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The Kisrawan or Keserwan is a region between Mount Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast, north of the Lebanon 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 Maronites. 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 Mamluk Sultanate 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 depopulated villages in the region.
The Mamluks established Turkmens settlements in the coastal part of the Kisrawan to keep guard over the region. Their chiefs from the Assaf dynasty continued to rule the Kisrawan with the onset of Ottoman Empire 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 Hubayshes. 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.
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 Maronites, 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.
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.
The Turkmens temporarily evacuated the Kisrawan for Ottoman Empire-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.
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.
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 (the Byblos region). 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.
During the rebellion of Ali Janbulad of Aleppo, Fakhr al-Din allied with the rebels and took over the Kisrawan in 1606, following the flight of Sayfa from Tripoli. He installed Yusuf al-Muslimani as his deputy over the subdistrict. When Fakhr al-Din fled Mount Lebanon for Tuscany during an Ottoman punitive expedition in 1613, the Kisrawan was restored to the Sayfas by the commander of the expedition, Hafiz Ahmed Pasha. The following year a new province was established, the Sidon Eyalet, and its governor Bustanji Pasha attempted to wrest control of the Kisrawan but was repulsed by the Sayfas. The Sayfas permanently lost the district in 1616, when Fakhr al-Din's son Ali and brother Yunus, with Ottoman backing, defeated the Sayfas' Druze allies and caused Hasan Sayfa (Yusuf's son) to flee for Akkar. In 1621, Fakhr al-Din, who had since returned to Mount Lebanon, compelled Sayfa to relinquish to him his remaining properties in Ghazir and Antelias to settle Sayfa's mounting debt.
Abu Nadir consolidated Khazen control of the Kisrawan by purchasing large tracts of land there from the impoverished Twelver Shias of the district. His son Abu Nawfal continued his father's land acquisitions and, with his sons, was granted an extensive estate in the district by Sultan Mehmed IV in 1671. Moreover, Abu Nawfal gained the influential office of French vice-consul in Beirut in 1658 and again in 1662. His descendants held the office for considerable periods through the late 17th and early 18th centuries. During this period, Abu Nawfal divided his estate in the Kisrawan among his eight sons. The sons and their descendants mainly based themselves in the villages of Ghosta, Ajaltoun and Zouk Mikael, and to a lesser extent Daraoun and Sahel Alma.
Khazen domination of the Kisrawan facilitated its demographic transition into an overwhelmingly Maronite-populated region. Besides the tax collection rights the family obtained on a practically inheritable basis, the Khazens monopolized the silk trade in Kisrawan, fostering sericulture there and the migration of Maronite peasants from northern Mount Lebanon.
In early 1858, a group of peasants from the Kisrawan lodged a formal complaint against the Khazens to Khurshid Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Beirut. Later, in March 1858, the Khazens held a summit for the people of the Kisrawan to garner support for their nomination of a new qaimaqam. Instead, the peasants participating in the summit voiced their dissent against the Khazens and in October, several villages in the Kisrawan allied against the Khazen sheikhs. A muleteer and youths boss from Rayfoun, Tanyus Shahin, was chosen by this alliance of peasants as their leader in December, and was declared the wakil awwal (first delegate).
In January 1859, Shahin intensified the armed revolt against the Khazen sheikhs and with 800 of his peasant fighters, he besieged the Khazens during a summit they were holding in Ghosta. The siege prompted the sheikhs to flee the village, and the peasants under Shahin subsequently plundered the Khazens' estates. Shahin and his men proceeded to attack the Khazens in other villages with little blood spilled in the process, with the exception of the wife and daughter of a Khazen sheikh who were killed in Ajaltoun in July during a raid on their home by the peasants. The Maronite patriarch, Paul Peter Massad, condemned their killing as a "horrific crime". Silk and wheat warehouses belonging to the sheikhs were plundered and the goods were redistributed among the peasants of the Kisrawan. By July, the Khazens had been routed and between 500 and 600 family members had fled to Beirut in an impoverished state. Shahin broadened the peasants' main demands of tax relief and refunds for the illegal payments they had previously paid to the Khazen sheikhs to also include political and legal reforms. Shahin cited the Edict of Gülhane, which mandated equality for all Ottoman citizens.
Shahin declared a republic in the Kisrawan and a government composed of a 100-member council of representatives of the Kisrawan's villages, mostly peasants but also landowners and clergymen, presided by Shahin was established to govern the region backed by his 1,000-man militia. The republic was mainly supported by the villages of Rayfoun, Ajaltoun, Ashqout, Qleiat and Mazraat Kfardebian, and the headquarters was originally in Zouk Mikael before being relocated to Rayfoun. Opposition to the government was strongest in the villages of Ghosta, Aramoun, Ghazir and Ftuh. Shahin's star rose among the Christians of Mount Lebanon in general, who saw in him their defender against the Druze landlords and the traditional Maronite elites. In response to complaints of harassment of Shia Muslim villagers by local Christians in the region, Shahin assaulted and looted Shia villages in the Kisrawan and Byblos hills in late 1859.
In May 1860, Shahin's militiamen intervened on the side of Christian villagers in the neighboring Matn region to the south during clashes with their Druze counterparts. The tit-for-tat clashes spiraled into a full-scale civil war mainly between the Druze and the Christians of Mount Lebanon. Despite a proclamation that he could raise a 50,000-strong army for the Christian side, Shahin's militia mainly guarded their home region of the Kisrawan, while the Druze advanced against their Christian opponents elsewhere in Mount Lebanon. Under pressure by the Maronite Church and the Ottomans, Shahin practically disbanded his peasants' republic. The following year, after an international intervention ended the civil war, a rival Maronite leader, Youssef Karam, defeated Shahin at a battle between Rayfoun and Ashqout. They reconciled soon afterward and Shahin formally relinquished the republic.
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