ABSTRACT
After an introduction to the early history of the Maronites, Chapter 1 of this study begins in the fifteenth century, when the growing presence of the Jacobite Church in Lebanon led sections of the Maronite community to doubt their historic union to Rome. It explores how these doubts were countered by the Franciscans of the Holy Land, above all by the Maronite Franciscan Gabriel ibn al-Qilāʿī. It then shows how al-Qilāʿī’s letters and poems were re-interpreted by seventeenth-century Maronite historians such as Stefanos al-Duwayhi, creating the idea of a perpetual union between Rome and the Maronites that is still debated today.
