The Ottoman Empire at least nominally ruled Lebanon from its conquest in 1516 until the end of World War I in 1918. The Ottoman sultan, Salim I (1516–20), invaded Syria and Lebanon in 1516. Salim I, moved by the eloquence of the Lebanese ruler Amir Fakhr ad Din I (1516–44), decided to grant the Lebanese amirs a semiautonomous status. The Ottomans, through the Maans, a great Druze feudal family, and the Shihabs, a Sunni Muslim family that had converted to Christianity, ruled Lebanon until the middle of the nineteenth century. It was during Ottoman rule that the term Greater Syria was coined to designate the approximate area included in present-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine.