Lordship of Sidon in the context of "Norwegian Crusade"

The principality of Galilee was one of the four major seigneuries of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, according to 13th-century commentator John of Ibelin, grandson of Balian. The direct holdings of the principality centred around Tiberias, in Galilee proper, but with all its vassals, the lordship covered all Galilee (now Israel) and southern Phoenicia (today Lebanon). The independent Lordship of Sidon was located between Galilee's holdings. The principality also had its own vassals, the lordships of Nazareth and Haifa.

The principality was established, at least in name, in 1099 when Tancred was given Tiberias, Haifa, and Bethsan by Godfrey of Bouillon. In 1101, Baldwin I limited Tancred's power by giving Haifa to Geldemar Carpenel, and Tancred was forced to give up the principality and become regent in Antioch. The principality became the fief of the families of St. Omer, Montfaucon (Falcomberques), and then Bures, and its main seat was in Tiberias; thus it was sometimes also called the Principality of Tiberias or the Tiberiad. The principality was destroyed by Saladin in 1187, although the title was used by relatives and younger sons of the kings of Cyprus (the titular kings of Jerusalem) afterwards, and some of its former holdings were briefly reclaimed by a treaty made during the Barons' Crusade.

The Ma'n dynasty (Arabic: ٱلْأُسْرَةُ ٱلْمَعْنِيَّةُ, romanized: Banū Maʿn, alternatively spelled Ma'an), also known as the Ma'nids; (Arabic: ٱلْمَعْنِيُّونَ), were a family of Druze chiefs of Arab stock based in the rugged Chouf area of southern Mount Lebanon who were politically prominent in the 15th–17th centuries. Traditional Lebanese histories date the family's arrival in the Chouf to the 12th century, when they were held to have struggled against the Crusader lords of Beirut and of Sidon alongside their Druze allies, the Tanukh Buhturids. They may have been part of a wider movement by the Muslim rulers of Damascus to settle militarized Arab tribesmen in Mount Lebanon as a buffer against the Crusader strongholds along the Levantine coast. Fakhr al-Din I (d. 1506), the first member of the family whose historicity is certain, was the "emir of the Chouf", according to contemporary sources and, despite the non-use of mosques by the Druze, founded the Fakhreddine Mosque in the family's stronghold of Deir al-Qamar.

Two years following the advent of Ottoman rule in the Syrian region in 1516, three chiefs of the Ma'n dynasty were imprisoned for rebellion by the Damascus Eyalet governor Janbirdi al-Ghazali, but released by Sultan Selim I. The Ma'ns and their Druze coreligionists in the Chouf were continually targeted in punitive campaigns by the Ottomans related to their evasion and defiance of government tax collectors and their stockpiling of illegal firearms, which were often superior to those of the government troops. The particularly destructive 1585 Ottoman expedition against the Druze prompted the Ma'nid emir Qurqumaz ibn Yunis to go into hiding in the neighboring Kisrawan, where he died the following year.