[2][3] Tobia Aoun was born in December 1803 in a small village along the banks of the Damour River in Lebanon, under the Maronite Patriarchy of Joseph VII Peter Tyan.

With the death of Patriarch Joseph Peter Hobaish on 23 May 1845, a synod was convened but did not meet until August due to the sectarian violence destabilizing Mount Lebanon in the early stages of the Double Qaimaqamate government.

[14] The British envoy to Lebanon Sir Hugh Rose made the following description of Tobia Aoun on 9 September 1844: "Bishop Tubia is a violent, ambitious person of a Fellah family in the mixed district.

[23] Sir Hugh Rose explains on 12 January 1842 that "Bishop Tubia assembled the Christian deputies, both lay and clerical, and made them sign on the 10th ultimo a "Hedjé", a writing by which they bound themselves to petition the Porte for a Prince of the House of Shehab, taking, moreover, an oath, that whoever violated it should be answerable both with his life and his property to the remainder (an Arab formula)".

[24] As attested by the British Consul in Beirut Mr. Wood to Her Majesty's Secretary Henry John Temple Viscount Palmerston, Bishop Tobia played an active diplomatic role in establishing a new governing body for Lebanon following the 1840–1841 Civil War.

In a letter dated 7 September 1841, Mr. Wood states: "Soon after my arrival, I received the visit of the Maronite Bishop Tubia, who was sent by the Patriarch to felicitate me, and to communicate to me the prelate's sentiments respecting the new arrangement to be made and the concessions granted by the Sublime Porte to the inhabitants of Lebanon".

[25] On 2 September 1841, the Maronite Patriarch wrote to Mr. Wood: "I send you Monsignor Tubia to converse with you, and to discuss this matter...I have again written to him, recommending him to communicate to you the impossibility of accomplishing your wishes".

[25] On 27 March 1842, Sir Hugh Rose wrote to Lord Aberdeen that "Bishop Tubia, in January, on an alarm of his arrest by the Turks, requested an asylum in my house, should it prove to be correct".

[29] Sir Hugh Rose states that Bishop Tobia declared: "Let the Druze, as a first step, restore at once all the plundered personal and moveable property still in their hands; and, secondly, let them engage to aid the building of such houses as were burnt by them.

[31] Rose affirmed in the same letter that "Bishop Tubia has given indication that his sternness is pliable; there have been secret requests on his part for permission to import corn duty free for his own house".

In genuine calculated colonial strategy, their sentiments often shifted according to geopolitical alliances, with the Protestant British often at odds with the Bishop, and the Catholic French applauding his humanitarian and diplomatic efforts.

The Franco-Maronite alliance, over a thousand years old, reached a culminating point in 1860 when Napoleon III dispatched 6000 French soldiers to Beirut in protection of the Maronites, essentially occupying Mount Lebanon with the approval of the Ottoman authorities.

Khurshid Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Sidon, claimed "that at the beginning of the war, Maronite priests stirred up their parishioners by promising them that the French fleet would come to their assistance".

[32] For the Ottomans, European agents and local Maronites were responsible for enticing the war, with the ultimate goal of re-establishing a strong pro-European Christian government for Lebanon.

[34] According to American Protestant missionary Henry Harris Jessup in Fifty-Three Years in Syria, Bishop Tobia was "the man who next to the Patriarch had done more than any other Maronite to precipitate this awful civil war".

[36][37] In the Missionary Herald, the official paper of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Jassup writes of Aoun on 14 March 1865 : "The Notorious Maronite Bishop came to (Baabda) with a swarm of priests, dispensing indulgences in accordance with the Pope's encyclical letter".

[43] On 18 January 1861, Lord Dufferin wrote Henry Bulwer, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, that during the Civil War the rebel Maronite leaders "were encouraged and countenanced in their excesses by Bishop Tobia and some of his brother ecclesiastics".

[44] In the British "Journal of the Foreign Affairs Committees" dated 4 December 1861, Tobia Aoun and the Maronite bishops are described as "unprincipled, ambitious priests",[45] guilty of "wickedness and audacious treason".

[45] On 16 September 1860, the French general Auguste-Alexandre Ducrot wrote of Aoun: "I received today the visit of a figure who has, for many years, played a great role in all the affairs of Lebanon: it is Mgr.

[46] An 1862 publication on the history of Lebanon states that Bishop Tobia was responsible for the conversion to Catholicism of Medjid Shehab, grandson of the famed Prince Beshir II.