In A.D. 461, the churches of Egypt, Syria, and Armenia separated from the Church of Constantinople, over the Monophysite controversy on the single divine or single compound nature of the Son; in 634 the struggle with Mahometanism began; in 676 the Maronites of Lebanon formed a strong sect, which, in 1182, joined the Roman Church.

What care I where Kasheed Hassoun stables his camel?" Maloof shouldered his way up to him, and grasping the Maronite by the beard muttered in Arabic: "Thou dog!

He was a Maronite from Lebanon, and he and his had a feud with Hassoun, Majdalain, and all others who belonged to the sect headed by the Patriarch of Antioch.

Similarly, it was France who intervened in the Syrian massacres of 1845, who landed troops for the protection of the Maronites in 1860, and established a protectorate of the Lebanon there a few years later, which lasted up till the outbreak of the European War.

In 1860 Turkish troops joined with the Druses and fell upon the Maronites with wholesale massacres that spread as far south as Damascus, where ten thousand Christians were killed in two days.