The Emirate of Mount Lebanon is an autonomous subdivision in the Ottoman Empire.

The Emirate is considered to be an historical precursor of the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate established in 1861, which is, in turn, the precursor of the Lebanese Republic of today.

Historians have given different names to this entity: Shuf Emirate, Emirate of Jabal Druze, Emirate of Mount Lebanon, as well as Ma'an Emirate.

The boundaries are not well defined.

The town of Baakleen is the capital of the emirate during the Ma'an period until Fakhr-al-Din II chooses to live in Deir el Qamar due to a water shortage in Baakleen.

Dar el Qamar remainsthe capital until Bashir Shihab II ascends to the throne and makes Beiteddine the capital.

Beiteddine remains the capital of the Chouf District today.

Fakhr-al-Din II, the Druze prince and Lebanon's most prominent leader, is a strongman who is given leeway by the Ottomans to subdue and destroy other provincial leaderships in Ottoman Syria on their behalf, and who is himself destroyed in the end, to make way for a firmer control by the Ottoman state over the Syrian eyalets.

The 'emir' is thus the dominant warlord in the Lebanese mountains.

Fakhr al-Din establishes a subtle symbiosis between the Maronites of Kisrawan and the Druzes of the Shuf mountains.

After his downfall, the Ottomans try different ways to break up this symbiosis, but all efforts fail.

In the end, they return power to the Maans in the person of Ahmad al-Maani, the grandnephew of Fakhr al-Din, in 1667.

The Maan and Shihab government of different parts of Mount Lebanon, between 1667 and 1841, wis an Ottoman iltizam, or tax farm, rather than a dynastic principality, and the multazims are never reigning princes.

The relations between the Porte and the Shihab emirs revolve around the payment of taxes, and the official legitimation of their position as multazims.

Such is the precariousness of their position that over the more than three centuries of the two dynasties (1516–1840) only two significantly strong leaders emerge, Fakhr-Al-Din I (1516–1544) and his grandson Fakhr al-Din II (1591–1635).

Bashir Shihab II (1788–1840) is also an important prince but he is viewed as a tyrant at the period rather than a leader.]

That leads to the 1840 revolution against Bashir and his Egyptian allies.