His Income Amounts, At Most, To Four Hundred
Purses, Or About £10.000.
Sterling, after deducting from the revenue of
the mountain the sums paid to the Pashas, to the Sheikh Beshir, and to
the numerous branches of his family.
His favourite expenditure seems to
be in building. He keeps about fifty horses, of which a dozen are of
prime quality; his only amusement is sporting with the hawk and the
pointer. He lives on very bad terms with his family, who complain of his
neglecting them; for the greater part of them are poor, and will become
still poorer, till they are reduced to the state of Fellahs, because it
is the custom with the sons, as soon as they attain the age of fifteen
or sixteen, to demand the share of the family property, which is thus
divided among them, the father retaining but one share for himself.
Several princes of the family are thus reduced to an income of about one
hundred and fifty pounds a year. It has constantly been the secret
endeavour of the Emir Beshir to make himself directly dependent upon the
Porte, and to throw off his allegiance to the Pasha; but he has never
been able to succeed. The conduct of Djezzar Pasha was the cause of this
policy. Djezzar, for reasons which have already been explained, was
continually changing the governors of the mountain, and each new
governor was obliged to promise him large sums for his investiture. Of
these sums few
[p.200]were paid at the time of Djezzar's death, and bills to the amount
of sixteen thousand purses were found in his treasury, secured upon the
revenue of the mountain. At the intercession of Soleiman Pasha,who
succeeded Djezzar at Akka, and of Gharib Effendi, the Porte's
commissioner (now Pasha of Aleppo), this sum was reduced to four
thousand purses, of which the Emir Beshir is now obliged to pay off a
part annually.
By opposing the Druse parties to each other, and taking advantage of the
Christian population, a man of genius and energy of the Shehab family
might perhaps succeed in making himself the independent master of the
mountain. Such an event would render this the most important government
in Syria, and no military force the Turks could send would be able to
overthrow it. But at present the Shehab appear to have no man of
enterprise among them.
The Shehab marry only among themselves, or with two Druse families, the
Merad [Arabic], and Kaszbeya [Arabic]. These and the Reslan [Arabic],
are the only Emir families, or descendants of the Prophet, among the
Druses. These Emirs inhabit the province called El Meten. Emir Manzour,
the chief of the Merads, is a man of influence, with a private annual
income of about one hundred and twenty purses.
I shall now subjoin such few notes on the Druses as I was able to
collect during my short stay in the mountain; I believe them to be
authentic, because I was very careful in selecting my authourities.
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