Kisrawan
The Kisrawan or Keserwan is a region between Mount Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast, north of the Lebanese capital Beirut and south of the Ibrahim River. It is administered by the eponymous Keserwan District, part of the Keserwan-Jbeil Governorate.
In the 12th–13th centuries it was a borderland between the Crusader states along the coast and the Muslim governments in Damascus. Its inhabitants at that time were Twelver Shia Muslims, Alawites, Druze and Maronite Christians. While the Kisrawanis acted independent of any outside authority, they often cooperated with the Crusader lords of Tripoli and Byblos. Soon after the Sunni Muslim Mamluks conquered the Crusader realms, they launched a series of punitive expeditions in 1292–1305 against the mountaineers of the Kisrawan. The assaults caused wide scale destruction and displacement, with Maronites from northern Mount Lebanon gradually migrating to the depopulated villages of the Kisrawan.
The Mamluks established Turkmen settlements in the coastland of the Kisrawan to keep guard over the region. The Turkmen chiefs from the Assaf dynasty continued to govern the Kisrawan with the onset of Ottoman rule in 1517. In alliance with the Maronite Hubaysh family, whose members served as their stewards and agents, the Assafs patronized Maronite settlement and prosperity in the region. The last Assaf emir was killed in 1591 by Yusuf Sayfa, the governor of Tripoli, who proceeded to take over the Kisrawan and kill the Hubayshs. After a number of struggles with the Druze Ma'ns over control of the Kisrawan, the Sayfas permanently lost their hold over the region to them in 1616. Under the patronage of the Ma'nid emir Fakhr al-Din II, the Maronite Khazen family gradually came to dominate the area, purchasing large tracts of land from Shia Muslim villagers. Their activities fostered the overwhelming Maronite majority of the region that persists until the present day.
The Khazens lost their grip over the region during a peasants' revolt led by Tanyus Shahin, who declared a republic over the Kisrawan in 1859. Although the Kisrawani militia played a key role sparking the 1860 Mount Lebanon civil war, the area largely avoided the bloodshed and destruction of that conflict. Shahin was defeated and disbanded the republic after his defeat by Youssef Karam in 1861. During the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–1990, the Kisrawan was a stronghold of the Maronite-dominated Lebanese Forces militia.
Etymology
The name Kesrawan has Persian origins. According to the historian Kamal Salibi, "the very name Kesrawan must have originally been that of a Persian clan called the Kisra". "Kisra" is the Arabic form of the common Persian name Khosrow and "Kisrawan" is the Persian plural form of Kisra.Geography
The Kisrawan is traditionally defined as the part of the Mount Lebanon region northeast of Beirut between the Ibrahim River in the north and the Kalb River in the south. It straddles the Mediterranean coast, extending eastward to the western slopes of the Mount Lebanon range.History
Early Muslim period
During the early Muslim period, the Kisrawan was part of Jund Dimashq and was administered from Baalbek. Mu'awiya I, the governor of the Levant in 639–661 and first Umayyad caliph, settled Persian civilians and soldiers from other parts of the Levant in Baalbek and Tripoli. These Persian settlers had remained in the Levant after the Byzantines reconquered the region from the Persian Sasanian Empire and converted to Islam after the Muslim conquest in the 630s. Salibi holds that Mu'awiya also settled the Persians in the Kisrawan.Information about the Christians of the Kisrawan before the 12th century is scant, though the local, 19th-century chronicler Tannus al-Shidyaq held there was an organized Christian, likely Maronite, community governed by village headmen by the early 9th century. The modern historian William Harris asserts that the origins of the Kisrawan Shia community in the 12th–13th centuries "are shrouded in mystery, with no clues in Arabic chronicles". Twelver Shia Muslim communities may have been established in the Kisrawan and the bordering Byblos area to the north during the 10th century when Shia Islam was in the ascendant in Tripoli and the Islamic world at large. According to the historian Jaafar al-Muhajir, the Twelvers of Kisrawan were likely remnants of the Shias of Tripoli who relocated to the Kisrawan during or after the Crusader siege of Tripoli in the early 12th century.
Crusader period
During Crusader rule in Tripoli and Beirut, the Kisrawan was a rural borderland between the Crusader dominions along the Mediterranean coast and the Muslim states in the interior regions of the Levant. Its inhabitants were Twelver Shia, Alawite, Druze and Maronite tribesmen. The mountaineers of the Kisrawan acted independently of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which controlled Sidon and Beirut, and the County of Tripoli, as well as the Muslim rulers of Damascus, all of whom claimed control of the Kisrawan. The Maronite chiefs there likely cooperated with the Crusaders and were strongly allied with the Embriaci lords of Byblos, who were vassals of the count of Tripoli. The Islamic communities in the Kisrawan did not share the Sunni Muslim faith of the Damascene rulers and may not have been enthusiastic supporters of their cause against the Crusaders, possibly even cooperating with the latter, although there's no historical evidence or mention of such a cooperation in the chronicles of the time.Mamluk period
The Mamluks conquered Crusader Tripoli in 1289 and Beirut in 1291. According to the geographer al-Dimashqi, the region was part of the amal of Baalbek, which was part of the al-Safaqa al-Shamaliyya of Mamlakat Dimashq. According to Salibi, it was part of the amal of Beirut, part of the same region and province.Punitive campaigns
In the aftermath of the Crusader withdrawal from the Levant, the mountaineers of the Kisrawan frequently blocked the coastal road between Tripoli and Beirut and harassed passing Mamluk troops. The Mamluks launched a punitive campaign against them in 1292. It was led by Baydara, the viceroy of Egypt, the second highest-ranking official in the sultanate, after the commanders of Damascus expressed reticence fighting the experienced mountaineers in the region's narrow passes. Baydara was defeated and was able to withdraw his men only after bribing the Kisrawani chiefs.When the Mamluks were routed by the Mongols of the Ilkhanate at the Battle of Wadi al-Khaznadar near Homs in 1299, the mountaineers attacked and robbed Mamluk troops in their panicked flight through the Kisrawani coastal roads and the road between Beirut and Damascus. The Mamluks reasserted their position in the Levant in 1300 and took punitive action against the Kisrawan. Under the Damascus governor Aqqush al-Afram, the Mamluks routed the Kisrawani warriors and imposed heavy penalties on the inhabitants and their leaders. Kisrawani rebel activity resumed within a few years and Aqqush led a final, large-scale campaign against the mountaineers in 1305. Hundreds of fighters were slain and the Mamluks destroyed numerous villages, churches and vineyards, while massacring and displacing many of the inhabitants.
The Alawites of the Kisrawan were particularly hard hit in the 1305 campaign and thereafter disappeared from the historical record. Many Shia Muslim families were relocated to Tripoli and were permanently displaced from the coastal area. They remained the majority population in the Kisrawan, but their numbers never recovered. The Maronites also suffered significantly, but the displacement of Shia and Alawite communities eventually paved the way for Maronites from northern Mount Lebanon to settle in their place.
Establishment of the Turkmens
The Mamluks settled Sunni Muslim Turkmens in the coastal villages of the Kisrawan in 1306 to serve as a permanent direct guard for the government over the region and the road to Beirut. Their territory extended along the coastal region of the Kisrawan between Antelias in the south and Nahr al-Mu'amalatayn, just north of the Bay of Jounieh. The Turkmens were granted this territory as an iqta. Although iqta-holders in principle were only granted the right to an area's revenues as a salary and to provide for their troops, the Turkmens, like their Druze Buhturid neighbors to the south, held them on a practically inheritable basis.The Turkmens temporarily evacuated the Kisrawan for Ottoman-controlled Anatolia in 1366 to escape punishment by the Mamluks for failing to heed unspecified government orders. When the Circassian sultan Barquq was overthrown by the Turkish Mamluks who had previously ruled the sultanate in 1289, the Turkmens supported the Turks, while their Buhturid rivals backed Barquq. The Turkmens assaulted the Buhturid domains, killing 130 Buhturids and sacking their lands and houses in the Gharb area southeast of Beirut. Barquq retook the sultanate in 1390 and dispatched Arab tribesmen from the Beqaa Valley to attack the Turkmens, killing their leader Ali ibn al-A'ma. The Mamluks captured and soon after freed Ali's brother Umar, probably to not afford the Buhturids too much advantage from the Turkmens' losses.
Ottoman period
Assaf rule
The Ottomans conquered the Mamluk Sultanate in 1516–1517 and the Ottoman sultan Selim conferred on the Turkmen emir Assaf the inheritable lordship of the Kisrawan, as well as the neighboring Bilad Jubayl to the north of Nahr al-Mu'amalatayn, in return for annual payment. Administratively, the Kisrawan became a nahiya of the Sidon-Beirut Sanjak of the Damascus Eyalet. Through the following several years the Kisrawan experienced peace and prosperity while conditions in the Druze Mountain to its south were characterized by chaos and punitive expeditions by the Ottoman government. The Assafs ruled over the area with mildness and the government collected taxes at a relatively low rate. These conditions spurred increased resettlement of the region. Ottoman tax records indicate there were 28 villages in the subdistrict in 1523, rising to 31 in 1543.The tax records did not distinguish different Muslim groups from each other, nor different Christian denominations. In the 1523 records, the Kisrawan had a population of 391 Muslim households, 37 Muslim bachelors, 7 imams, and 198 Christian households and 21 Christian bachelors. The Christian population had grown substantially by 1530, with 297 households and 5 bachelors, while the Muslim population grew to 404 households and 103 bachelors, the number of imams decreasing to 3. By 1543, the Muslim population decreased to 377 households, 65 bachelors and no imams, while Christian households and bachelors rose to 372 and 34. According to the 17th-century Maronite historian Istifan al-Duwayhi, Shia Muslims from Baalbek moved to Faraya, Bekataa and Harajil, Sunni Muslims from the southern Beqaa Valley settled in Fatqa, Sahel Alma, Faitroun, Fiqqay, Aramoun and Jdeideh, while Druze from the Matn settled in Brummana and smaller hamlets. Christians from northern Mount Lebanon continued to migrate to the Kisrawan, with Maronites from al-Majdal moving to Aramoun and the Hubaysh family of Yanouh settling in Ghazir.
File:The village of faraya.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1|The village of Faraya in the Kisrawan was settled by Shia Muslims from Baalbek in the early 16th century
Assaf moved his headquarters to Ghazir; previously he divided his time between estates at Aintoura and Ain Shaqif. His move away from his Turkmen tribesmen's abodes closer to the coast, namely Zouk Mikael, Zouk Kharab, Zouk Mosbeh and Zouk Amiriyya, contributed to the estrangement between them and Assaf and his household. In Ghazir the Assafs cultivated ties with the Maronites, particularly the Hubaysh family, with Assaf and his sons Hasan and Husayn recruiting the Hubaysh brothers as their stewards and agents. The Hubayshes also acted as intermediaries between the Assafs and their Maronite subjects in the mostly Maronite Bilad al-Jubayl. After Assaf died in 1518 his youngest son Qaytbay killed Hasan and Husayn, drove out the Hubayshes, and took over the Kisrawan from his base in Beirut. Five years later Qaytbay died and Hasan's son Mansur, with the support of the Hubaysh family, took charge of the Kisrawan.
In the late 1530s, Sunni Muslim opposition against Mansur and the Hubayshes was raised in the Kisrawan by the Turkmen chief of Zouk Mikael, who was resentful at the neglect by the Assafs in favor of the Maronites, and the Arab chief of Fatqa from the Beqaa-based Hanash family. In 1541 Mansur had them both assassinated, effectively voiding the brewing opposition against Assaf–Hubaysh domination. The blow to the Hanash and Turkmens in the Kisrawan opened the door to further Maronite migration from the north. In 1545 Maronites from Jaj moved to the district, the ancestor of the Khazen family moved to Ballouneh, the Gemayel family moved to Bikfaya and the Kumayd family moved to the Ghazir area.
Assaf dominance over northern Lebanon, including the Kisrawan persisted through Mansur's death in 1580 and the first five years under his son and successor Muhammad. In 1585 the Ottomans launched a punitive expedition against the rural chieftains of Mount Lebanon. Muhammad was arrested and imprisoned in the imperial capital Constantinople but returned the next year. At that point his authority was expanded to include the tax farms for all the districts of northern Mount Lebanon, excluding the city of Tripoli. The governor of Tripoli and a former dependent of the Assafs, Yusuf Sayfa, was also the chieftain of Akkar and thus a fiscal subordinate of Muhammad. He resolved to eliminate the Assaf emir and take over his territory. He refused to pay his tax arrears and when Muhammad moved against him in 1591, Sayfa had him assassinated. Afterward Sayfa married his widow and took over Assaf properties in Ghazir and gained the tax farm of the Kisrawan. Hubaysh influence took a decisive blow, with Sulayman Hubaysh and his nephews Mansur and Muhanna arrested and executed by Sayfa. The Shia Hamade clan gained influence in their place under Sayfa rule.