Deir el Qamar remained the seat until Bashir Shihab II ascended to the throne and moved its court to the Beiteddine palace.

[1] The Maan and Shihab government of different parts of Mount Lebanon, between 1667 and 1841, was an Ottoman iltizam, or tax farm, rather than a dynastic principality, and the multazims were never reigning princes.

[4] Such was the precariousness of their position that over the more than three centuries of the two dynasties (1516–1840) only two significantly strong leaders emerged, Fakhr-Al-Din I (1516–1544) and his grandson Fakhr al-Din II (1591–1635).

[5] Although Lebanese nationalist historiographies[citation needed] tended to portray the Emirate as a sort of historical precursor of the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate established in 1861, later historians and intellectuals such as Kamal Salibi and Ahmad Beydoun have contested these narratives, and argued that the devolution of functions to local rulers was nothing exceptional in the framework of indirect administration in Ottoman Syria.

[5] In general, the tax-farming system meant that the multazims always served at the sultan's pleasure, and given this degree of insecurity they would try to collect as much tax as they could, within the limits of the taxpayers' physical ability to pay.

[5] The Ottomans divided the territories they conquered from the Mamluks into wilayas, sanjaks and nahiyas, and assigned qadis and military governors to the larger administrative divisions.

The family had not been prominent under the Mamluks, but was strong enough under the Ottomans to be in charge of dividing the tax-farms assigned to it among a number of lesser local notables.

In 1598, as the wars between the Safavids and the Ottomans broke out again, he was also appointed governor of the Sanjak of Safad, which gave him direct control over the pro-Safavid Shiites of Jabal Amil.

[5] In an attempt to achieve independence for Lebanon, he concluded a secret agreement with Ferdinand I of Tuscany, pledging to support each other against the Ottomans.

[7] Fakhr al-Din temporarily abdicated in favour of his brother Yunus and his son Ali, and spent the next five years in exile in Europe.

[7] When he returned to Lebanon he ruled more or less unchallenged for the next fifteen years, as the Ottomans were too engrossed in their wars with the Safavids to give any serious attention to the situation.

[1] Eventually, however, the Wāli of Damascus, Kücük Ahmed Pasha, was despatched at the head of an army against Fakhr al-Din, who was defeated, captured and taken to Istanbul, where he was executed in 1635 along with Yunus and Ali.

The Shihab (or Chehab) family was somewhat unusual in a region politically dominated by Druze dynasties, as they were nominally practitioners of Sunni Islam.

The Shihab emirs were appointed as multazims of their territories on an annual basis, and their position in this respect was always precarious, yet they remained at the top of the feudal hierarchy.

Also, the Druze formed an alliance with Britain and allowed Protestant Christian missionaries to enter Mount Lebanon, creating tension between them and the native Maronite Church.

[4] Milhim repeatedly succeeded in avoiding the payment of the regular amount of taxes to the Ottoman authorities, and in 1748 the governor of Damascus launched a punitive expedition against him.

Bashir openly acknowledged that he was a Christian but at the same time he respected his Muslim subjects reminding them of Qureishi roots of Shihab princes.

[3] When Ibrahim Pasha moved his army into Syria in 1831, Bashir II offered his allegiance to the Egyptian forces and was granted extensive authority over much of Lebanon.

He used his power to channelize taxes to create an effective military and administrative structure, which were extremely unpopular measures for a portion of the Lebanese feudal chiefs that led to wide-scale revolts by Druze and Christian tribal groups which he successfully suppressed.

Not long after his appointment the new emir called the principal Druze families to Deir el Qamar to discuss his tax policies.