma“n," International Journal o f Middle Eastern Studies, IV, 1973, 272-288.

Abdul-Rahm ABU-HUSAYN

distance from the Shuf Mountains o f Korkmaz Ma‘n. So we are told by modem historical scholarship on the basis o f an account o f the seventeenth century written by the Maronite patriarch-historian al-Duwayhi and reproduced later by nineteenth century historical writings. Recent research, using Ottoman archival material and contemporary Syrian historical literature, has demonstrated beyond doubt that first, there was no robbery o f the Egyptian tribute in that year and that it was actually delivered in full to Istanbul and second, that the Ottomans had far more fundamental and long term reasons to punish this Korkmaz and other Druze than a mere robbery which was their leading role in the armed rebellion in the sixteenth century. In fact Korkmaz Ma‘n in particular is repeatedly singled out as the most rebellious Druze chief (mukaddem-i asi) and the person whose fesa d ve şenaat exceeded all others. Obviously, this Korkmaz was no innocent bystander and the victim o f a conspiracy but a dangerous rebel. Additionally the Ottomans must have been worried because o f the external (European) role in inciting rebellion in the Druze regions and their supplying o f firearms to local elements.103 With the death o f Korkmaz, the stage was set for the introduction o f the Lebanese national hero p a r excellence, Fakhr al-Din Ma‘n II. It was the presumed Lebanon o f this Fakhr al-Din which nationalists looked back to as the historical precursor o f the Lebanon o f the twentieth century that they wished to establish. And the territory o f this Lebanon was claimed on the grounds that it was Fakhr al-Din’s Lebanon. This Fakhr al-Din as depicted in the Lebanese nationalist narrative and school textbooks is “the embodiment o f the ideal o f the l0'’

See above.

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inspired national leader who personifies the spirit o f the Lebanese nation and its noble aspirations.” This narrative also underlines what is presented as historical fact: “that he is the first to attempt the realization o f Lebanon and Lebanese unity, the first to struggle for the independence o f Lebanon from Ottoman control, the first to work for the development o f the country and its transformation economically and socially.” 104 Lebanese nationalist writers were assisted in the idealization o f Fakhr al-Din by European travel literature and writers and Orientalists. Thus, Father Eugene Roger writes that “his soul aspired to glory, and his courage could not be satisfied with the achievements o f his predecessors”; and Father Henry Lammens states that the man was “ahead o f his times.” 105 A modem Lebanese historian describes him in the following words: “his ideals and moral codes were closer to those o f kings than to commoners” and that he was a genius at administration and an astute politician, intelligent and energetic, possessed o f a sharp eye sight and insight.” 106 As already observed earlier, and as befits a national hero, an elaborate genealogy has been worked out for the Ma‘nid family which provided Fakhr al-Din with a noble and timehonored Arabian descent. Also, and in view o f the plurality o f Lebanese society and perhaps because o f the preponderant role o f die Maronites in modem Lebanon as well as the well known cordial relations between him and the Maronites and the Catholic Church generally, Fakhr al-Din was given a post mortem Maronite upbringing.

104

Kama! Salibi, “Fakhr al-Din al-Thani wa al-Fikrah al-Lubnaniyyah." in A b'ad alQawmiyyah al-Lubnaninivya (Beirut, 1970), 85 (hereafter, Salibi, 1970). 105 Quoted in Yasin Su way d, al-Tarikh a l-'Askari lil Muqata'at al-Lubnanivya f t 'AhJ allmaratayn%2vols. (Beirut, 1985), Voi. 1, Al-Imarah al-ma‘niyya, 186-187, hereafter Suwayd. 106 Suwayd, 187.

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Long before Ottoman archives were used for the study o f Lebanese history, Kamal Salibi subjected this idealized picture o f the man to close scrutiny by the simple expedient o f putting his professional integrity as a historian before his undeniable patriotism and thus using, in addition to “Lebanese’* sources other more reliable sources, mainly contemporary sources, including those written in Damascus. This was in the context o f a lecture series organized by the Kaslik University (a university that is run by the Maronite monastic order) on the subject o f “the dimensions o f Lebanese nationalism.” The lectures were subsequently published by the same university in book form and included papers such as “Imam A w zaT s influence in the constitution o f Lebanese nationalism”. Imam Awza‘i, it may be noted, was an eighth century Muslim jurists living in Baalbek.107 Salibi reduces the story o f Fakhr al-Din to its component parts and reaches the following conclusions: on the question of who the Ma‘ns were, he dismisses the traditional account as “suspect, full o f obvious mistakes” and proceeds to reconstruct the story o f the Ma‘ns in the Shuf which goes back to the late fifteenth rather than the early twelfth century. Next, Salibi addresses the question o f the upbringing o f Fakhr al-Din in a Maronite shaykhly family and concludes by dismissing it as a late attempt to explain the relationship between Fakhr al-Din and the Maronite Khazin shaykhs. There are in this part many side stories that are also dismissed. Finally Salibi addresses the question o f Fakhr al-Din’s presumed plan to create a united Lebanon and whether he intentionally or unintentionally succeeded in this endeavor. Salibi’s conclusions here are as follows:

107 Ah'ad al-Qawmiyyah al-Lubnaniniyya, 11-30.

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Fakhr al-Din did control a large area that encompassed the Lebanese regions as well as parts o f Galilee, Palestine, Transjordan, the Syrian interior to Palmyra etc. But this expansion was not in pursuit of a specific plan toward uniting all the Lebanese areas in one state. Second, Fakhr al-Din actually enjoyed a status in the Lebanese areas that was different from his status in the other areas. But he was not aware o f the difference and he never thought of uniting the Druze and the Maronite regions in a unitary Lebanese emirate.108 Salibi sums up by stating that: when a Lebanese entity appeared in a clear form in the reign o f emir Bashir Shihab II, the Lebanese looked for a historical explanation for this entity. Thus emerged the legend o f Fakhr al-Din, the Druze emir who was brought up in Maronite lands and spent his whole life in the heroic, conscious pursuit to bring about Lebanese unity. This legend started small and grew up with the growth of Lebanon until Fakhr al-Din became to the Lebanese today, the pioneer o f Lebanese independence and the symbol o f national unity.109 Much later, research in Ottoman archives has confirmed Salibi’s conclusions with minor modifications. The Ottoman sources, documents and chronicles, in addition to other provincial sources, draw a picture o f this Fakhr al-Din as a Syrian provincial governor whose relations with the Ottomans, like those o f many o f his contemporaries, had their ups and downs, and who was at no time l0* Salibi, 1970.85-108. 109 Salibi. 1970.110.

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accorded a title or a rank higher than that o f sancakbeyi o f SidonBeirut and Safad. He is nowhere referred to as sultan al-barr. But he did enjoy significant external support (primarily from Tuscany and the Papacy) as well as internal support from Druze and nonDruze, mainly the Maronites who were commanded by no less a moral and spiritual authority than the papacy to lend their unconditional support to this Druze chief. Salibi returned to the question later on in the context o f an interpretive book on the history o f Lebanon in which he used the recent works published on the basis o f Ottoman material to further fine-tune his conclusions on this Fakhr al-Din. He concludes with the following: In the circumstances [of the first half o f the seventeenth century], there was nothing unusual about the career of Fakhr al-Din Ma‘n in the southern Lebanon. He was a Druze chief or notable who was appointed by the Ottomans to govern the sanjaks of Beirut and Sidon on their behalf, and then the sanjak o f Safad and other parts o f Syria. The man being highly intelligent, alert and enterprising opened the seaports under his control to European commerce and developed the silk production in the Druze country and its environs as a cash crop for export to Europe. The Tuscans approached him and fanned his ambitions,...., so began his problems with the Ottoman overlords. More cautious and circumspect than the Janbulads, Fakhr al-Din managed to mend his fences with the Ottomans every time they were broken. In the end, however, his ambitions led him too far, and the Ottomans finally realized that they had no choice but to deal with him as a rebel.110 1,0

Kamal Salibi, A House o f Many Mansions, The his fon' o f Lebanon Reconsidered ( London, 1988), p 154.

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There remains one important member o f the Ma‘n dynasty to consider, less celebrated but no less important than Fakhr al-Din. The person in question was Ahmad Ma‘n, the grand nephew o f Fakhr al-Din and the last o f the Ma‘nid chiefs o f the Shuf mountains. In the traditional Lebanese historiography, his importance derives from the fact that he bridged the genealogical gap between the Ma* ns, o f whom he was the last in the male line, and the Shihabs, who were his relatives or descendants in the female line. Without him, so to speak, the Shihabi rule in Mount Lebanon would have lacked hereditary legitimacy. And according to the same historiographic tradition, it was this Ahmad Ma‘n who allegedly put a definitive end to the ‘Alam al-Dins, the chief political rivals o f the Ma‘ns and the presumed leaders o f what was assumed to be theYamani faction among the Druze, as opposed to the presumed Qaysi faction o f which the Ma‘ns, and later, the Shihabs were the imagined leaders. Apart from this, Ahmad Ma‘n features in the traditional historiography of Lebanon, as in modem writings, as a shadowy and somewhat innocuous figure who received the iltizam of the Shuf and Kisrawan from the Ottomans, to hold it without interruption for thirty years until his death in 1697: a long period o f imagined peace, unmarked by any notable event with respect to the relations o f the emir with the Ottomans, as with respect to his relations with his neighbors. Subsequent research utilizing Ottoman material, however, reveals an entirely different picture o f the man. Here he is depicted as an ambitious, crafty and elusive scoundrel whom the Ottomans repeatedly tried but failed to capture and bring to justice. He appears to have taken advantage o f the Ottoman preoccupation on the Hungarian front between 1683-1699 to stage a rebellion against the Ottomans in his own Druze regions and to instigate similar rebellions in nearby areas. Unlike his great uncle and predecessor

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Fakhr al-Din, who was captured by the Ottomans, taken to Istanbul and put to death, Ahmad Ma‘n somehow managed to elude capture and ultimately died in his bed. With his death, the Ma‘nid line ended and the leadership passed, through the female line, to their in-laws, the Shihabs o f Wadi al-Taym.111 Traditional Lebanese historiography was at pains to explain the conflicts o f the Ma‘ns, when reference to them could not be totally avoided, in a way that would exonerate them o f rebellion and depict their iltizam -- most o f the time a makeshift arrangement subject to annual renewal —as a hereditary institution, an emirate, deriving historical legitimacy from the supposedly uninterrupted recognition and confirmation it received from the Ottoman State and the Islamic imperial states before it. That is why Duwayhi in the seventeenth century, then Shihabi and Shidyaq of the nineteenth (following the lead o f Duwayhi), regarded the Ottoman attack o f the Shuf in 1585 as the consequence o f false accusations brought against the Ma‘nid emir o f that time, who was in fact an innocent and a loyal Ottoman subject. Duwayhi was apparently the historian to who first provided the Ottoman attack on the Shuf in 1585 with this fabricated explanation. His problem was that he could not ignore an attack on the Shuf that resulted in the death o f Korkmaz Ma‘n, the father o f his hero Fakhr al-Din. And such an attack must have been provoked by some act of insubordination, to which Duwayhi, as a close friend o f the Ma‘ns, would not admit. The alternative was to explain the incident away, which is what Duwayhi did. Also despite these historians’ knowledge o f the sources and their use o f them, they omitted any reference to Ottoman attacks against the Ma‘ns which preceded the

111 On Ahmad Ma‘n see A. Abu-Husayn, “The Unknown Career of Ahmad Ma'n," Archivum Ottomanicum, 17, 1999, 241 -247.

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1585 invasion. According to them, Fakhr al-Din’s later repeated conflicts were only due to the unjustified hostility o f certain Ottoman governors and commanders or their greed and the treachery and insidious insinuations o f neighboring envious chiefs."2 But modem historians, writing with a Lebanese or Arab nationalist predisposition had no qualms about describing the actions o f Fakhr al-Din as “Lebanese" or Arab uprisings against Ottoman tyranny and oppression. In the age o f nationalism which began to impact Lebanon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Lebanese nationalism, perhaps unlike national movements elsewhere in the third world was not only an intellectual construct. Lebanon had come to enjoy an internationally guaranteed self rule and indigenous institutions o f government since 1861. And with the advantages o f self mie becoming abundantly clear, it is not surprising that many Lebanese began to agitate for a final break with the Ottoman Empire. On the question o f what would follow freedom from Ottoman control, there was more than one view regarding the nature o f the political entity to be established. There were those who were Arab nationalists and worked for an Arab Syria or even a much larger united Arab state including Lebanon. Others wanted a French Syria, or a Christian Mount Lebanon, or an enlarged (Greater Lebanon) with special relationship with France, e tc .112113 O f the various Lebanese communities in the M utasarrifiyya o f Mount Lebanon, the Maronite community has emerged in the wake o f the civil war

112

See A. Abu-Husayn, “The korkmaz Question, a Maronite Historian's plea for Ma'nid Legitimacy/* Al-Abhath%34, 1986, 3-11; “Khalidi on Fakhr al-Din: History as Apology,** AlAbhath, 41, 1993, 3-15. 1,3 It should be remembered that the Mutasarifiyya of Mount Lebanon (1861-1918) included only a small part of Lebanon as constituted in 1920.

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o f mid nineteenth century as the leading community in many respects, and the Maronite Church as the only well organized institution in existence. So when the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I, Patriarch Ilyas Huwayik o f the Maronites led the party that called for a greater Lebanon with special connections to France. The idea o f greater Lebanon has earlier been advanced by a Maronite intellectual in the early twentieth century, Bulus Nujaym. What is interesting and relevant about his formulations are not the economic, sociological or political arguments advanced in justification o f this idea (they have actually been voiced also by many others) but rather the historical one. Historically according to Nujaym, a greater Lebanon was simply a return to the Lebanon o f Fakhr al-Din Ma‘n: Fakhr al-Din fashioned a powerful and well organized state with Lebanon as its center...It was no longer a Turkish province but a state with a life o f its own, resembling more the civilized countries o f Western Europe than a vilayet of the sublime Porte. Led by an Enlightened Despot it experienced the splendor o f an (Italian) Renaissance.114 O f this Fakhr al-Din, Nujaym says elsewhere: His genius is incontestable. He has left lasting monuments. This is First and foremost the economic prosperity o f Beirut and Lebanon which is his work and which today also places them in the first rank o f the countries o f the Levant. It is next the creation o f a political unity o f Lebanon, o f a Lebanese state, capable o f playing a great role in Syria and in all the East. A prosperous state which had attracted to 1,4 As quoted in Marwan Buheiry. “Bulus Nujaym and the Drand Liban Ideal 1908-1919,” in Manvan Buheiry (ed), Intcl/ecual Life in The Arab East. IH90-I939 (Beirut, 1981), 74 (hereafter, Buheiry 1981).

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him the attention and goodwill even o f Europe. No doubt he had failed, but he had shown the way to the LebaneseDruzes and Maronites who, in their unity, provided the defense o f the autonomy. He had cemented this unity with the glorious traditions o f his government. He had awakened in all the mountaineers the consciousness o f their national unity. He had placed them in the first rank o f all the peoples o f Syria.115 O f course there was nothing unusual in Lebanese nationalists seeking historical antecedents to their projected Lebanon or looking back to some “golden age.“ After all, most nationalist movements indulge in this kind o f intellectual exercise. But what was unusual in this Maronite imagined “golden age” is that its hero was a Druze. And that this came only a few decades after the mid­ nineteenth century civil war between Maronites and Druze in which thousands o f Maronites and other Christians lost their lives and many more were forced out o f their ancestral villages was certainly remarkable. But could the myth o f Fakhr al-Din’s “Lebanon” and “Lebanese state" have a more distant origin than the mid-nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Reading the Lebanese Maronite sources o f the seventeenth and the first half o f the nineteenth century (and they are almost all the local sources we have) we find the following in Duwayhi, reproduced verbatim by Shihabi in the nineteenth century. O f Fakhr al-Din Duwayhi says the following: In the state (dawla) o f Fakhr al-Din, the Christians held their heads high; They built churches, rode caparisoned 1,5 Quoted in Buheiry, 19X1. 74-75.

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horses, wore turbans o f muslin and inlaid belts,...and carried jeweled muskets. Missionaries from the land o f the Franks came and established themselves in Mount Lebanon. This is because most o f his troops were Christians, and his stewards and servants Maronites The Maronites, it may be recalled, were staunch supporters o f both the Ma‘ns and their successors the Shihabs. Both these dynasties had strong connections with Roman Catholic European powers and the Roman Catholic Church which had an active political interest in the Maronites; and both dynasties showed the Maronites great favor. Moreover, the Maronites were actually under papal orders, since the early seventeenth century, to assist the Ma‘ns and look to them for protection. Hence Duwayhi minces no words as he speaks o f Fakhr al-Din’s local rule and describes it as a state."6 It may be unwarranted to draw such an important conclusion from a single, and maybe cavalier reference to the state o f Fakhr al-Din. But Duwayhi himself later on in his chronicle, when he reports the death o f the last Ma‘nid emir, says: “on September 15, 1697, emir Ahmad Ma‘n died and thus the just Ma‘nid state came to an end." Shihabi again reproduces Duwayhi in the nineteenth century. The Maronites who were the protected flock o f the Ma‘nid emirate became the masters of its successor, the Shihabi emirate. Not only the Shihab emirs as o f the mid-eighteenth century converted to Christianity and became Maronites but they, the Maronites, came to control the administration and the economy of the emirate. Thus it was natural, as Salibi says, that to them “Bashir II was a reigning prince, and the scion o f a dynasty of 116 Sec above.

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reigning princes.” Whereas the Druze regarded this same Bashir II as “a mere fiscal functionary o f the Ottoman state, whose iltizam, or tax-farming concession, was subject to annual renewal.” The very historical legitimacy o f the Shihab emirate derived from the presumed legitimacy o f the M a'nid before it. Duwayhi, o f course, was innocent o f the nationalist agenda that Nujaym puts forward. His Ma‘nid state was also a modest entity compared to the grandiose “Lebanon” that Nujaym thought it was. But it is an entity which offered the Maronites, as Christians with no independent m illet status, the best deal possible within the Ottoman state. Duwayhi, as patriarch, was concerned with the security o f his religious community which he thought would be assured if the Shihabs were to continue with the Ma‘nid policy visà-vis the Maronites. He lived through the first seven years o f the Shihab emirate. What was important is to impart this sense o f Ottoman legitimacy which he furnished for the Ma‘nid and the Shihab emirate to the non Maronites, primarily the Druze and Muslims in neighboring regions. Judging by the Lebanese nationalist narrative as it exists today, the success o f Duwayhi is spectacular indeed. Notwithstanding the recent work o f Salibi and the discussion above o f an alternative view o f the Ma‘ns, this remains as one o f the central themes in scholarly works as well as in school textbooks.