The Kisrawan campaigns were a series of Mamluk military expeditions against the mountaineers of the Kisrawan, as well as the neighboring areas of Byblos and the Jurd, in Mount Lebanon. The offensives were launched in 1292, 1300 and 1305. The mountaineers were Shia Muslim, Alawite, Maronite and Druze tribesmen who historically acted autonomously of any central authority. The Maronites in particular had maintained close cooperation with the last Crusader state, the County of Tripoli. After the fall of Tripoli to the Mamluks in 1289, the mountaineers would often block the coastal road between Tripoli and Beirut, prompting the first Mamluk expedition in 1292 under the viceroy of Egypt, Baydara. During that campaign, the Mamluks, spread along the coastal road and cut off from each other at various points, were constantly harried by the mountaineers, who confiscated their weapons, horses and money. Baydara withdrew his men only after paying off the mountain chiefs.
The second campaign was launched in 1300 to punish the mountaineers for attacking and robbing Mamluk troops retreating along the coastal road following their rout by the Ilkhanate at the Battle of Wadi al-Khaznadar the year before. The viceroy of Damascus, Aqqush al-Afram, defeated the Kisrawani fighters in a number of engagements, after which they conceded, handed over the weapons they had confiscated in 1292 and paid a heavy fine. Persistent rebellion by the mountaineers led Aqqush to lead a final punitive campaign against the Kisrawan in 1305, which caused mass destruction of villages and the killings and mass displacement of its inhabitants.
After the final expedition, the Mamluks settled Turkmen tribesmen in the coastal parts of the Kisrawan to keep a permanent, direct presence in the region. The Alawites fared particularly badly, and were no longer mentioned inhabiting the Kisrawan in the historical record. The Twelver Shia remained the largest confessional group, but their numbers never recovered. While the Maronites were also dealt heavy human and material losses, they were not the principal targets of the campaign. During early Ottoman rule (1516–1917), Maronites became the predominant religious group in the Kisrawan due to migration there from northern Mount Lebanon. Their settlement was patronized by the Turkmen Assaf governors of the region.
In modern Lebanese historical narratives, the Kisrawan campaigns have been a source of controversy by historians from different religious groups. Maronite, Shia and Druze historians have each sought to emphasize the roles of their respective confessional group, over each other, in defending the autonomy of the Kisrawan from Mamluk outsiders. In writings by Sunni Muslim authors, the Mamluks are portrayed as the legitimate Muslim state working to incorporate Mount Lebanon into the rest of the Islamic realm.
Background
The Kisrawan is the area of Mount Lebanon extending from Beirut in the south to the Ibrahim River (Nahr Ibrahim) in the north. In the 12th century it had a tribal and religiously mixed population of Maronite Christians, Twelver Shia Muslims, Alawites and Druze.
Information about the Christians of the Kisrawan before the 12th century is scant, though in the 9th century there was evidently an organized Christian, likely Maronite, community governed by village headmen. The Christians of Mount Lebanon had been tolerated under the Levant-based Umayyad caliphs (660–750), but became a source of suspicion to the Iraq-based Abbasid caliphs, who toppled the Umayyads in 750. The distance of Mount Lebanon from the central government and renewed assaults by the Byzantines, viewed as natural allies of the Christians, contributed to Abbasid anxieties. In response, the Abbasids installed Muslim emirs from the Tanukh tribe in the hills around Beirut, south of the Kisrawan, to strengthen their authority in the region in the mid-8th century. Under Muslim rule, Christians were mandated to pay the jizya, a form of poll tax, though its actual collection in Mount Lebanon was likely done on an inconsistent basis. In response to an Abbasid tax levy in 759, the Christians in the Munaytara region immediately north of the Kisrawan revolted against the government, in coordination with the Byzantines. It was severely suppressed by the Abbasids with heavy rebel casualties and large-scale deportations. A number of the deportees were allowed to return after the intervention of the Muslim theologian Abd al-Rahman al-Awza'i of Beirut. Further tax rebellions by Christians, presumably inspired by Byzantine military gains against the Caliphate, occurred in 791 and 845.
From 860, Mount Lebanon and the Levant in general no longer came under direct Abbasid rule except for a short revival in the 10th century. Instead, a host of Muslim rulerships prevailed in all or part of the Levant, including the Sunni Muslim Tulunids and Ikshidids in the late 9th–early 10th centuries, followed by the Twelver Shia Hamdanids and Ismaili Shia Fatimids in the late 10th–early 11th centuries. Twelver Shias were well established in close-by Tripoli by the late 10th century. Twelver communities may have been established in the Kisrawan and the bordering Byblos area to the north during the same time period, though Shia-leaning Muslims may have been present as early as the Umayyad period or entered following the deportations of Christians in 759. According to the historian Ja'far al-Muhajir, pro-Alid and Shia-leaning Muslims, represented by the tribes of Hamdan and Madh'hij in local tradition, could have settled in nearby Dinniyeh to the north after the Hasan–Muawiya treaty in 661. The Druze religion, which branched off of Isma'ili Shia Islam in the early 11th century, gained adherents among people in Mount Lebanon and its environs, including much of the Tanukh settlers in the hills east of Beirut. Certain aspects of the faith, such as transmigration of souls between adherents, were viewed as heretical and foreign by Sunni and Shia Muslims, but contributed to solidarity among the Druze, who closed their religion to new converts in 1046 due to the threat of persecution.
The regional order changed with the conquest of the interior regions of the Levant by the Sunni Muslim Seljuks in 1071. The emirate of Tripoli along the coast adjacent to Mount Lebanon, ruled by a family of Twelver Shia jurists since 1065, and the Tanukhs, maintained their autonomy amid Seljuk internal squabbles. The Fatimids resumed control of Byblos and other coastal cities before the end of the century, but Tripoli remained independent. In 1109, the Latin Christian Crusaders, having already captured Palestine to the south and the north Levantine coast, conquered Tripoli, a process they had started from 1102. Northern Mount Lebanon thereafter became part of the County of Tripoli.
The Maronites of the Kisrawan maintained close relations and cooperated with the Crusaders, who abolished the jizya. Maronite mountaineers had lent their support to the siege of Tripoli. The Shia communities may also have been on better terms with the Crusaders than with the Sunni Muslim rulers of Damascus, or at least were not enthusiastic supporters of their cause against the Crusaders. The historian William Harris asserts that the origins of the Kisrawan Shia community in the 12th–13th centuries "are shrouded in mystery, with no clues in Arabic chronicles". However, according to al-Muhajir, the Twelvers of Kisrawan were likely remnants of the Shias of Tripoli who relocated to the Kisrawan during or after the Crusader siege of Tripoli. Ibn al-Athir relates that Tripoli was heavily pillaged, many of the inhabitants were killed and their treasures were seized, and many others fled to different places to avoid the Crusaders' attacks. The mountaineers of the Kisrawan, regardless of religious confession, did not recognize the authority of either the Crusader states or Damascus, and their territory remained outside of either's control.
In 1187–1188, Beirut and Byblos fell to Saladin, founder of the Sunni Ayyubid dynasty, but the cities reverted to Crusader possession in 1197. In 1266–1268 and 1283, the Sunni Mamluks, who had succeeded the Ayyubids in Islamic Syria in 1260, raided the Maronite countryside of Tripoli, namely the mountains of Bsharri and Byblos, both north of the Kisrawan. Several villages were plundered and their inhabitants killed. The Mamluk sultan Qalawun () likely intended to suppress the potential resistance of the Maronite mountaineers of Tripoli's hinterland in preparation of his planned siege of the city. Tripoli was captured in 1289 and the last Crusader outposts along the coast fell within the next three years. The Mamluks reinstated the jizya obligations.
After the conquest, the Kisrawan remained a "lawless terrain" between the Mamluk provincial capitals of Damascus and Tripoli, according to Harris. The new rulers remained on guard for potential seaborne Crusader assaults on the Levantine coast in the west and joint military offensives with the Mongols, who were established north and east of the Mamluk empire. While the mostly Christian or non-Sunni Muslim-populated mountain regions between the coast and the interior plains of the Levant were not treated with suspicion as potential Crusader allies by the Mamluks, the Kisrawan's inhabitants were viewed differently. The Druze in the hills south and east of Beirut allied with the Mamluks. Neither the Twelver Shia of Jabal Amil further south nor the Alawites in the hills east of Latakia in the north lived within the strategic Damascus–Tripoli–Beirut corridors. The Maronites in northern Mount Lebanon had already been pacified by the Mamluks. All of these mountain communities had opposed the Crusaders at point or another, while the non-Sunni and Maronite mountaineers of the Kisrawan had never been in conflict with them. According to Harris, the "anomaly" that the Kisrawan presented with regard to its strategic location and historically Crusader-friendly population, "predisposed the Mamluks to military action".
1292 campaign Following the withdrawal of the Crusaders, the Mamluks launched a punitive expedition against the mountaineers of the Kisrawan and the landlocked Jurd area immediately to its south in July 1292. The medieval Muslim historians identify the mountaineers as Twelver Shia, Alawites and Druze, though the late 15th-century Maronite historian Gabriel ibn al-Qilai mentions only Maronites. The Mamluk chronicle of Badr al-Din al-Ayni (d. 1453) is considered "the best account" of the campaign by Harris. Al-Ayni held that Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil () ordered the operation in response to the mountaineers' blockading of the coastal road between Beirut and the Kisrawan. The Mamluk commanders in Damascus, to whom the task was charged, were wary of combating large numbers of battle-hardened mountaineers in the narrow passes of the Kisrawan.
In response to Damascene reticence, the sultan commissioned his Egypt-based viceroy Badr al-Din Baydara, who led a 3,000-strong army northward through the Levantine coast until reaching the Kisrawan. The mountain warriors who met the Mamluk cavalries numbered around 10,000. Upon the Mamluks' arrival, Maronite villagers rang their church bells to alert their muqaddams ("chiefs"), who met and drafted attack plans. Accordingly, men were stationed at the river gorges of Nahr al-Fidar and Nahr al-Madfoun, the southern and northern natural boundaries of the Byblos area immediately north of the Kisrawan.