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 commissary at his side when he was resisting Napoleon at Acre, and the Shehab Emir never failed to pay to the Imperial Treasury at Constantinople a proportion (even excessive) of the miri (land-tax), which he extorted in triplicate, and sometimes quadruplicate, out of his feudatories.

Feudalism was, and continued to be, the dominant social feature throughout Syria. It was a feudalism of ancient prescription, centred not, as in Asia Minor, upon families sprung from Household officers of the Ottoman Sultan or commissaries of the Porte and enriched by the exercise of Imperial functions, but on chiefs who held power in virtue of descent from families originally preferred by popular selection or their own arms. We have ample evidence of its universal prevalence, whether the feudal unit was tribe, district, town, village, or clan; but we happen to know it best in the Lebanon, as it was in the time of Emir Beshir Omar el-Shehab, whose long reign covered intermittently all the period from 1788 to 1840. The paramount power of the Shehabs was based at the first on Druse tribal feudalism, to which the family, though originally Arabs of Hira, had obtained a claim by marriage with the greater family of Ma'an. It came to be supported and confirmed by a vassalage, not of birth so much as appointment-by a whole hierarchy of mukatajis, who contracted for taxes and had penal powers. As a result, the old feudalism of birth was subjected in the eighteenth century to a new feudalism, identical in character with that most often found in the Anatolian Dere-Beyliks, but sanctioned by a paramount Emir, not an Ottoman Sultan. In disgust at this change, a large section of the Druses emigrated to the Hauran; but a strong remnant remained in Lebanon under the chiefs of the Jumblatt and Yezbeki families. This kept Druse feudalism alive, and prepared a day of reckoning with the Christian elements in the mountain, who not only accepted the new feudalism, but secretly incorporated the Emir in their own religious circle. About 1820 the