nds of the Arslan family,
which, however, suffered so severely in wars with the Franks, that it
was superseded by the Tnuhs, who, holding Beirut and nearly all the
Phoenician coast, came into conflict with the sultans of Egypt. One of
these latter, Malik Ashraf, about A.D. 1300, forced outward compliance
with Sunni Islam on the Mountain, after defeating the Druses at Ain
Sofar. Meanwhile, however, the _Maan_ family, lately immigrant from N.
Arabia, was growing in power, and throwing in its lot with the Osmanli
invaders in the reign of Selim I., it was promoted to the supreme
amirate about 1517. Fakr ud-Din Maan II. increased Druse dominion until
it included all the N. Syrian region from the edge of the Antioch plain
to Acre, with part of the eastern desert, dominated by his castle at
Tadmor (Palmyra), and the important towns of Latakia, Tripoli, Beirut
and Saida; and forming further ambitious designs, he intrigued with
Christians and broke with the Turks. In 1614 the pasha of Damascus moved
against him with a large force, and compelled him to fly from Syria. He
sought the courts of Tuscany and Naples and tried to enlist Frank
sympathies, inventing (probably) the curious myth, so often credited
since, that the Druses are of crusading origin and owe their name to the
counts of Dreux.[1] He landed again at Saida in 1619 and recovered his
old position. But in 1633 Kuchuk Ahmed Pasha was sent against him with a
large army, and succeeded in capturing him with his sons. The family was
sent to Constantinople, and two years later strangled. The dynasty
struggled on till the end of the century, amid civil war, in which the
parties seem to have been divided by the earlier Arab factions of
Kaisites (Qaisites) and Yemenites, the Maan belonging to the latter.

The Shehab family, originally Hira Arabs, which had governed Hauran
under the early caliphs of Damascus, and thereafter held power in
Hermon, intermarried with the Maan; and in the latter's day of weakness
sided with the Kaisi faction and obtained the supreme amirate of the
Mountain. But it appears never to have professed the Druse creed,
remaining Sunnite. Haidar Shehab, third of the line, inflicted a notable
defeat on the pasha of Saida (capital of an Ottoman eyalet since 1688)
and the Yemenite Druses at Ain Dara, near Zahleh, in 1711, and proceeded
to consolidate Shehab power, breaking up the old feudal society and
substituting for the sheikhs _mukatajis_ (tax-contractors), w