Always conspicuous among the great families of the Lebanon, during
the last century and a half preeminent, has been the House of Shehaab,
possessing entirely one of the provinces, and widely disseminated and
powerfully endowed in several of the others. Since the commencement of
the eighteenth century, the virtual sovereignty of the country has been
exercised by a prince of this family, under the title of Chief Emir. The
chiefs of all the different races have kissed the hand of a Shehaab; he
had the power of life and death, could proclaim war and confer honours.
Of all this family, none were so supreme as the Emir Bescheer, who
governed Lebanon during the Egyptian invasion, and to whose subdolous
career and its consequences we have already referred. When the Turks
triumphed in 1840, the Emir Bescheer was deposed, and with his sons sent
prisoner to Constantinople. The Porte, warned at that time by the too
easy invasion of Syria and the imminent peril which it had escaped,
wished itself to assume the government of Lebanon, and to garrison the
passes with its troops; but the Christian Powers would not consent to
this proposition, and therefore Kassim Shehaab was called to the Chief
Emirate. Acted upon by the patriarch of the Maronites, Kassim, who was a
Christian Shehaab, countenanced the attempts of his holiness to destroy
the feudal privileges of the Druse mookatadgis, while those of the
Maronites were to be retained.
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