Modern research indicates that the tribute caravan arrived intact and that the expedition was instead the culmination of Ottoman attempts to subjugate the Druze and other tribal groups in Mount Lebanon dating from 1518.

Tensions resumed in the 1560s as Druze and non-Druze local dynasties, particularly the Ma'ns, Assafs and Shihabs, acquired large quantities of prohibited firearms, which were often superior to those possessed by government troops.

Ibrahim Pasha was appointed to "rectify the situation" in the Levant in 1583 and launched the expedition against the Druze of Mount Lebanon in the summer of 1585 as a Porte-ordered diversion for his Constantinople-bound caravan.

He mobilised about 20,000 soldiers, including the Janissaries of Egypt and Damascus, as well as local chieftains, namely the Bedouin Mansur ibn Furaykh and Druze rivals of the Ma'ns.

The expedition and its aftermath marked a turning point in Ottoman governance of the Levant as local chieftains were thenceforth frequently appointed as sanjak-beys (district governors).

One such governor was a son of Qurqumaz, Fakhr al-Din II, who became the most powerful local force in the Levant from the time of his appointments to the sanjaks of Sidon-Beirut and Safad in the 1590s and 1602, respectively, until his downfall in 1633.

[1] Duwayhi's version attributes the cause of the campaign to a raid of the Constantinople-bound tribute caravan of Egypt's governor Ibrahim Pasha by bandits in Jun Akkar, a coastal area north of Tripoli.

[3] Their accounts were the principal source used for the event by the modern historians Peter Malcolm Holt, Abdul Karim Rafeq, Kamal Salibi and Muhammad Adnan Bakhit.

[4] Modern research by the historian Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn in the 1980s suggests that the Jun Akkar raid did not occur and that successive government–Druze hostilities from the 1520s onward culminated with the 1585 government expedition.

After Janbirdi declared himself sultan following Selim's death in 1520, the Ottomans stamped out his revolt and began to incorporate the Levant more firmly into the empire's structures.

[7] The Druze tribesmen of southern Mount Lebanon proved challenging for the authorities to pacify, and a provincial law code from Sultan Suleiman's reign (1520–1566) referenced them as a "misguided folk where each follows his own cult" and from whom tax collection was difficult.

Members of the community had to pretend to be of the Sunni Muslim faith to attain any official post, were occasionally forced to pay the jizya (poll tax) reserved for Christians and Jews, and were the target of condemnatory treatises and fatwas (edicts) by the ulema of Damascus.

[18] In an order by the Porte to the beylerbey of Damascus in August 1574, it is mentioned that the villagers of the Gharb, Jurd, Chouf and Matn owed tax arrears dating over twenty years and that the muqaddams (chieftains) of the Druze possessed large quantities of muskets; the muqaddams named in the order were the Ma'nid Qurqumaz, possibly the grandson of the above-mentioned Qurqumaz, the Tanukhid Sharaf al-Din and the non-Druze chieftains Mansur ibn Hasan of the Keserwan-based Assaf family and Qasim of the Wadi al-Taym-based Shihab family.

[19] The combined forces of the beylerbey of Damascus, the imperial Damascene Janissaries, the sanjak-bey of Tripoli, and an Ottoman fleet launched an expedition against the Druze that year, but they were unable to subdue and disarm them.

[21] In that year they were accused of collaborating with the Druze and Shia Muslims of the Safad Sanjak, south of Sidon-Beirut, and the Porte's order called for "get[ting] rid of [Qurqumaz] ibn Ma'n, whose trouble and evil deeds exceed all others".

[23] On 12 February 1585 an imperial order issued to the beylerbey of Damascus, Uveys Pasha, reaffirmed that Qurqumaz was "a rebellious chieftain ... who has gathered [around him] miscreants in the Druze community and done harm and mischief in the sanjak of Safad".

[24] Abu-Husayn views the constant state of rebellion by the Druze and the general insubordination of chieftains in parts of Syria where the government had been unable to exercise authority as the direct cause of Ibrahim Pasha's expedition.

[40] Fakhr al-Din combined lucrative commercial ties with the Italians, a privately funded army of sekbans (musketeers), and support from Ottoman officialdom, which he guaranteed through bribes and prompt payment of taxes, to establish himself as the most powerful chieftain of the Levant until his downfall in 1633.

About the same time the Porte also began to grant lands along the upper Euphrates valley to Ottoman officers and loyal Bedouin chieftains and in 1586 created the Rakka Eyalet all toward exerting greater control of the desert interior of the Levant.