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) or Armenians, yet other sources claim them to have been Greeks native to the Levant[4] or possibly even from the Arabian peninsula.

Firstly, their loyalty to the Greek emperors in Constantinople: If they were Maronites they would not have obeyed (as they did) his orders to make war or peace with the new Muslim Arab conquerors.

They initially agreed to serve as mercenaries for the Arabs and to guard the Amanian Gate, but their loyalty was intermittent and they often sided with the Byzantine Empire as their agenda varied.

[6] According to Greek and Syriac historians, their territory stretched from the Amanus to the "holy city", the latter often identified as Jerusalem, although more likely to refer to Cyrrhus, also called Hagioupolis, the capital of Cyrrhestica, in upper Syria.

The Umayyads were compelled to sign another treaty by which they paid the Byzantines half the tribute of Cyprus, Armenia and the Kingdom of Iberia in the Caucasus Mountains;[4] in return, Justinian relocated around 12,000 Mardaites to the southern coast of Anatolia, and the area of Laconia in the Southern Peloponnese, being under Byzantine control, Nicopolis in Epirus and Cephalonia as part of his measures to restore population and manpower to areas depleted by earlier conflicts.