The Hamadas' reign over Mt Lebanon in the later seventeenth century epitomized the Ottoman state's regularization and co-optation of parochial forms of self-government in the provincial periphery. The imperial administration was not only prepared to ignore their socio-religious deviance, but actively promoted the Hamadas and similar tribal groups as its taxation and police deputies over extensive, otherwise inaccessible hinterland areas. This concord between local Shiite notables and the state began to unravel during the critical period of external crisis and domestic reform that characterized the last decades of the century. The Hamadas' attack on Tripoli in September 1685 to liberate the guarantors of their iltizam contracts heralded almost fifteen years of punitive expeditions, counter-raids and generalized instability in Tripoli and beyond. The Hamadas entered this conflict as the most powerful taxlord dynasty of the eyalet if not the entire Syrian coastlands; the massive Ottoman military campaign of 1693–4 left them physically broken and politically dependent on the paramount Druze emirs of Sidon and, increasingly, their Maronite subalterns. This revolt is detailed not just in several local chronicles but in a large extant corpus of Ottoman chancery decrees and in at least three imperial histories, making it the single best-documented episode in the history of Ottoman Shiism.

The interest of the Shiites' rebellion, this chapter argues, goes beyond the narrative significance of its events, in that it bespeaks several longue-durée ruptures in the domestic, regional and imperial governance of the western coastal highlands.