History of the Maronites

civil conflict within the Ottoman Empire

The Mardaites (; ) or al-Jarajima (; /ALA-LC: 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) with other theories placing them as Armenians or even Greeks native to the Levant. 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 g