Back جراجمة Arabic Mardaïta Catalan Marada German Μαρδαΐτες Greek Mardaíta Spanish جراجمه Persian Mardaitit Finnish Mardaïtes French Mardaitai ID Mardaiti Italian
 Main areas under Mardaite control in the Levant, c. 7th century AD | |
| 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 Chalcedonian Christianity 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.
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]
- ^ Hitti, Philip (1957). Lebanon in History. India: Macmillan and Co Ltd. p. 246.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Chinigò, Francesco (1900). I mirditi. Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana. p. 224.
- ^ 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) - ^ Kazhdan, Alexander, ed. (1991). The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. p. 1297. ISBN 0-19-504652-8.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
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