page_title: Tyre, Lebanon
section_title: French influence zone (from mid-19th c. on)
hierarchical_section_title: Tyre, Lebanon / History / Ottoman period (1516–1918) / Rise and rivalry of the feudal Zu'ama / French influence zone (from mid-19th c. on)
caption_attribution_description: English: The harbour of Tyre, Southern Lebanon, between 1898 and 1914, from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection at the US Library of Congress
context_page_description: Tyre is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, though in medieval times for some centuries by just a tiny population. It was one of the earliest Phoenician metropolises and the legendary birthplace of Europa, her brothers Cadmus and Phoenix, as well as Carthage's founder Dido. The city has many ancient sites, including the Tyre Hippodrome, and was added as a whole to UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 1984.
  The historian Ernest Renan noted:
  One can call Tyre a city of ruins, built out of ruins.
  Today Tyre is the fifth largest city in Lebanon after Beirut, Tripoli, Aley and Sidon, It is the capital of the Tyre District in the South Governorate. There were approximately 200,000 inhabitants in the Tyre urban area in 2016, including many refugees.
context_section_description: For their fight against the Egyptian invaders, Al-Mahmud and his successor Ali al-As'ad – a relative – were rewarded by the Ottoman rulers with the restoration of Shiite autonomy in Jabal Amel. However, in Tyre it was the Mamlouk family that gained a dominant position. Its head Jussuf Aga Ibn Mamluk was reportedly a son of the Anti-Shiite Jazzar Pasha (see above).
  Meanwhile, the Egyptian occupation had opened the door for European intervention in Ottoman affairs through various Lebanese communities. Thus France under Napoleon III and its allied Maronite leaders increased their influence across Lebanon from the mid-19th century onwards.
  When the Emperor of the French thus sent an expeditionary corps of some 7,000 troops to Beirut during the 1860 Mount Lebanon civil war between Druze and Maronite groups, he also commissioned first archaeological excavations in Tyre that were undertaken by Ernest Renan. After his departure irregular digging activities disturbed the historical sites.
  In the same year, the Greek-Orthodox church of Saint Thomas was consecrated near the Greek-Catholic Saint Thomas Cathedral. Around the same time, the Latin-Catholic church of the Holy Land was established by the Franciscan order.
  In 1865, Jabal Amel's ruler Ali al-As'ad died after a power struggle with his cousin Thamir al-Husain.
  In 1874, the Bavarian historian and politician Johann Nepomuk Sepp led a mission to Tyre to search for the bones of Frederick Barbarossa. The expedition had the approval of Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the German Empire, and openly pursued ambitions to establish a German colony. While Sepp and his team failed to discover Barbarossa's remains, they did excavate the ruins of the Crusader cathedral and took a number of archaeological findings to Berlin where they were exhibited. For their excavations, Sepp and his team had some 120 people evicted, though with some compensation, with the support of local authorities.
  According to Sepp, Tyre had some 5,000 inhabitants in 1874. A traveller from the US, who visited Tyre around the same time put the number at maximum 4,000, about half of them Shiites and half Catholic Christians, with "a sprinkling of Protestants." In 1882, the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition founded a school at the Western sea side of the Christian quarter.
  Meanwhile, the 1858 Ottoman Land reforms led to the accumulated ownership of large tracts of land by a few families upon the expense of the peasants. While the Al-As'ad descendants of the rural Ali al-Saghir dynasty expanded their fief holdings as the provincial leaders in Jabal Amel, another power player rose from the urban class of the mercantilist notables ("Wujaha' ") to the rank of Zu'ama (feudal landlords) in Tyre:
  
  The grain merchant al-Khalil family would go on to play a dominant role in the city for more than a century. It was reportedly a branch of one of the main dynasties in Jabal Amel, the Zayn family in Nabatieh, and connected to another feudal clan, the Sidon-based Osseirans, by marriage:
  "According to one source, they were supported by the ulama in their climb to prominence in an effort to undermine the unpopular dominance of the Sunni al-Mamluk family of that city." 
  
  It was
  "a 'dark age' of ignorance and feudalism; it was a time when the masses, al ama, were terrified of their masters and landlords, of the Ottoman Officialdom, a time when the flock [..] took life as 'slavery and obedience."
  As a result of this mass-impoverishment, many inhabitants of Tyre and Jabal Amil emigrated in the 1880s to West Africa.
  In 1906, construction of the Maronite cathedral of "Our Lady of the Seas" near the modern harbour was finished. It was built on the foundations of an older church.
  The 1908 Young Turk Revolution and its call for elections to an Ottoman parliament triggered a power-struggle in Jabal Amel: on the one hand side Rida al-Sulh of a Sunni dynasty from Sidon, which had sidelined the Shia Al-As'ad clan of the Ali al-Saghir dynasty (see above) in the coastal region with support from leading Shiite families like the al-Khalil clan 
caption: Tyre harbour pre-WWI, American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department, US Library of Congress
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