Maronites are a Syriac Christian ethnoreligious group native to the Eastern Mediterranean and Levant region of West Asia, whose members traditionally belong to the Maronite Church, with the largest concentration long residing near Mount Lebanon in modern Lebanon. The Maronite Church is an Eastern Catholic sui iuris particular church in full communion with the pope and the rest of the Catholic Church.

The Mardaites or al-Jarajima were early Christians following either Miaphysitism or Monothelitism in the Nur Mountains. Little is known about their ethnicity, but it has been speculated that they might have been Persians or Armenians, yet other sources claim them to have been native to the Levant or possibly even from the Arabian peninsula. 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".