MARDATE

Arabic Jurjumani, plural Jarajima, member of a Christian people of northern Syria, employed as soldiers by Byzantine emperors. The Mardates inhabited the Amanus (Gavur) Mountains, in the modern Turkish province of Hatay, the 7th-century borderland between Byzantine and Muslim territory. In the period 660680, allied with the Byzantine emperor Constantine IV, the Mardates pushed southward into Arab-occupied Lebanon and northern Palestine. In the 690s Constantine's successor, Justinian II, by agreement with Caliph 'Abd al-Malik of Damascus, resettled 12,000 Mardates in various parts of Greece and Anatolia. Those remaining in Lebanon and Syria were subjected to Muslim rule and absorbed by other peoples.