Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

Within a decade of Selim’s conquest, Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz were firmly under Ottoman rule. Istanbul, the imperial capital, was home to both the decision takers and the law makers of the empire as a whole. At the top of the hierarchy was the sultan, an absolute monarch whose word was writ. He lived in the Topkapi Palace, behind great walls overlooking the imperial capital, the Straits of the Bosporus, and the Golden Horn. Downhill from the palace walls, behind an imposing set of gates, lay the offices of the grand vezir and his ministers. This center of government came to be known by its most distinctive feature—its gates. Referred to in Turkish as the Bab-i Ali, or “High Gate,” the expression was rendered La Porte Sublime in French and anglicized as the Sublime Porte, or just “the Porte.” These two institutions—the royal court and the Sublime Porte—set the new terms of government for the Arab provinces, as for the empire as a whole. With Ottoman rule came new administrative practices. Ottoman provincial government in the sixteenth century was a form of feudalism in which military commanders were awarded territory by the central government. The post holder would oversee the administration of justice and tax collection from his lands. He would also maintain a certain number of cavalrymen from the revenues of his lands and pay a fixed sum in taxes to the central treasury. Unlike feudalism in Europe, the Ottoman system was not hereditary and so did not produce an aristocracy to rival the power of the sultan. The system was ideally suited for a rapidly expanding empire, where territory was conquered faster than the state’s ability to produce a trained bureaucracy to administer it. The bureaucrats were left to bookkeeping, making an inventory of the wealth of the empire. Detailed tax registers were compiled listing the number of taxable men, households, fields, and revenues for each village of a given province. These registers were supposed to be updated every thirty years, though in the course of the sixteenth century the state began to neglect its bookkeeping; the practice died out altogether in the seventeenth century.¹⁸ The new Ottoman provinces in Syria—Aleppo, Damascus, and later the coastal province of Tripoli (in modern Lebanon)—were divided into smaller administrative units and placed under commanders. The provincial governor was given the largest fief, with a set number of troops and fixed taxes to deliver to the sultan for his campaigns and treasury. The military commander of the province was given the next largest fief, with lower-ranking commanders allotted lands in proportion to their rank and the number of troops they were expected to present for the sultan’s military campaigns.¹⁹ This modified feudal system was never applied to Egypt, which continued to be ruled in an uneasy partnership between Ottoman governors and Mamluk commanders. The men who came to fill the posts in the Arab provincial administration were appointed by the central government in Istanbul, and they tended to come from outside the Arab lands. Like the Mamluks, the Ottomans operated their own system of slave recruitment, primarily in their Balkan provinces. Young Christian boys were taken from their villages in an annual conscription known in Turkish as the devshirme, or “boy levy.” They were sent to Istanbul, where they were converted to Islam and trained to serve the empire. Athletic boys were sent for military training, to fill the ranks of the crack Janissary infantry regiments. Those with intellectual promise were sent to the palace to be trained for civil service in either the palace itself or the bureaucracy. By modern standards, the boy levy appears nothing short of barbaric: children sent into slavery to be raised far from their families and forcibly converted to Islam. At the time, however, it was the only means for upward mobility in a fairly restrictive society. Through the boy levy, a peasant’s son could rise to become a general or grand vizier. Indeed, entry to the elite ranks of the Ottoman military and government was more or less restricted to devshirme recruits. The fact that the Arabs, who in their great majority were free-born Muslims, were excluded from this practice meant that they were greatly underrepresented among the power elite of the early Ottoman Empire.²⁰ One of the great innovations of Sultan Sьleyman II’s reign was to define the administrative structure of each Ottoman province in law. Known in the West as “the Magnificent,” Sьleyman was known locally by the Turkish nickname Kanuni, or “the law-giver.” More than two centuries after Sьleyman’s death, the Egyptian chronicler al-Jabarti extolled the virtues of his legal and administrative reforms: “Sultan Sьleyman al-Kanuni established the principles of government administration, completed the establishment of the empire, and organized the provinces. He shone in the darkness, lifted up the shining light of religion, and extinguished the fire of the infidels. The country [i.e., Egypt] has continued to be part of their empire and obedient to Ottoman rule from that time until now.”²¹ The rules of government were set out for each province in a constitutional document known as a kanunname, or “book of laws.” These provincial constitutions made clear the relationship between governors and tax-payers and set down the rights and responsibilities of both sides in black and white. For its age, it represented the height of government accountability. The first provincial constitution was drafted in Egypt in the immediate aftermath of Ahmed Pasha’s rebellion in 1525. Sultan Sьleyman II’s grand vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, introduced the kanunname as a central part of his mission to restore the Sultan’s authority over Egypt. The document is remarkably comprehensive, setting out the administrative framework down to the village level. It establishes the responsibilities of office holders in the maintenance of security, the preservation of the irrigation system, and the collection of taxes. The rules for land surveys, for pious endowments, for the maintenance of granaries, and for the running of seaports are clearly explained. The constitution even notes how often the governor should meet with his advisory council of state (four times each week, just like imperial council in Istanbul).²² In order to enforce the law, Ottoman administrators needed disciplined and reliable troops. The provincial governors had under their command military forces composed of both Ottoman regulars and locally recruited irregular troops. The elite of the military were the Janissaries, whose commander was appointed by Istanbul. A city like Damascus would have an infantry consisting of between 500 and 1,000 Janissaries to uphold local order. There were also a number of cavalry forces, whose ranks were supported by the revenues of the province. According to Ottoman sources there were over 8,000 cavalrymen in the three provinces of Aleppo, Tripoli, and Damascus combined in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.²³ These forces were supplemented with locally recruited infantrymen and North African mercenaries. The judiciary was, along with the governors and the military, the third element of Ottoman administration. The central government in Istanbul dispatched a chief justice to each provincial capital, where he would preside over the Islamic courts. Though Christians and Jews were entitled to settle their differences in their own communities’ religious tribunals, many chose to pursue their complaints or to record their transactions in the Muslim courts. All imperial decrees from Istanbul were read publicly in court and inscribed in the court registers. In addition to criminal cases, the courts provided arbitration between disputing parties, served as notary public to record commercial contracts and the exchange of land, and registered the major transitions in life—marriages and divorces, settlements for widows and orphans, and the distribution of the personal effects of the deceased. All cases and transactions were duly inscribed in the court registers, many of which still survive, providing an invaluable window into the daily life of the towns and cities of the Ottoman Empire.

Sultan Sьleyman II proved one of the most successful rulers of the Ottoman Empire. In his forty-six-year reign (1520–1566) Sьleyman completed the conquest of the Arab world started by his father. He took Baghdad and Basra from the Persian Safavid Empire in 1533?1538, where the Ottoman army was received by the Sunni population as liberators after years of persecution by the Shiite Safavids. The conquest of Iraq was very significant in both strategic and ideological terms. S?leyman II had consolidated his empire, adding the ancient Arab capital of Baghdad to his conquests, and halted the advance of Shiite dogma into Sunni lands. Sьleyman II’s forces moved south from Egypt to occupy the southern Arabian lands of Yemen in the 1530s and 1540s. In the Western Mediterranean, Sьleyman added the North African coastal regions of Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria to Ottoman domains as tribute-paying vassal states between 1525 and 1574. By the end of the sixteenth century, all Arab lands were under some form of Ottoman control except Central Arabia and the sultanate of Morocco, territories that were to remain outside the Ottoman Empire. Each of the Arab lands came into the Ottoman Empire at a different point in time, under particular circumstances, with distinct historical and administrative backgrounds. The story of Ottoman rule in every one of these provinces is unique, shaped by the conditions under which they entered the empire.

The Ottoman conquest of North Africa was achieved more through piracy than traditional warfare—though, of course, one man’s pirate is another’s admiral. Sir Francis Drake used piracy to great effect in fighting England’s wars against the superior Spanish fleet in the sixteenth century, yet as a knight of Elizabeth I’s realm and one of her most trusted advisors he hardly conjures the image popularly held of maritime brigands. So it was with Khayr al-Din “Barbarossa”—so called by European contemporaries for his red beard—one of the greatest admirals in Ottoman history. To the Spanish he was a ruthless pirate, the scourge of their Mediterranean shipping, who sold thousands of Christian sailors captured in battle into slavery. To the inhabitants of the North African coastline he was a holy warrior carrying the jihad against the Spanish occupiers, whose war booty was an important component of the local economy. And to the Ottomans he was a native son, born around 1466 on the Aegean island of Mytilene just off the coast of Turkey. At the turn of the sixteenth century the Western Mediterranean was the arena of an intense conflict between Christian and Muslim forces. The Spanish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula culminated in the fall of Granada in 1492, bringing to an end nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule in Spain (711–1492). Faced with life in Catholic Spain, where religious proselytism soon gave way to forced conversion, most Iberian Muslims left their native land to seek refuge in North Africa. These Muslim refugees, known as Moriscos, never forgot their homeland or forgave Spain. The Spanish monarchs, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, relentlessly pursued their holy war across the Mediterranean to the Muslim kingdoms in which the Moriscos took refuge. They established a string of fortress colonies, or presidios, along the North African coast from Morocco to Libya and forced local leaders in the inland towns to pay tribute to Spain. Two of these colonies—Ceuta and Melilla—still survive as Spanish possessions on the Moroccan coastline. The Spanish faced little opposition to their aggressive expansion from the Muslim mini-states of North Africa. Three local dynasties based in Fez (in modern Morocco), Tlemcen (in Algeria), and Tunis ruled in Northwest Africa. They paid tribute to the Spanish crown and dared raise no challenge to the Spanish fortresses that dominated their main ports and harbors. The Muslim rulers’ cooperation with the Spanish invaders discredited them in the eyes of their subjects, and soon local zealots began to organize their own forces to rebuff the invaders. Because the presidios were resupplied by sea, Spanish shipping was more vulnerable to attack than the strong fortresses themselves. Local sailors who armed ships and took their jihad to sea came to be known in the West as the Barbary corsairs (the term Barbary derived either from the Greek for “barbarian” or, more charitably, from the indigenous Berber people of North Africa). While these corsairs took plunder and slaves from the Spanish shipping they attacked, they viewed their war as a religious conflict against Christian invaders. Their bold attacks against the Spanish made the corsairs local heroes and gained them the support of the Arab and Berber inhabitants of the coast. Khayr al-Din was the most famous of the Barbary corsairs. He followed in the footsteps of his brother, ‘Aruj, who created an independent ministate in the small port of Jijilli, to the east of Algiers. ’Aruj extended the area under his power across the Algerian coast to Tlemcen in the west, which he captured in 1517. He was killed by the Spanish the following year in a vain attempt to defend Tlemcen. Khayr al-Din understood that the corsairs would need the support of a powerful ally if they hoped to hold their gains against the might of the Spanish Empire, and he raised the corsairs’ jihad to a successful war machine by entering into alliance with the Ottoman Empire. In 1519 Khayr al-Din sent an envoy to the Ottoman court, bearing gifts and a petition from the people of Algiers, to request Sultan Selim’s protection and offering to place themselves under his rule. Selim the Grim was near death as he agreed to add the Algerian coastline to the territories of the Ottoman Empire. He sent Khayr al-Din’s envoy home with an Ottoman flag and a detachment of 2,000 Janissaries. The greatest Muslim empire in the world had now engaged battle with the fleet of Spain, shifting the balance of power in the Western Mediterranean decisively. Encouraged by their new alliance with the Ottomans, the Barbary corsairs pressed their attacks far beyond the coast of North Africa. Khayr al-Din and his commanders struck against targets in Italy, Spain, and the Aegean Islands. In the 1520s he seized European ships carrying grain and, like a sea-faring Robin Hood, delivered the food to the people of the Algerian coast, who were suffering shortages from drought. His ships rescued Moriscos from Spain and brought them back to settle in the towns under his control to join the fight against Spain. Yet Khayr al-Din and his men were best known for their exploits against Spanish shipping. They sunk galleys, freed Muslim slaves, and captured dozens of enemy ships. Barbarossa’s name provoked fear all along the coasts of Spain and Italy—with reason. The number of Christians his men captured numbered in the thousands, with nobles held for high ransom and commoners sold into slavery. For the Muslim corsairs there was a sense of poetic justice: many of them had previously been held captive and sold as galley slaves by the Spanish. The Spanish navy needed an admiral to match wits with Khayr al-Din. In 1528 the emperor Charles V engaged the celebrated commander Andrea Doria (1466–1560) to lead the fight against him. Doria, a native of Genoa who had commissioned his own fleet of war galleys and hired his services out to the monarchs of Europe, was no less a corsair than Khayr al-Din. Doria was a great admiral, but Khayr al-Din was greater. In their eighteen years of dueling across the Mediterranean, Doria seldom got the better of his Ottoman adversary. Their first encounter, in 1530, was a case in point. Khayr al-Din’s forces had taken the Spanish fortress in the Bay of Algiers after a short siege in 1529. The Spanish captives were reduced to slaves and made to dismantle the fort, whose stones were used to create a breakwater to shelter the harbor of Algiers. Charles V was outraged by the loss of the strategic fort and convened a council of state. Andrea Doria suggested an attack on the port of Cherchel, just west of Algiers. Doria’s forces landed near Cherchel in 1530 and freed several hundred Christian slaves but met with stiff resistance from the Moriscos who inhabited the town, who were spoiling for a fight with the Spanish. Khayr al-Din sent a relief force, and Doria, who did not want to risk engaging the larger Ottoman fleet, withdrew his ships—abandoning the Spanish soldiers in Cherchel. Those Spaniards who fought were killed, and those who surrendered were enslaved. Khayr al-Din had dealt two humiliations to the Spanish and secured his position in Algiers. Barbarossa had also raised his standing in the eyes of the sultan, and in 1532 he was invited to Istanbul to meet with Sьleyman the Magnificent. He set off with a fleet of forty-four ships and ravaged the coast of Genoa and Sicily along the way, seizing eighteen Christian ships—which he robbed and burned. Finally he arrived in Istanbul, where the sultan invited him to the palace. When he was ushered into the sultan’s presence, Khayr al-Din prostrated himself and kissed the ground, awaiting his sovereign’s command. Sьleyman bid his admiral to rise and promoted him to commander of the Ottoman navy, or Kapudan Pasha, and governor of the Maritime Provinces. Lodged in a royal palace for the duration of his stay in Istanbul, Khayr al-Din met regularly with the sultan to discuss naval strategy. In a final mark of favor, Sьleyman pinned a golden medal to Khayr al-Din’s turban during a palace ceremony, to demonstrate his gratitude to the Kapudan Pasha for his role in expanding the territory of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa and delivering victories against his Spanish foe.²⁴ On his return from Istanbul, Khayr al-Din set about planning his next major campaign: the conquest of Tunis. He mounted an expedition of nearly 10,000 soldiers and took Tunis without a fight in August 1534. The Ottomans were now in control of the North African coast from Tunis to Algiers, placing Charles V’s maritime supremacy in the Western Mediterranean in jeopardy. Andrea Doria advised the emperor to drive the corsairs from Tunis. Charles agreed, accompanying the fleet himself. He wrote of the vast assembly of “galleys, galleons, carracks, fusts, ships, brigantines, and other vessels” that carried the Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese troops—some 24,000 soldiers and 15,000 horses—to Tunis. “We left [asking] for the aid and guidance of our creator . . . and with divine assistance and favour, to do that which seems most effective and for the best against Barbarossa.”²⁵ As the massive fleet approached Tunis, Khayr al-Din withdrew his forces, knowing that he could not withstand the armada. Tunis now fell to Spanish forces. Charles V claimed in his letters home that the Spanish freed 20,000 Christian slaves. Arab accounts claim that the Spanish killed at least as many of the local inhabitants in the sack of Tunis. In strategic terms, the conquest of Tunis placed the Straits of Sicily, the gateway to the Western Mediterranean, firmly in Spanish hands. The only Muslim stronghold left was Algiers. In 1541 the Spanish mounted a massive siege force to take Algiers and defeat Khayr al-Din once and for all. An armada of sixty-five galleys and over 400 transport vessels carrying 36,000 soldiers and siege machines set sail in mid-October. Sayyid Murad, the Algerian chronicler, wrote: “This fleet covered the entire surface of the sea, but I was unable to count all the vessels for they were so numerous.” Against the Spanish, the Barbary corsairs raised a force of 1,500 Ottoman Janissaries, 6,000 Moriscos, and several hundred irregulars. Faced with an invasion force that outnumbered his own troops by a margin of more than four to one, Khayr al-Din’s situation looked desperate. One of his officers tried to raise the morale of his troops, saying, “The Christian fleet is enormous . . . but do not forget the aid that Allah gives his Muslims against the foes of religion.”²⁶ His words seemed prophetic to the local chronicler. On the eve of the Spanish invasion, the weather suddenly turned and violent gales drove the Spanish ships onto the rocky shores. The soldiers who did manage to reach shore in safety were drenched by torrential rains, and their gunpowder was spoiled by water. The defenders’ swords and arrows proved the more effective weapons in these conditions, as the drenched and demoralized Spanish were driven to retreat after 150 ships were lost and 12,000 men killed or captured. The Barbary corsairs had inflicted a decisive defeat on the Spanish and secured their position in North Africa once and for all. It was Khayr al-Din?s greatest triumph, celebrated each year in Algiers for the rest of the Ottoman era. Five years later, in 1546, Khayr al-Din Barbarossa died at the age of eighty. He had succeeded in securing the coast of North Africa for the Ottoman Empire (though the final conquest of Tripoli and Tunis was achieved by his successors later in the sixteenth century). Ottoman rule in North Africa was unlike any other part of the Arab lands, reflecting its corsair origins. In the decades following Khayr al-Din’s death, power was balanced between a governor appointed by Istanbul, an Ottoman admiral of the fleet, and the commander of Ottoman Janissary infantry. In the seventeenth century the commander of the Janissaries, who had settled and became permanent residents of Algiers, became governor of Algiers and ruled through a council, or diwan. Then in 1671 the power shifted again: the admiral of the fleet appointed a local civil ruler, or dey, who governed instead of the commander of the Janissaries. For a few years the dey exercised effective power, though Istanbul continued to appoint a pasha, or governor, whose powers were more ceremonial. After 1710, however, deys assumed the office of pasha as well, and Istanbul’s control over North Africa grew ever weaker, as the deys enjoyed full autonomy in return for paying a small annual tribute to the Porte. Long after the conclusion of the Ottoman-Spanish rivalry in the Western Mediterranean, the Porte was perfectly satisfied to leave the deys of Algiers to rule the North African coast on its behalf. Too far from Istanbul to administer more directly, and too thinly populated to cover the expense of a more elaborate administration, the Barbary Coast was typical of those Arab provinces the Ottomans chose to rule in collaboration with local elites. This allowed the Ottoman Empire to claim sovereignty over strategic Muslim territory, and to enjoy a small income stream, at little cost to the imperial treasury. The arrangement suited the deys of Algiers, who enjoyed Ottoman protection and extensive autonomy in their relations with the maritime powers of the Mediterranean. The arrangement would work to the advantage of both sides until the nineteenth century, when neither the deys nor the Ottomans were sufficiently strong to withstand a new era of European colonization in North Africa.

A very different system of autonomous rule developed in the Eastern Mediterranean. The mountains of Lebanon had long provided a refuge for unorthodox religious communities fleeing persecution. Two such communities—the Maronites and the Druzes—devised their own system of rule. Though the Lebanese highlands (known as Mount Lebanon) came under Ottoman rule along with the rest of Greater Syria at the time of Selim the Grim’s conquest in 1516, the Porte preferred to leave the local inhabitants to rule themselves in their mountain fastness. The Maronites had sought the safety of the northern Lebanese mountains in the late seventh century, fleeing persecution by rival Christian sects in what was then the Byzantine Empire. They were supporters of the Crusaders in the Middle Ages and enjoyed close relations with the Vatican thereafter. In 1584 a Maronite College was opened in Rome to teach theology to the most gifted young Maronites, cementing ties between the Maronites and the Roman Catholic Church. The Druze trace their origins back to eleventh-century Cairo when a dissident group of Shiite Muslims fled persecution in Egypt. In the isolation of the southern Lebanese mountains, their beliefs took the form of a distinct and highly secretive new faith. The Druze emerged as a political community as well as a religious one, and they came to dominate the political order in Mount Lebanon, with the full participation of the Maronite Christians. A Druze amir, or prince, ruled over a rigid hierarchy of Druze and Christian hereditary nobles, each attached to a particular territory in Mount Lebanon. When Mount Lebanon came under Ottoman rule, the sultans chose to preserve the region’s particular feudal order, demanding only that the Druze prince recognize the sultan’s authority and pay an annual tribute. The system worked, as the Druze were sufficiently divided among themselves so as not to pose a threat to Ottoman rule. All of that was to change with the rise of Amir Fakhr al-Din II. Fakhr al-Din II (c.1572–1635), the prince of Mount Lebanon, was like a character from the pages of Machiavelli. His methods were certainly closer to those of Cesare Borgia than those of his Ottoman peers. Fakhr al-Din used a combination of violence and cunning to extend the territories under his control and preserve his position of power across the decades. He even appointed his own court historian to record the great events of his reign for all posterity.²⁷ Fakhr al-Din came to power in 1591 following the assassination of his father by the rival Sayfa clan, a Kurdish family who ruled over northern Lebanon from the coastal city of Tripoli (not to be confused with the Libyan city of the same name). Over the next thirty years the Druze prince was driven by the twin motives of revenge against the Sayfa clan and the expansion of the lands under his family’s rule. At the same time, Fakhr al-Din preserved good relations with the Ottomans. He paid the taxes on his territory in full and on time. He traveled to Damascus and lavished gifts and money on the governor, Murad Pasha, who later was promoted to grand vizier in Istanbul. Through these connections Fakhr al-Din succeeded in extending his rule over the southern port city of Sidon, the city of Beirut and the coastal plain, the northern districts of Mount Lebanon, and the Biqa’ Valley to the east. By 1607 the Druze prince had consolidated his control over most of the territory of the modern state of Lebanon as well as parts of northern Palestine.²⁸ Fakhr al-Din’s troubles expanded in line with the growth of his mini-state. The territories under his control now extended well beyond the autonomous Mount Lebanon into areas under full Ottoman rule. This unprecedented expansion provoked concerns in government circles in Istanbul and jealousy among Fakhr al-Din’s regional rivals. To protect himself from Ottoman intrigues, the Druze machiavel entered into a treaty of alliance with the Medici of Florence in 1608. The Medici offered guns and assistance with Fakhr al-Din?s fortifications in return for a privileged position in the highly competitive Levantine trade. News of Fakhr al-Din’s treaty with Tuscany was met with dismay. Over the next few years, the Ottomans watched the deepening of Lebanese-Tuscan relations with mounting concern. Fakhr al-Din’s stature in Istanbul had been undermined when his friend Murad Pasha had been succeeded as grand vizier by an enemy, Nasuh Pasha. In 1513 the sultan decided to act and dispatched an army to topple Fakhr al-Din and dismantle the Druze mini-state. Ottoman naval vessels were sent to block the Lebanese ports, both to prevent the Druze prince from escaping and to discourage Tuscan shipping from coming to his assistance. Fakhr al-Din deftly eluded his attackers and bribed his way past the Ottoman ships. Accompanied by an advisor and a number of servants, he hired two French galleons and a Flemish vessel to carry him to Tuscany.²⁹ After a fifty-three-day journey from Sidon to Livorno, Fakhr al-Din landed on Tuscan soil. His five-year exile represented a rare moment when Arab and European princes met on equal footing and examined each other’s customs and manners with respect. Fakhr al-Din and his retainers observed firsthand the working of the Medici court, the state of Renaissance technology, and the different customs of the people. The Druze prince was fascinated by all he saw, from the common household goods of the average Florentine to the remarkable art collection of the Medicis—including portraits of leading Ottoman figures. He visited the Duomo of Florence, climbing Giotto’s campanile and the stairs up Brunelleschi’s famous dome, completed the previous century and one of the greatest architectural achievements of its day.³⁰ Yet for all the marvels he witnessed in Florence, Fakhr al-Din never doubted the superiority of his own culture nor that the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful state of the age. Fakhr al-Din returned to his native land in 1618. He chose his moment of return carefully: the Ottomans were at war with the Persians again and turned a blind eye to his return. Much had changed in the five years of Fakhr al-Din’s absence. The Ottoman authorities had reduced his family’s rule to the Druze district of the Shuf in the southern half of Mount Lebanon, and the Druze community had split into rival factions determined to prevent a single household from ever gaining such supremacy as Fakhr al-Din had enjoyed. In no time, Fakhr al-Din confounded the plans of both the Porte and his regional rivals. From the moment he returned the Druze prince reestablished his authority over the people and the territory of Mount Lebanon to rebuild his personal empire from the northern port of Lattakia through the whole of the Lebanese highlands south to Palestine and across the Jordan River. In the past, Fakhr al-Din had secured his gains by consent of the Ottoman authorities. This time his seizure of territory represented a direct challenge to the Porte. He was confident that his fighters could defeat any army the Ottomans might field, and over the next five years Fakhr al-Din grew increasingly bold in confronting the Ottoman authorities. Fakhr al-Din reached the height of his power in November 1623 when his forces defeated Ottoman troops from Damascus and captured the governor, Mustafa Pasha, in the battle of ‘Anjar.³¹ The Druze forces pursued their enemies up the Biqa’ Valley to the town of Baalbek, with their prisoner, the governor of Damascus, in tow. While his forces laid siege to Baalbek, Fakhr al-Din received a delegation of notables from Damascus who negotiated for the release of their governor. The Druze amir dragged out the negotiations over the next twelve days and secured every one of his territorial objectives before releasing his prisoner. When the Ottoman wars with Persia ended in 1629, however, Istanbul once again turned its attention to the rebellious Druze prince of Mount Lebanon, who had extended the borders of the lands under his control eastward into the Syrian desert and northward towards Anatolia. In 1631, in an act of pure hubris, Fakhr al-Din denied an Ottoman army rights to winter in “his” territory. From that point on, the Ottomans were determined to be rid of their insubordinate Druze vassal. The aging Fakhr al-Din was facing significant challenges from other quarters, as well—from Bedouin tribes, his old enemies the Sayfas of Tripoli, and rival Druze families. Under the strong leadership of Sultan Murad IV, the Ottomans seized on Fakhr al-Din’s growing isolation and dispatched a force from Damascus to overthrow the Druze leader in 1633. Perhaps his supporters were weary after years of constant fighting; perhaps they were losing confidence in Fakhr al-Din’s judgment, as he flaunted Istanbul’s writ ever more flagrantly. As the Ottoman army approached, the Druze warriors refused their leader’s call to battle and left him and his sons to confront the Ottoman force on their own. The fugitive prince took refuge in the mountain caves of the Shuf, deep in the Druze heartlands. The Ottoman generals followed him into the highlands and built fires to smoke him out of his hiding place. Fakhr al-Din and his sons were arrested and taken to Istanbul, where they were executed in 1635, bringing to an end a remarkable career and a dangerous threat to Ottoman rule in the Arab lands. Once Fakhr al-Din had been eliminated, the Ottomans were pleased to restore Mount Lebanon to its indigenous political system. Its heterogeneous population of Christians and Druzes was ill-suited to a system of government intended for a Sunni Muslim majority. So long as local rulers were willing to work within the Ottoman system, the Porte was more than willing to accept diversity in the administration of its Arab provinces. The Lebanese feudal order would survive well into the nineteenth century without further trouble to Istanbul.