This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mount Lebanon had been governed since the 1840s under the double qaimaqamate, a power sharing system dividing the territory into a Christian and a Druze administrative district, and rising tension over land, the silk economy and rival French and British patronage of the two communities broke that arrangement into open Druze-Maronite fighting in May 1860. The fighting killed thousands, overwhelmingly Christian, and destroyed hundreds of Maronite villages and churches before it spread to Damascus in July, where a local Muslim mob, joined by some irregular fighters and met with little effective resistance from the city's Ottoman governor, attacked the city's Christian quarter over several days.
Amid the Damascus killing, the exiled Algerian resistance leader Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi, then living in the city, sheltered thousands of Christians inside his own residence, an act of protection still commemorated in Lebanon and Syria today. Damascus's Christian victims were chiefly Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic residents rather than Maronites, a distinct community from the one under attack in the mountains, evidence that the summer's violence, though confessionally patterned throughout, was not a single uniform conflict wearing two names.