The Mountain and the Sultan

In the summer of 1292, a column of three thousand elite Mamluk cavalry rode north along the Lebanese coast and disappeared into the mountain gorges above Byblos. They did not come back as they had arrived. The highland communities of Kisrawan — Twelver Shia, Alawite, Druze, and Maronite — had assembled ten thousand fighters in the limestone ravines above the coastal road and sent the sultan's soldiers home in humiliation. It was the beginning of a thirteen-year conflict that would end in one of the most consequential acts of demographic violence in the medieval Near East. The Mountain and the Sultan tells the full story of the Kisrawan campaigns of 1292–1305: the three Mamluk expeditions that targeted the autonomous highland communities of central Mount Lebanon, the multi-confessional resistance confederation that twice defeated imperial power, and the scorched-earth campaign of 1305 that destroyed that world entirely. It follows the Alawite community into the silence of its complete eradication, the Shia communities into displacement and eventual scholarly renaissance in Jabal Amel, and the Maronite settlers who moved southward over the following centuries into the cleared highland landscape. The confessional map of modern Lebanon — the Maronite heartland, the Shia south, the Druze mountain — was made, in significant part, by the decisions and catastrophes of these thirteen years. This is the story of how it happened.