The Mardaites (Syriac: ܡܪ̈ܕܝܐ; Arabic: المردة / ALA-LC: al-Mardah; Greek: Μαρδαΐται) inhabited the highland regions of southern Anatolia, Isauria, Syria, and Lebanon. Their origins are little known, but they may have been of Armenian (Mardistan) origin.[1] What is certain is that they were Christians, probably Monophysite or Monothelite.[1]
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According to some historians, after the conquest of the Levant by the Arab Caliphate, the Mardaites around Mount Lebanon obtained control of their areas of settlement in the rugged hinterland of Mount Lebanon. The Caliphate originally employed them to watch the frontier with the Byzantines in Cilicia, but the Mardaites were often used by Byzantine rulers as proxies to wage guerrilla warfare on the Caliphate. Thus in 677, a major Mardaite raid reached Jerusalem, contributing to the lifting of the great siege of Constantinople.[1] In the 690s, Justinian II per treaty with the Arabs, relocated a large number of them to the southern coast of Asia Minor, as well as parts of Greece such as Epirus and the Peloponnese, as part of his measures to restore population and manpower to areas depleted by earlier conflicts.[2] There they were conscripted as rowers and marines in the Byzantine navy for several centuries.[3] Others however remained behind and continued raiding Muslim-held territories until their chief stronghold fell to Maslamah ibn Abd al-Malik in 708. Maslama then resettled them throughout Syria, and although he allowed them to retain their faith, he conscripted them in his army.[1]
The Byzantine expansion between 985 and 1025 AD provoked an influx of Maronites from the Orontes valley into the northern part of Mount Lebanon, in particular into the Kadisha gorge. Maronite groups settled there as a confederation of tribal clans, with the Maronite Patriarch as a community chief.
Other historians, however, downplay the importance of the Mardaites in the context of Byzantine-Omayyad relations and doubt that they achieved a level of independence beyond a form of tribal self-rule in mountainous areas of limited strategic and symbolic relevance. These scholars remember that, at a later stage, the Byzantines even persecuted the Maronites because they accused the latter of supporting the Monothelite doctrine, which the Byzantine viewed as heretical.[4]
Some Maronites' claim of a Mardaite ancestry, for example with the creation of a Marada Brigade during the Lebanese Civil War, derive from the same attempt as those of Phoenicianists to stress the non-Arab origin of Maronites in order to preserve their separate ethnic identity. This view however is disputed by some modern scholars.[5]