Renaissance Emir: A Druze Warlord at the Court of the Medici

By T.J. Gorton

A groundbreaking biography of the mysterious Levantine prince Fakr ad-Din. The year is 1613: the Ottoman Empire is at its height, sprawling from Hungary to Iraq, Morocco to Yemen. One man dares to challenge it: the Prince of the mysterious Druze sect in Mount Lebanon, Fakhr ad-Din. Yielding before a mighty army sent to conquer him, he—astonishingly—takes refuge with the Medici in Florence at the height of the Renaissance. Fakhr ad-Din took along with him a diverse party of Moslem, Christian, and Jewish Levantines on their first visit to the “Lands of the Christians.” During his five-year stay in Italy, he fights to persuade Popes, Grand-Dukes and Viceroys to support a grand plan: a new Crusade to wrest the Holy Land from the Ottomans, giving Jerusalem back to Christendom and himself a crown. This groundbreaking biography of Fakhr ad-Din, Prince of the Druze, is based on the author’s vivid new translations of contemporary sources in Arabic and other languages. It brings to life one remarkable man’s beliefs and ambitions, uniquely illuminating the elusive interface between Eastern and Western culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Olive Branch Press
• Release date: Jul 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781623710538

T.J. Gorton

Ted Gorton taught Arabic at St Andrews University in Scotland and was an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and elsewhere, besides spending twenty-five years in the Middle East. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals, mostly about Hispano-Arabic poetry, and two volumes of Arabic poetry in translation. His last book was Lebanon: Through Writers’ Eyes. He lives in London and Gascony.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Prince of the Druze

An old, and haughty nation, proud in arms

Milton

The road from the coast near Beirut up to Deir al-Qamar is a windy one, steep inclines alternating with stomach-wrenching hairpin turns and unexpected, fleeting views back down to the Mediterranean, steadily receding as you climb. By the time you reach an altitude of about 600 meters (2000 feet), you feel the difference—and not just in your ears. The heat, dust and traffic of the coastal road are now far behind, and you find yourself transported to a region of parasol-pine-bristled mountains, terraced fields of vineyards, fruit trees and olive groves, red-roofed villages and rocky cliffs and caves. And hill-towns, some of them former capitals like Beit ad-Din or Deir al-Qamar, their regal Moorish palaces standing like stranded relics of a forgotten realm. Which, in a way, is what they are.

More than just the scenery has changed. If you speak Arabic, you will hear the difference in the speech of the people, who alone in the region pronounce an old consonant, a guttural q sound that other Levantines have softened to a glottal stop, like the lost t in the Cockney pronunciation of water. No one will fail to notice the older men in their baggy black trousers, white moustaches and white fez- or kepi-like headgear; the women, especially but not only older ones, with their headscarves and modest clothing, so different from the bling and miniskirts of Beirut. For you are in the Shouf, home of the Druze—and this is the story of their most famous prince.

*        *        *

It can never be easy to lose one’s father when one is only thirteen. The shock must be all the more devastating for a young man who suddenly finds himself the heir to a troubled legacy, a leadership position coveted by the grown-up and ruthless heads of rival clans. Add to this a war-torn neighborhood, a patchwork of ethnic and religious minorities living uneasily with each other and in a state of war with the great empire ruling their mountainous homeland, and you can begin to imagine the situation young Fakhr ad-Din Ma’n found himself in as spring came to Lebanon in 1585.

His mother, Sitt (Madame) Nassab, must have been acutely conscious of the danger. The Levant was and to a degree still is a society run by men, and the oldest male in her family was barely in his teens. Her husband had just been killed (or driven to suicide) by the Ottomans, his supposed suzerains; their army was in the process of laying waste the Druze country, burning villages and hunting down anyone in a leadership position. Sitt Nassab did the only thing she could to find a safe environment for her sons to grow up in—place them, secretly, with a trusted family of princes. Her choice (according to most accounts) was a judicious one—not one of their fellow Druze, but Christians.

Mount Lebanon had been peopled over the centuries by political and religious refugees who knew that the only defense against persecution lay in the unity and determination of the persecuted. Bonds of alliance and friendship had been forged across the sectarian lines which were—and remain—a primary badge of identity. Many of the Muslim inhabitants of the Middle East were descendants of former Christians who had converted in the wake of the Islamic conquest of the Byzantine Levant; the reasons for their conversion are well-documented: not the sword so much as the tax-breaks. A few Muslim clans and tribal groups also chose to change religious affiliation, opting for a Shiite or other splinter group rather than the official Sunni Muslim creed. A very few went further and adopted a faith that is not recognized by orthodox Muslim authority as Islamic at all, an apostasy that is formally prohibited by Islam. Fakhr ad-Din’s ancestors had done just that, centuries ago: but in the Middle East, nothing is as present as the past. Let us take a brief step back (say, five hundred years) for a bit of perspective.

The first two or three centuries of the second Christian millennium were an unstable time even by past Levantine standards. Seljuk Turks and the Fatimids of Egypt were fighting for control of lands which were nominally part of a Muslim Caliphate ruled from Baghdad. Then came the First Crusade, culminating in the bloody sack of Jerusalem in 1099. The campaigns of the famous Saladin turned the tide, but the last Crusader outpost at Acre was not taken until 1291. By that time the Mamluke slave-dynasty had replaced Saladin’s descendants in Cairo and extended their own rule up the Levantine coast. During this extended time of troubles, some indigenous tribes and clans found it both advantageous and possible to move to new territory, sometimes even to change religion.

One such tribal group appears, dimly, during this time. Called the banu ("sons of") Ma’n, they were reportedly of Kurdish origin—like the great Saladin himself. The Ma’ns moved from the torrid flatlands of Mesopotamia to the part of southern Mount Lebanon known as the Shouf sometime before 1120.⁵ They are mentioned as having taken part in at least one battle against the Crusaders, then disappear from the record for a century or two. They were probably Sunni Muslims, but they might have been Shia or belonged to a Shiite-leaning sect such as the ‘Alawis/Alevis or Yazidis. We do not know at what point convenience or fervor led them to follow the "Call" and convert to the Druze faith; by the time one actually knows more about them than the very patchy details mentioned above, they had long since done so. In Mount Lebanon they would stay, becoming so identified with the region that its name would later be called by theirs.

*        *        *

In the small hours of May 29, 1453, the Turkish armies of Mehmet the Conqueror swarmed at last into the breach they had blasted in the massive walls of Byzantium. To the east, the Mamluke state had already begun to crumble at its base, but it would totter on for another half a century. It was against the Mamlukes that Mehmet’s grandson Sultan Selim I, known in Turkish as Yavuz or Steadfast and in English as the Grim, turned his attention. The Mamluke sultan al-Ghawri, perhaps sensing the danger, entered his Levantine domains at the head of a large army. Selim had been fighting the Persians, and so was able to march southwards at very short notice and go head-to-head with another Muslim empire.

Selim’s moment came on August 23, 1516, at Marj Dabiq on the plains of Syria, a day’s march north of Aleppo. The Mamluke defeat was utter and decisive, their sultan losing both his kingdom and his life on the battlefield. The Ottomans in short order took possession of Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Tripoli and Damascus, meeting almost no resistance; Beirut, Sidon and Antioch all sent envoys to congratulate the new rulers

The Ottoman era had begun centuries ago in Anatolia and then the Balkans; now it had begun in the Levant as well. For the West, the upstart Muslim principality that had established a foothold in south-eastern Europe had morphed into a sprawling empire occupying the entire eastern and southern Mediterranean basin and its hinterland. Levantines like the Ma’ns and their neighbors found themselves from one day to the next owing allegiance to a dynamic Muslim power centered in nearby Constantinople, rather than to a declining sultanate ruled from Cairo.

Out of the Shadows

From their migration to Lebanon until just before the Ottoman conquest, the Ma’ns’ career is attested through incidental tidbits. The Damascene historian Ibn Tulun mentions an Ibn Ma’n arrested in 1499 by the Mamluke viceroy of Damascus.⁶ Then a Yunus ibn Ma’n is recorded as having died in 1512, buried with pomp as a "young man of reverence, power and dignity."⁷ His religion is not attested but he is assumed to have been a Druze.

Only in the (Christian) century of Fakhr ad-Din’s birth do we begin to find a relatively coherent trail to follow. Korkmaz (a Turkish name meaning "fearless") ibn Yunus Ma’n, perhaps the son of the Yunus who died in 1512 was one of several noble Druze emirs with large followings and land-holdings in the Shouf Mountains at the time of the Ottoman conquest of the Levant in 1516–17. Historians disagree about his pre-eminence or otherwise, and even his name, as well as about whether he submitted to and was confirmed in his domains by the new overlords. Whatever his role at the time of the conquest, his family were clearly leaders of a notable clan of some wealth and local influence.

Then, a few years later, we hear of another Yunus ibn Ma’n who was lured to Damascus, now capital of an Ottoman province, and executed; he would appear to be the son of the Korkmaz mentioned above, and the father of another Korkmaz, who would in turn become the father of the historical Fakhr ad-Din. The exact names are not finally established, but there was in all probability a Yunus-Korkmaz-Yunus-Korkmaz succession leading at last to Fakhr ad-Din, whose brother was named Yunus; and it may even have gone further back in the alternation of the two names, so that everyone for four or probably five generations was either Yunus ibn (son of) Korkmaz or Korkmaz ibn Yunus.⁸

Following his brilliant campaign against the Mamlukes, Selim returned to Constantinople in triumph only to find his finances terribly depleted by the war. The only way the Ottomans could hope to assert their newly-won suzerainty over the Levant was by keeping as much as possible of the old order intact. They thus relied on the existing hierarchy: princely families in non-strategic areas such as the Shouf were confirmed in their privileges, and continued being what they had been before: tax-farmers responsible for keeping the peace and sending regular tribute to Constantinople, as they had done to Cairo. Having received oaths of submission from the Lebanese emirs, he confirmed them in their fiefs, and imposed a light tribute on them.⁹

The Ottomans soon had cause to regret their initial conciliatory attitude towards the Druze, who were consistent in one thing: their determination to resist outside interference, especially when it came in the form of tax-collectors. Ensconced as they were in their mountain fastnesses, armed with the latest European muskets in contravention of direct orders from Constantinople, they were ready and able to riddle an advancing column of troops with deadly fire from above. Only an army of overwhelming numbers and firepower could overcome this tactical advantage. The new Ottoman rulers thought they had bought their peace with lenient terms. From the point of view of their new vassals, however, the well-worn Arabic proverb ana wa akhi ‘ala ibn ‘ammi; ana wa ibn ‘ammi ‘ala al-gharib ("My brother and I against our cousin; my cousin and I against the stranger") would prevail. Seldom have these mountain tribes shown the mutual solidarity they enjoyed during the first century or so of Ottoman rule.

Things got so out of hand at three junctures during the sixteenth century that an imperial assault was indeed mounted. Thus in 1523–4, Khurram (Turkish Hürrem) ibn Iskandar Pasha led an expeditionary force against the Shouf, and returned with "four loads of Druze heads"—presumably camel-loads—after burning most of the villages of the region.¹⁰ The uncertain religious status of the Druze at this time was clearly illustrated by a fatwa or bull issued by the Muslim Sheikh of Damascus, saying it was legal to kill Druzes and seize their property.

This was enough to subdue even the unruly Druze for a generation or so, but by 1576 the situation had once again deteriorated to the point that the Ottomans sent an army to re-assert their authority, and especially to confiscate the large numbers of firearms that the inhabitants were known to have been buying from European traders, in violation of numerous edicts. This time the Druze prevailed: the expedition returned decimated and empty-handed, an unforgivable affront to imperial prestige. Ottoman control of the Druze country was so tenuous for most of the sixteenth century, in fact, that a leading historian has called that century and part of the next "the Long Rebellion."¹¹

The ignominious expedition of 1576 was not forgotten, but there were many other demands on the armies and treasury of the Empire at that time, so retaliation did not come at once. Ten years later, it arrived with a vengeance. Ibrahim Pasha—Ottoman Governor of Egypt—was charged with executing a "final solution" against the rebellious Druzes. The sanguinary Pasha entered the Shouf in 1585 at the head of a force more appropriate for a siege of Vienna or war with Persia, inflicting the worst devastation and slaughter the region had ever seen. Ibrahim returned in triumph to Constantinople, with thousands of trophy heads, hundreds of live captives and cart-loads of muskets.

He did not succeed in capturing the chief enemy, Korkmaz ibn Ma’n, Fakhr ad-Din’s father, however. Korkmaz knew all too well what happened to rebelious vassals whom the Ottomans had taken the trouble to capture: his own father (Yunus) had been captured by the Ottomans, taken to Damascus and hanged. So it was a sort of family tradition, a fatal birthright.¹² On receiving Ibrahim’s summons to appear before him and account for his misdeeds, chiefly selling grain to the Franks (against one Ottoman law) and using the ill-gotten proceeds to buy firearms (violating another), he sent the following answer (in a period translation):

To the Lord of Lords, sovereign above the great ones, true mighty, the noble captain cousin to the grand lord, and worthiest among the elect of the Prophet Mahomet, the noble and most famous Lord Ebraim Bassa [Pasha], God give success to his haughty enterprises and prosperity in all his honor… But my hard fortune will not grant my the favor that I may come unto thee; for there are at this time present with thee three of mine enemies, who (I know well) being not contented to have always disquited and troubled my estate, they now seek to bring me into so great hatred with they heart, that if thou haddest me in thy hands, thou wouldst without consideration bereave me of my life… Besides this, my coming is also hindered by mine antient oath that I took; when being yet but a child, I saw mine own father so villainously betrayed by the murthering sword of Mustapha, being at that time the Bassa of Damascus; who under the color of unfeigned friendship, got him into his hand, and traiterously [sic] struck off his head… And therefore I neither can nor may obey the requests, and in that respect it grieveth me, that I shall seem disobedient unto thee, being in any other action, and in all my cogitations wholly addicted to do any service not only to thee, who art most worthy to be reverenced of far greater persons than I am, but also to every the least vassals of Amurath [Murad]. Thou will pardon me I hope…¹³

If Korkmaz really hoped his convoluted and patently insincere letter would secure a pardon, he was to be disappointed. Fleeing before the irresistible force as it advanced up the mountain, he hid in one of the caves at Niha. There he is reported to have died, and must have done so, for there is nothing further reliably recorded about him. One could speculate that he preferred to give himself death rather than face the ignominy of capture, and the sheer drop from the Niha caves certainly provided, then as now, convenient means for such an act. After all, the Druze believe that for them, death is followed by instant reincarnation in the body of a newborn Druze, a rather neat way of escaping one’s pursuers. Those he left behind had no neat alternative.

The Shouf was in ashes, its élite destroyed, its surviving peasantry in a desperate state. The young Fakhr ad-Din must have wondered whether he would ever see, or live to enjoy, his birthright as Emir of the Druzes—or indeed whether there was anything of it left to enjoy.

That he did so may be largely attributed to the intelligence and pluck of his mother, Sitt Nassab. She was one of a long line of Druze women of legendary strength and courage, before and after her: Taiba Ma’n, her husband’s mother; Sitt Hbous Arslan, who ruled her clan in the nineteenth century, "to the exclusion of several Arslan amirs qualified to occupy the position";¹⁴ and in recent times Sitt Nazira Jumblatt, the mother of Kamal, the brilliant and supremely enigmatic warlord, socialist and mystic. All Sitt Nassab’s pluck, however, might have been in vain but for the loyalty of Christian allies of her husband, the Maronite clan of al-Khazin, to whom the Druze widow turned for help. The head of the al-Khazins, Abu Nawfal, took the young prince (along with his younger brother Yunus) into his own household, where they were educated and grew to manhood alongside Abu Nawfal’s own son, Abu Nader; it is hardly surprising that the two older boys would become close despite the difference in their religions. There is an alternative (Druze) tradition of Fakhr ad-Din’s upbringing, which has him growing up in the household of his mother’s Tanukh relative, the Emir Saif ad-Din.¹⁵ Irrespective of which version is correct, the lifelong bond between him and the Khazins is not open to dispute—and such an unusual cross-sectarian bond is perhaps most easily explainable if he did grow up in their midst.

Before Fakhr ad-Din, the relationship between the Druze and the Maronites was already more complex than just a common cause between two minorities with a shared animosity towards the Turk. The Maronite sect first appeared in the sixth century AD, among farmers settled along the Orontes Valley in modern-day Syria, espousing first the Monophysite belief in the single nature of Christ (soon condemned as heresy), then the Monothelite compromise promoted by the Emperor Heraclius, which stressed the unity of His will. The Byzantines persecuted them; they preferred to leave their ancestral homes for a wilderness (the high valleys of Mount Lebanon), rather than give up their belief in the single nature of the will of Christ. They are nowadays in communion with Rome and deny ever having ascribed to Monothelitism. Today the Maronites are the dominant Christian sect in Lebanon (the President of the Republic is by convention always a Maronite). Fakhr ad-Din pursued a policy of active favoritism, encouraging the immigration into his Shouf heartland of these industrious peasants who contributed to his agricultural plans (especially the cultivation of mulberry-trees for silk production) as well as to his militia.*

The Heir Becomes Apparent

Fakhr ad-Din was "revealed" to his followers when he was about eighteen, presumably implying that he lived secretly at the al-Khazins’ (or just possibly Saif ad-Dins’) until then; he would assume effective and public authority three years later, in 1593. It would seem likely that his survival and expectation of eventual rule were something of an open secret, at least within the community, for there does not seem to have been any attempt to assert leadership over the Druze by anyone else. This is difficult to imagine in a society where "every man is a prince," in the words of the historian al-Muhibbi,¹⁶ unless all concerned in fact knew that the heir apparent was alive and steadily approaching maturity in the bosom of a prominent local family. While living with the al-Khazins—in that version—he reportedly applied himself to an intensive routine of martial and mental exercises in preparation for the day he would become Emir of the Druze.

A number of contemporary sources provide descriptions of his person and character. Physically, they all agree that he was short (his arch-enemies the Sayfas of Tripoli used to joke that "an egg could fall from his pocket without breaking," it was so close to the ground). If one abstracts the eyewitness physical descriptions from western travelers and local sources, one could say that he was: short, stocky, strong, cheerful, noble but unpretentious; with clear, bright eyes, a pug (or at least non-aquiline) nose and a dusky complexion. His hair and beard were black when he was young, but had turned quite white by the time he was fifty, making later visitors overestimate his age by a decade. He was an accomplished chess-player and horseman, with a keen interest in botany and astronomy. He had a prodigious appetite even in relatively old age.

Besides his native Arabic, he was fluent in Turkish and learned Italian well enough to be able to translate from it. The contemporary descriptions paint his character as: (unanimously) generous; also fearless and valiant in battle; merciful towards defeated enemies; true in friendship; beloved of the common people, sincere and upright; just in government but implacable, even harsh in the administration of justice. One westerner said that he was grasping and duplicitous in his dealings with foreign merchants, but this is an isolated comment in the face of much praise for his efforts to foster trade with the West.¹⁷

The first illustration (following Chapter 8) is the only surviving likeness thought to have been painted from life. The oil painting done at the Medici court by an unknown (French?) painter named Libleau, from which this etching was copied, has been lost despite searches carried out in Florentine and other galleries by, among others, me.¹⁸ The color portrait on the cover of this book is from a wax museum dedicated to him in his ancestral capital, Deir al-Qamar. Congenial as it is, the sculptor can only have relied on benign fantasy to create it.

A Very Personal Physician

The foreign resident of the Levant who knew Fakhr ad-Din better than any other was undoubtedly Eugène Roger. His presence at the court was, according to several accounts, by virtue of his status as "Personal Physician"to the Emir. What medical credentials this Franciscan friar might have had are unknown. He was obviously a close confidant, and was with his patron to the bitter end, that is, until he was taken into custody. His writings are infused with Christian missionary zeal and some assertions need to be taken with a degree of scepticism.

Roger gives us a description of the origins of the Ma’n family and their position. If this is not entirely factual, it is interesting in that it most probably reflects the version of events that Fakhr ad-Din himself wished to perpetuate. Roger was also the last westerner to report on Fakhr ad-Din during his lifetime.

The following is the "authorized version" of our Prince’s origins and early career, according to Friar Roger (in my translation):¹⁹

My third chapter deals with the Emir Fakhr ad-Din [Fechrreddin], prince of the Druzes, his life and the grand achievements which acquired for him that fame which spread out from Asia to Europe, and most particularly to our Kingdom of France…

Emir means Prince, and Fakhr ad-Din means Glory of the Faith. He was of the House of Maan, wherefor the Turks, Arabs and Moors called him Ibn Maan, that is, the Son of Maan. [ . . . ] They began by settling in the city of Beirut, which they restored and repopulated so that it took on its present aspect. Then they took control of Sidon, which was practically deserted, rebuilding its Castle and restoring the city walls, after which trading vessels from Christendom began trading there. Prince Fakhr ad-Din had a secure building constructed there, which they called a khan, with twenty-four rooms and vast storehouses and where merchants from Europe could safely stay [this is the Khan li-Franj which has recently been restored and opened to visitors as a museum].

The city was soon filled with a crowd of Moors, Greeks and Jews, who were attracted both by the active commerce and fertile land, as by the freedom which they all enjoyed in the practice of their respective religion.

Roger gives us a description of the prince he knew so well:

The Prince was of medium height, of ruddy complexion, with a sparkle in his eye.²⁰ His wit was subtle, his courage invincible; he was learned in Astrology and Physiognomy; it is held that his mother was a magician, and that she had initiated