Mardaïte

Mardaïte, member of a Christian people of northern Syria, employed as soldiers by Byzantine emperors. The Mardaïtes inhabited the Amanus (Gāvur) Mountains, in the modern Turkish province of Hatay, the 7th-century borderland between Byzantine and Muslim territory. In the period 660–680, allied with the Byzantine emperor Constantine IV, the Mardaïtes pushed southward into Arab-occupied Lebanon and northern Palestine. In the 690s Constantine’s successor, Justinian II, by agreement with Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik of Damascus, resettled 12,000 Mardaïtes in various parts of Greece and Anatolia. Those remaining in Lebanon and Syria were subjected to Muslim rule and absorbed by other peoples.