Emirate of Mount Lebanon

The Emirate of Mount Lebanon (Arabic: إِمَارَة جَبَل لُبْنَان) was a part of Mount Lebanon that enjoyed variable degrees of partial autonomy under the stable suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire between the mid-16th and the early-19th century. The town of Baakleen was the seat of local power during the Ma'an period until Fakhr-al-Din II chose to live in Deir el Qamar due to a water shortage in Baakleen. Deir el Qamar remained the seat until Bashir Shihab II ascended to the throne and moved its court to the Beiteddine palace. Beiteddine remains the capital of the Chouf District today. Fakhr-al-Din II, the most prominent Druze tribal leader at the end of the 16th century, was given leeway by the Ottomans to subdue other provincial leaderships in Ottoman Syria on their behalf, and was himself subdued in the end, to make way for a firmer control by the Ottoman central administration over the Syrian eyalets. In Lebanese nationalist narratives, he is celebrated as establishing a sort of Druzes–Maronite condominium that is often portrayed as the embryo of Lebanese statehood and national identity. Historians and intellectuals such as Salibi and Beydoun have questioned many of these assumptions, suggesting a more balanced and less ideological approach to this period.

The Maan and Shihab government of different parts of Mount Lebanon, between 1667 and 1841, was an Ottoman iltizam, or tax farm, rather than a dynastic principality, and the multazims were never reigning princes. The relations between the Porte and the Shihab emirs revolved around the payment of taxes, and the official legitimation of their position as multazims. Such was the precariousness of their position that over the more than three centuries of the two dynasties (1516–1840) only two significantly strong leaders emerged, Fakhr al-Din II (1591–1635) and Bashir Shihab II (1788–1840).Although Lebanese nationalist historiographies tended to portray the Emirate as a sort of historical precursor of the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate established in 1861, later historians and intellectuals such as Kamal Salibi and Ahmad Beydoun have contested these narratives, and argued that the devolution of functions to local rulers was nothing exceptional in the framework of indirect administration in Ottoman Syria.