In May 1918, a priest looked on in horror while a bishop fed barley to his horses pulling a ‘luxurious’ carriage. Amidst acute grain scarcity and starvation in Mount Lebanon, the bishop in question and other influential clergy had done little to relieve their parishioners’ suffering, even hoarding and selling grain destined for charity. Corruption also sullied the reputations of local, provincial and Ottoman officials and institutions. However, the end of the war found the Maronite Patriarch forced to borrow his means of transportation, despite being the most influential religious figure in the Mountain. The Patriarchate had acted decisively to relieve famine during WWI, sacrificing much of its wealth. Amidst a landscape of discredited political and clerical institutions, the Patriarchate emerged from the war emboldened and thus became the architect for the creation of Greater Lebanon in 1920. This paper will assess the Patriarchate’s moral and material position during the war, its subsequent relief efforts, and their impact on the creation of Lebanon. To the extent that historians have considered the impact of the WWI famine on Lebanon, their analysis has been limited to the years 1914-1918, without systematic consideration of its deeper sources or subsequent consequences. The analysis will situate the Patriarchate’s role in famine relief as a product of nineteenth-century environmental transformation. Before WWI, the silk economy enriched many in the Mountain while also destabilizing extant social and ecological relations. The Patriarchate had benefited from the silk economy materially while also becoming responsible for coordinating activity to resolve social instabilities resulting from its impacts. Karl Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ can aptly characterize this dialectic, which in many other places was resolved by centralizing governments. Lebanon’s social and environmental particularities meant that its confrontation with industrialization would not produce an ‘industrial-strength’ government (which might have mediated the severity of the famine through rationing). The paper will draw on significant research from the Maronite Patriarchate, French diplomatic archives, and several other repositories in Lebanon. The Patriarchate’s financial ledgers and correspondence, in particular, will underpin analysis of its mobilization of land and capital during the war, activities which positioned it as the de facto government of the Mountain. That reality would subsequently shape patterns of governance in Lebanon and would, crucially, hamper the consolidation of state power.