The 1860 civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, also known as the 1860 Christian–Druze war, was a civil conflict in Mount Lebanon during Ottoman rule in 1860–1861 fought mainly between the local Druze and Christians.
Following decisive Druze victories and massacres of the Christians, the conflict spilled over into other parts of Ottoman Syria, particularly Damascus, where thousands of Christian residents were killed by Druze fighters and local Muslim groups. The fighting precipitated a French-led international military intervention.
Background
Before 1840, the relationship between the Druze and Christians in Mount Lebanon had often been characterized by patterns of coexistence and interdependence within a hierarchy not defined by religion, but structured by rank. This hierarchy worked through a shared political culture in which social position determined one's rank, and was not based on religious affiliation. Both Christian and Druze elite families shared a culture of lordship and often allied against their own commoners (ahali). After the Shihab dynasty converted to Christianity, the Druze lost most of their political and feudal powers.
On 3 September 1840, Bashir Shihab III was appointed emir of the Mount Lebanon Emirate by the Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid I, succeeding his distant cousin, the once-powerful Bashir Shihab II. Geographically, the Mount Lebanon Emirate corresponded with the central part of present-day Lebanon, which historically has had a Christian and Druze majority. In practice, the terms "Lebanon" and "Mount Lebanon" tended to be used interchangeably by historians until the formal establishment of the post-World War I Mandate of Lebanon.
In 1839, the Ottoman Empire issued the Gülhane decree, thereby launching the Tanzimat reforms that promised equality for all subjects. This decree left enough room for parties to interpret "equality" differently. These reforms, alongside European intervention and local political mobilization, contributed to the transformation of an older order based primarily on rank into a political system increasingly structured around sectarian representation.
The sultan deposed Bashir III on 13 January 1842 and appointed Omar Pasha as governor of Mount Lebanon. Representatives of the European powers proposed to the sultan that Mount Lebanon be partitioned into Christian and Druze sections. On 7 December 1842, the sultan adopted the proposal and asked the governor of Damascus to divide the region into two districts: a northern district under a Christian deputy governor and a southern district under a Druze deputy governor. The arrangement came to be known as the "Double Qaimaqamate". Both officials were to be responsible to the governor of Sidon, who resided in Beirut. The Beirut-Damascus highway was the dividing line between the two districts.
While the Ottoman authorities pursued a divide-and-rule strategy, various European powers established alliances with the various religious groups in the region. The French established an alliance with the Lebanese Christians, while the Druze formalized an alliance with the British, allowing them to send Protestant missionaries into the region. These alliances were built on decades of earlier European travel writing and missionary activity. The increasing tensions led to an outbreak of conflict between Christians and Druzes as early as May 1845. Consequently, the European great powers requested for the Ottoman sultan to establish order in Lebanon, and he attempted to do so by establishing a new council in each of the districts. Composed of members of the various religious communities, the councils were intended to assist the deputy governor.
Historiography
Historians differ on the underlying causes of the war. Some argue that the war was a reaction of ancient hatred or antagonism. However others argue that this oversimplification is harmful and that the sectarianism that fueled the war was actively produced by the interaction of Ottoman reform (Tanzimat), European intervention and competition among local elites during the 1820-40s.
Makdisi argues that European accounts (Charles Churchill, Baptistin Poujoulat) and later French colonial historiography (Henri Lammens) portrayed the 1860 war as evidence of an "age-old" and irrational sectarian hatred, obscuring the role of European and Ottoman policy in producing the sectarian order after 1840. Ottoman and Turkish republican historians largely echoed this framing while defending Fuad Pasha's repression. Local Arabic-language chroniclers, mostly Christian clergy and notables, tended instead to interpret the violence as a "plot" against their community, downplaying the popular and autonomous character of movements like Tanyus Shahin's. Twentieth-century Lebanese nationalist historians (George Antonius, Philip Hitti, Asad Rustum, Kamal Salibi) initially read 1860 as a "dark point" preceding national awakening, a framework later revisited after the 1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War by historians such as Salibi and Georges Corm. Makdisi's own thesis — that nineteenth-century sectarianism was historically produced rather than a survival of ancient hatreds, and that it prefigured, rather than corrupted, Lebanese nationalism — has become a widely cited reference point in later scholarship on the events of 1860.
Leadup to war
The system failed to keep order when the peasants of Keserwan, overburdened by heavy taxes, rebelled against the feudal practices that prevailed in Mount Lebanon. In 1858, Tanyus Shahin, a Maronite Christian peasant leader, demanded for the feudal class to abolish its privileges. However, Historian Ussama Makdisi argues that the Kisrawan uprising was less a straightforward tax revolt than a crisis over the meaning of communal representation: the insurgents "represented themselves rather than allowed themselves to be represented", framing their demands for equality based on the Tanzimat rather than of class grievance alone. Elite and Ottoman observers, in turn, dismissed the rebels as juhhal ("ignorants"), a label that delegitimized their claim to autonomous political action.
In January 1859, an armed uprising, led by Shahin, was launched against the Maronite Khazen muqata'jis (feudal lords) of Keserwan. Khazen lands were pillaged and homes burned. After driving the Maronite feudal lords out of Keserwan and seizing their land and property, the insurgent peasants organized local committees/representatives (wakils) and administered local affairs. The Keserwan uprising had a revolutionary effect on other regions in Lebanon. The disturbances spread to Latakia and to central Mount Lebanon. Maronite peasants began to prepare for an armed uprising against their Druze lords. While some village clergy supported or participated, the patriarchate primarily urged calm and attempted mediation, since the Maronite Church was institutionally caught between its role as representative of the Maronite community and as proponent of the old social hierarchy that the peasants were rebelling against. In turn, the Druze lords, who had been hesitant to confront the growing assertiveness of the Maronite peasantry due to the numerical imbalance in the Maronites' favour, began to arm Druze irregulars.
In August 1859, a brawl occurred between Druze and Maronites in the Metn area in the Christian sector of the Qaimaqamate (more about the events in Beit Meri at "Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate: 1860 civil war"). The dispute enabled Maronite bishop Tobia Aoun to mobilise his Beirut-based central committee to intervene in the matter. Soon, a Druze muqata'ji of the Yazbaki faction, Yusuf Abd al-Malik, and his fighters intervened in a brawl between young Maronite and Druze men in the vicinity of the Metn village of Beit Mery, which resulted in 20 fatalities. The Druze lords began making war preparations, allegedly in co-ordination with the local Ottoman authorities, while Bishop Aoun oversaw the distribution of weapons to Maronite peasants. According to the historian William Harris, the Christians of Mount Lebanon felt "buoyed by their local numerical superiority, yet despondent because of the hostile Muslim mood in Syria" in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire's reforms.
In March, April and May 1860, numerous acts of murder, looting and skirmishing took place across the mixed Christian-Druze districts of southern Mount Lebanon in the Druze-run sector of the Double Qaimaqamate. According to the historian Leila Terazi Fawaz, the initial acts were "random and unpredictable enough to seem more the acts of lawless men than a calculated war against other sects, especially since banditry was always part of the objective".
In March, the father of a Catholic monastery in Aammiq was murdered and the monastery looted, and soon, a Druze man from Ainab allegedly murdered a Christian man from Abadiyeh. Those acts fuelled a cycle of revenge attacks that significantly increased in frequency by April.
In April, two Druze men were murdered in the vicinity of Beirut, followed by the killing of three Christians outside of Sidon. Two Christians from Jezzine were murdered at Khan Iqlim al-Shumar by Druze from Hasbaya on 26 April, and the next day, another four Christians were murdered in Katuli. On 11 May, Christians from Katuli murdered two Druzes at the Nahr al-Assal River, and three days later, two Druzes from Chouf were murdered near Sidon. The tit-for-tat killings continued, rendering most of the roads of Mount Lebanon unsafe for travellers.
Makdisi argues that this early violence also began to reshape the social geography of Mount Lebanon. Areas appeared in which Christians were afraid to travel and others where Druzes and Muslims feared entering, weakening older cross-confessional ties and increasingly associating security with communal separation.
Around the end of May, Christians reported to the European consuls that killings of their co-religionists occurred in the districts of Beqaa, Arqub and Gharb. The Maronite clergy communicated to one another their increasing concerns on the violence and the need to end it, but some clergymen believed that the cycle of retaliatory attacks would not stop.
With Maronite militias launching raids into Metn and Shahin's forces making incursions into the Gharb area west of Beirut, the Druze muqata'jis held a war council in Moukhtara in which the Jumblatti factions and their more hawkish Yazbaki counterparts agreed to appoint Sa'id Jumblatt as their overall commander.
According to historian Ussama Makdisi, the increasingly secterian mobilisation did not produce internally unified Chirstian and Druze blocks. Neither did Bishop Tobia Aoun nor Sa'id fully controlled the events on the ground, and commoners frequently defied the orders of the elites who claimed to represent their communities.
Civil war in Mount Lebanon and environs
Outbreak of war
Most sources put the start of the war at 27 May, while the British consul considered 29 May the actual start of full-fledged conflict. The first major outbreak of violence occurred when a 250-strong Maronite militia from Keserwan led by Taniyus Shahin went to collect the silk harvest from Naccache, but instead of returning to Keserwan, proceeded to Baabda in the al-Sahil district near Beirut. The local Druze leadership considered the Maronite mobilization at Baabda to be a provocation to the Druze in the mixed Metn district, while the Maronites saw the garrisoning of Ottoman troops under Khurshid Pasha near Naccache on 26 May as a prelude to a Druze assault. The Ottoman garrison established itself at Hazmiyeh with the support of the European consuls in order to bring order to Mount Lebanon. The Maronites considered this a threat since they viewed the Ottomans as allies of the Druze. However, the true motivations of the Maronite mobilization remain unclear. As historian Ussama Makdisi points out, whether their mobilization was "in response to Druze provocations or was the cause of Druze aggression is not, and probably will never be, known."