Palestine]
more pronounced after the Imperial Restoration in France, whose colonial designs grew more suspect. In 1847 a serious tumult between Latins and Greeks in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem had resulted in favour of the Greeks, but led to the return of the Latin Patriarch in partibus to Jerusalem, and of a French ConsulGeneral to support him. Four years later, when Louis Napoleon was in power as President, a Commission was demanded to report on the whole question of encroachments by the Orthodox Church upon ancient rights of French-protected Latins in the Holy Places of Palestine. The Russian Tsar had already revived his eighteenth-century claim to protect politically all Christians of the Eastern Rite in the Ottoman Empire. Was a similar claim to the Latins, based on French Capitulations, now in the mind of Louis Napoleon? The Porte desired one Protectorate as little as the other, and the Commission of 1851 was brought to nought. But two years later, a reiteration and definition of the Russian demand, with a stipulation for substantial guarantees, promising the greater danger, threw the Sultan into the French Emperor's arms, and brought on the Crimean War.
Effects of Crimean War; Confusion in Syria.—This war, far away though it was waged, had an evil influence on Syria. With heavy recruiting of the settled peasantry, and withdrawal of the better garrison troops, the newly-established Ottoman peace began everywhere to break down. Travellers who penetrated rural Syrian districts in the middle 'fifties bear witness to a general growth of insecurity and lively fear of nomads and mountaineers. The Metawalis were in open rebelliom in the Buka'a and the northern Lebanon. In 1854 Ismail Bey, of the Metawara tribe of the Ansarie, succeeded in restoring his mountains to their pre-Egyptian independence for several years. Homs and Hama remained in a state of siege for months; and the neighbourhood of Damascus was as unsafe as that of Aleppo had been before Ibrahim's
