Mardaites

"Marada" redirects here. For other uses, see Marada (disambiguation).
Mardaites
Main areas under Mardaite control in the Levant, c. 7th century A.D.
Regions with significant populations
Levant, Anatolia, the Balkans
Languages
Unknown; possibly Syriac, Armenian, or an Iranian language
Religion
Christianity
Related ethnic groups
Maronites,[1] Greeks,[2] South Slavs,[2] Albanians[3]

The Mardaites (Medieval Greek: Μαρδαΐται) or al-Jarajima (Syriac: ܡܪ̈ܕܝܐ; Arabic: ٱلْجَرَاجِمَة/ALA-LC: al-Jarājimah) were early Christians following Catholicism in the Nur Mountains. Little is known about their ethnicity, but it has been speculated that they might have been Persians (see, for a purely linguistic hypothesis, the Amardi, located south of the Caspian Sea in classical times) or Armenians, yet other sources claim them to have been Greeks native to the Levant[4] or possibly even from the Arabian peninsula.[5] Their other Arabic name, al-Jarājimah, suggests that some were natives of the town Jurjum in Cilicia; the word marada in Arabic is the plural of mared, which could mean a giant, a supernatural being like Jinn, a high mountain or a rebel.

The argument that the Mardaites were Greek,[4] is supported on two facts. Firstly, their loyalty to the Greek emperors in Constantinople: If they were Maronites they would not have obeyed (as they did) his orders to make war or peace with the new Muslim Arab conquerors. The same argument is made against being Muslim Arab renegades. They would not exhibit such fierce loyalty to an Greek emperor. Linguistic evidence also supports this theory. The name Mardaites is found in use in areas of the Byzantine empire at least until the 10th century. It was synonym to apelates, seen in Greek folk and epic poems (akrites). Finally, indicative of their ancestry and locality is that after the peace treaty was signed between the Byzantines and the Arabs, they remained in the land.

Whether their name was due to their existence outside of legitimate political authority or their residence in the mountains is not known. They were joined later by various escaped slaves and peasants during their insurgency and were said to have claimed territory from "the Holy City" to the "Black Mountain" (Nur Mountains).[6]

  1. ^ Hitti, Philip (1957). Lebanon in History. India: Macmillan and Co Ltd. p. 246.
  2. ^ a b Cvetković, Miloš (Jan 2017). "The settlement of the Mardaites and their military-administrative position in the themata of the West: A chronology". Institute for Byzantine Studies of the SASA, Belgrade – via researchgate.net.
  3. ^ Chinigò, Francesco (1900). I mirditi. Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana. p. 224.
  4. ^ a b Karolidis, Pavlos (2024). The Ethnic Ancestry of the Orthodox Christians of Syria and Palestine. United States. pp. 253–265. ISBN 979-8326558084.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  5. ^ Kazhdan, Alexander, ed. (1991). The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. p. 1297. ISBN 0-19-504652-8.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference eoi457 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).