of Tripoli, and the Pasha of Acre appropriating Gaza permanently and Damascus now and then. Really, three-quarters of Syria had very little to say to these rulers. All lying to the north, north-east, and north-west of the Aleppo oasis, including the towns of Killis, Aintab, and Marash, was in the hands of independent Aghas and Beys, mostly Kurds or Turcomans, the latter paying tribute and some sort of allegiance to the great Dere-Bey family of Chapanoghlu at Yuzgad, in Cappadocia. West to the Orontes, down the river almost to Antioch, and up it nearly to Hama, ruled three self-made princelings, seated in Edlib, Jisr Shogr, and Kala'at el-Mudik; while Antioch itself and Alexandretta were obeying only their own Aghas, and Kuchuk Ali, the Kurdish lord of Payas, held all the north-western angle. South of Antioch to within sight of Acre the whole length of the mountain country was autonomous, the Ansarie, under the Fakker house of Safita, and the Ismailiya admitting no Ottoman officer to the northern half, and the Shehab Emir of the Lebanon none, except as a guest, to the southern half. The Buka'a and most of AntiLebanon were at the discretion of the Emir of Baalbek, a Metawali. All the Trans-Jordan lands, except the Nukra Plain in the Hauran, kept outside Ottoman control, and so also did parts of western Palestine, for example the Nablus district, the Ghor, and the neighbourhood of Hebron. Needless to say, the Syrian deserts, east and south, remained untouched by Ottoman power. This list of exceptions leaves little to the direct rule of the pashas beyond the immediate neighbourhoods of Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus: the littoral strip from Latakia to Gaza (with many interruptions); Galilee and parts of Samaria and Judaea. Nor even there was their rule always effective. Burckhardt's account of Aleppo in his time, torn between sherifs and janissaries. often without a pasha at all. besieged more than once by its pasha (when it had one) from a neighbouring hillock. and defied by Kurds and Turcomans at its very gates, illustrates better than
