![]() ![]() A mountainous terrain is an ideal refuge from the mainstream, except that your enemy is the other refugee competing for the same type of rugged real estate. While the cities were mercantile and mostly Hellenistic, the mountains had been settled by all manner of religious minorities who claimed to have fled both the Byzantine and Moslem orthodoxies. ![]() This millennium of peace was interrupted only by small occasional friction within Moslem and Christian communities, rarely between Christians and Moslems. ![]() ![]() The Levantine cities were mercantile in nature people dealt with one another according to a clear protocol, preserving a peace conducive to commerce, and they socialized quite a bit across communities. The place resembled major cities of the eastern Mediterranean (called the Levant) more than it did the other parts in the interior of the Near East (it was easier to move by ship than by land through the mountainous terrain). For more than a millennium the eastern Mediterranean seaboard called Syria Libanensis, or Mount Lebanon, had been able to accommodate at least a dozen different sects, ethnicities, and beliefs - it worked like magic. ![]()
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