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The Ma‘n Amīrs of Lebanon

Tenth century to 1109/sixteenth century to 1697

Southern Lebanon

The Banū Ma‘n were an Arab Druze family of feudal chiefs in the Shūf region of southern Lebanon who were prominent in political life under the Ottomans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Ma‘nids replaced the Buḥtur family of the Gharb when the Ottomans took over Syria in 922/1516, and members of the family now begin to have firm historical attestation. Fakhr al-Dīn II was a tax-farmer for the Ottomans and governor of the sanjaqs of Sidon-Beirut and of Safad. Through skilful political manoeuvring, in which he enlisted the help of the Maronites of Kisrawān and even of an external power like the Medici Dukes of Tuscany (he spent several years in exile in Italy), he eventually became master of most of Syria as far east as Palmyra and as far north as the fringes of Anatolia. These ambitions inevitably provoked an Ottoman reaction, leading to his military defeat and execution. Although a bloody tyrant, Fakhr al-Dīn II did improve agriculture and trade, with the aim of raising more revenue, and his inauguration of a tradition of Druze-Maronite cooperation was a factor in the subsequent formation of a Lebanese national identity, so that Lebanese have come to regard him, somewhat anachronistically, as the founder of their modern country.

After his death, his descendants retained what was in effect autonomy in Mount Lebanon by acting as governors there for the Ottomans, but the direct line of the Ma‘nids ended with Aḥmad b. Mulhim in 1108/1697, their power in the region being replaced by that of their kinsmen, the Banū Shihāb (see below, no. 33).

Zambaur, 109.

EI² ‘Fakhr al-Dīn’, ‘Ma‘n, Banū’ (K. S. Salibi).

Adel Ismail, Histoire du Liban du XVIIe siécle à nos jours. Le Liban au temps de Fakhr-ed-Dīn II (1590–1633), Paris 1955.

P. K. Hitti, Lebanon in History, London 1957.

P. M. Holt, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent 1516–1922: A Political History, Ithaca and London 1966, with a genealogical table at p. 311.