removal of the khalifate from Damascus to Baghdad it remained the pivot of the struggle that shook the Near East at the advent first of the Seljuqs and then of the crusaders intent on chasing the paynim out of the Holy Places. In that convulsive collision between two great religions, we find again race-hatred and religious animosity playing havoc with the solidarity of the forces gathered in the hostile camps: the Muhammadan Arabs had brought to Syria the party spirit which divided the Qaysites and the Yamanites, and kept on running as a red thread through all Syrian troubles up to the calamitous events of 1860 in the Lebanon; the Christians were so hopelessly at odds among themselves that those of the Greek Church joined the caitiff crew of Mahound against the crusaders rather than unite in one effort with those of the Latin Church to fight the common enemy. And the Orthodox Greeks continued to be staunch supporters, at any rate obedient subjects of their Moslim rulers until Russia, admitted among the Great Powers, made them realise that as faithful Christians they might renounce that allegiance without prejudice to their inveterate detestation of the Latins.

These found France more than willing to act or pose as their natural protector. While Catholic Europe resounded with the cry formulated, a century and a half later, by the barefoot friar Ulrich Megerle, better known as Abraham a Santa Clara: "Auff, auff ihr Christen! der Türkische Sabel ist vor der Thür!"'14 and Martin Luther's apostrophe to the Turks and the Pope in one breath, 15 edified the Protestants, it occurred to Francis I of the house of Valois, putting personal and state interest above religion, to aim a blow at the house of Habsburg and especially at his formidable rival Charles V by entering capital of the khalifate. Syrians became the "transmitters of Greek learning to the East, whence it was brought back by the Arabs to the West." E. G. BROWN, A Literary History of Persia; cf C. BROCKELMANN, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, I, 201 ff., and U. VON WILAMOWITZ-MOELLENDORF, Orient und Okzident, Internationale Monatschrift fur Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, May 1, 1915: "Es ist wunderbar, wie in dem Syrien, das sich dem Islam ergiebt, die griechische Wissenschaft sehr viel stärker und fruchtbarer gepflegt wird as in der christlichen Zeit vorher, wie die arabische Medizin sogar Fortschritte über die griechische macht, die Arithmetik auch,. . . . .

14 Cf the good Augustine's Bewegliche Anfrischung der Christlichen Waffen wider den Türckischen Blut-Egel, etc., Vienna, 1683.

15 Vom Krieg wider den Türcken:

so helffe unser lieber Herr Jhesus Christus und

komm vom Himmel herab mit dem jüngsten Gericht und schlehe beide Türcken und Bapst zu boden sampt allen Tyrannen und Gottlosen."

into friendly relations with the Porte. The capitulation of 1535 may be considered the foundation of French claims to a protectorate over the Christians in the Levant. The actual relations between them, more in particular the Maronites, and the French date however from three centuries earlier. When St Louis landed at Limisso in September, 1248, he found in the island of Cyprus a Maronite colony notable for its loyalty to the kings of the house of Lusignan. It numbered about 190.000, many of whom took service with him, "armés de foi au dedans et de fer au dehors,"16 to fight the Saracens as their coreligionists of the Lebanon had done from the beginning of the crusades on, indeed, already on their own account long before in 1099 the first scouting band of Godfrey of Bouillon's army drew near their mountain home. St Louis anticipated Francis I in promising the Maronites his protection, as they deserved from his gratitude, "comme aux François eux-mêmes, et de faire constamment ce qui [serait] nécessaire pour [leur] bonheur."'17 In the subsequent correspondence between the kings of France and the lords spiritual and temporal of the Maronites we find letters from and to Henri IV, Louis XIV,18 Louis XV and Louis-Philippe. Christians of other denominations neither derived much benefit from, nor cared much for the French protectorate; de facto it applied only to the Maronites.19

The idea that the Christians needed any special protection against the Turks lay at the bottom of all those claims, for political rather than sentimental reasons, and persisted though, considering the times, they were on the whole very well treated in the realm of the Grand Signior while Spain murdered American Indians in droves, not to speak of her cruel persecution of Moors and Jews, and France herself treated her Protestants to a St Barthélemy. Those amenities between

16 DE LAMARTINE, Voyage en Orient, vol. III (vol. VIII of his Oeuvres Complètes, ed. 1863) p. 378.

17 Letter of May 21, 1250.

18 Who was the first officially to assume the title of Protector of the Christians in the Levant.

19 And if we may believe Bishop Tubiyā, of whom more anon, quoted by URQUHART, op cit., II, 262, the Maronites, too, had their reasons to look askance at French protection: "France is to us an oppression from which we would be most happy to escape..... Here and in the other parts of Syria, in Egypt and in Cyprus, from the middle of the last century to the close of the campaign of Napoleon, we reckon that the blood of 40.000 Maronites has been shed by the Turks or the Greeks. This is the debt we owe to French protection."

one.

Christians and Christians bore certainly no less violent a character in a country like Syria where religion, burdened with religious prejudice, had then as now a powerful hold on the people, the Syrian “being always labelled with the tag of the particular faith which he follows,"20 and, we may add, always eager for a fight to prove that his is the right To admit the truth, the Turk, instead of oppressing the useful Christians, endeavored to prevent their exterminating one another at the command of their variously frocked priests. Grouped according to sundry orthodoxies and heterodoxies, they were ready to fly at each other's throats on the slightest provocation, a beautiful result of "los progresos que en ella (the province of Syria) ha hecho la religion serafica."21 Richard Burton's sardonic smile at an equally maudlin comment on Syrian conditions of a later writer, 22 is as much to the point as Burckhardt's observation, made October 6, 1810, regarding the seraphic proceedings of the Christian sects, that there would have been civil war among them if the iron rod of the Turkish government had not repressed their religious fury.23 When foreign interposition in Turkish affairs began to undermine Turkish authority, the civil war came as a matter of course. Its culminating episode before our war of wars is the subject of Iskander Ibn Ya'qub'Abkāriūs's narrative which shows clearly how the fanatic intolerance peculiar to the Syrian character and fostered by European jealousy, by political ambitions creating an atmosphere of instability and insecurity, prepared the way for the massacres of 1860.

The Druzes, on good terms with all religions besides their own and averse to proselytism, also, whatever their descent may be, markedly different in race characteristics from the other inhabitants of the Lebanon, have been known of yore as friends of the Christians,24 to whom, regardless of shades and nuances of creed, they extended their welcome and accorded facilities for settlement, for the building of churches and monasteries.25 Foreign intrigue was necessary to

20 F. J. BLISS, The Religions of Modern Syria and Palestine.

21 I. DE CALAHORRA, Chronica de la Provincia de Syria y Tierra Santa de Gerusalen. Contiene los Progresos, etc.

22 RENAN, expatiating on "la merveilleuse harmonie de l'idéal évangélique avec le paysage qui lui sert de cadre,. . . . . . ." See BURTON'S Unexplored Syria, I, 6.

23 Travels in Syria and the Holy Land.

24 Cf R. POCOCKE, A Description of the East, II, passim. 25 Cf C. F. VOLNEY, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie, II, 79.

disturb their relations with the Maronites to the breaking point, says a recent writer.26 Foreign intrigue, namely, that sought to profit by abetting Maronite pretensions, by stimulating the arrogance of the Maronite clergy who, rather than the Maronite aristocracy, became under consular pressure and instigated by secret agents, the deadly enemies of the Druzes. The attitude of the latter remained conciliatory until they were goaded to resistance for the sake of selfpreservation and in the light of their past friendliness their offer of peace, which led to the convention27 signed after European intervention had been decided upon, did not deserve the ridicule and contempt showered upon it as a hypocritical move to ward off consequences. The attitude of the former can be gauged by an American missionary's statement which, though it refers primarily to a posterior phase of the "religious fury" in the Lebanon, is inserted here for the sake of the proper sequence of these introductory remarks: " the Druzes sought for an amicable settlement of all their difficulties before the rupture, but all their applications and wishes were unavailing. Nor am I aware of any plan or wish of the Christians to allow them to remain in their own country for the future. They must retire of their own accord or they must fight. War to them was an inexorable necessity. The idea of an exterminating war came exclusively from the Christian side, however un-Christian it was. It is contrary to the religion of the Druzes to contemplate, much more to attempt the extermination of any religious sect of any distinct race, in as much as such an aim or purpose is opposed, in their view, to the will and predestination of God, who has ordained at once the unchanging existence and fixed numbers of all sects and races of men upon the earth."28

Practically left alone by the Turkish government, under the rule of Princes first of the Ma'n then of the Shihab family,29 some of whom,

26 R. RISTELHUEBER, Les Maronites, Revue des Deux Mondes, January 1, 1915. 27 See APPENDIX, I.

28 Cf the London Times of November 1, 1860.

29 The ruling house of Ma'n, which originated in North Arabia and claimed descent from 'Ayyub, an adventurous knight-errant of the Banu Raby'a, became extinct in 1697 on the death of Aḥmad whose only son Malḥam had died in 1679. To prevent an intertribal war for his succession, Ahmad, prevailing upon the other chiefs, secured it for his grandson Haydar Shihab, son of Musa Shihab and one of his daughters, during whose minority a Bashir Shihab exercised authority in the Mount, his family moving from Ḥāsbayyā to Dayr al-Qamar. When this Bashir Shihāb succumbed in 1708 at Acre to the effects of poison, Haydar took personal charge of the government and, a few years later,

as the famous Fakhr ad-Dīn and Bashir, were born leaders of men, the Lebanon enjoyed comparative tranquility, anyway freedom from too pronounced self-assertion in mutually contentious Christian communities. The Amir Bashir Shihab played a skillful game between the English, traditional friends of the Druzes to counterbalance French influence on the Maronites, and Buonaparte when, trying to realise Leibniz's modified plan, that ambitious young general marched into Syria to be checked at Acre by Sir Sidney Smith. Bashir was still the commanding spirit of the Mount, coquetting with Maḥmūd II or Muḥammad 'Aly as the wind of Turco-Egyptian relations blew, when Ibrahim Pasha wrested Syria from the Porte for the latter, his father and the Sultan's vassal. Almost ten years elapsed before the great European Powers of the day, only France holding back, could decide on action in behalf of the Sultan and compassed the evacuation of Syria by Ibrāhīm Pasha's troops. Therewith the Amir Bashir's rule ended; a British man-of-war conveyed him in exile to Malta, whence he moved to Constantinople, closing his long and eventful career, in 1850, with a natural death, more fortunate in that respect. than his even better known predecessor Fakhr ad-Din of the Ma'nies who, in 1635, had been executed at Constantinople with two of his sons. Another scion of the Shihab family, Bashir Qāsim, put in the banished Amir's place, proved altogether unequal to the task of preserving order among the discordant elements of which the population of Mount Lebanon was composed and with his deposition the local dynasty ceased to exist. 30

Bashir Qasim's lack of tact and general unfitness precipitated a fiasco which, sooner or later, would have faced any one in his situation. For Ibrāhīm Pasha's iron discipline and inexorable justice the Turks had to substitute laxer methods, forced thereunto by European interference which threatened a repetition of the Greek follies of the Roman period Mommsen speaks of, in an infinitely more injurious

31

defeated at the head of the Qaysites, the disaffected Yamanites in the great battle of 'Ayn Darah, 1711, which consolidated his power. Cf M. VON OPPENHEIM. Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf, I, 148 ff.

30 The Shihabies, whose house originated in the Hejaz and who claimed descent from Khalid Ibn al-Walid, sank low from their high estate in consequence of the decline of feudal institutions in Mount Lebanon. Some of them are so impoverished, says Dr BLISS, op. cit., that they have become drivers.

31 "Griechische Dummheiten," Römische Geschichte, V, 304.