Madison Saracen

Madison Saracen is a British-based UCI trade team, specialising in downhill mountain biking.

Founded in 2011, the team went on to achieve great success with original member Manon Carpenter.

Carpenter became junior UCI Mountain Bike Downhill World Champion in the team’s debut season, before going on to take the senior titles of the UCI Mountain Bike Downhill World Cup and World Championships in 2014.

In December 2015 Madison Saracen announced its new roster and the signing of Marc Beaumont.

History

Formation

Launched in 2011 the team’s aspiration was clearly laid out by Madison CEO Dominic Langan.

“The first year is mainly a development squad, with a couple of people riding the world cup series. It’s a minimum three-year program and hopefully we’ll be doing much more beyond that – the aim is to get more riders into the world cup series.

“We hope to build that up and hopefully we can get some champions. We just want to get good British riders out there.”

Team progression

Manon Carpenter took the team’s first major win at the junior world championships in Champery, Switzerland.

Saracen

Saracen was a generic term for Muslims widely used among Christian writers in Europe during the later medieval era. The term's meaning evolved during its history. In the early centuries CE, Greek and Latin writings used this term to refer to the people who lived in desert areas in and near the Roman province of Arabia. They were distinguished as a people from others known as Arabs. In Europe during the Early Medieval era, the term came to be associated with Arab tribes as well. By the 12th century, "Saracen" had become synonymous with "Muslim" in Medieval Latin literature. Such expansion in the meaning of the term had begun centuries earlier among the Byzantine Romans, as evidenced in documents from the 8th century. In the Western languages before the 16th century, "Saracen" was commonly used to refer to Muslim Arabs, and the words "Muslim" and "Islam" were generally not used (with a few isolated exceptions).

Early usage and origins

Ptolemy's Geography (2nd century CE) describes "Sarakene" as a region in the northern Sinai peninsula. Ptolemy also mentions a people called the "Sarakenoi" living in north-western Arabia (near neighbor to the Sinai).Eusebius of Caesarea refers to Saracens in his Ecclesiastical history, in which he narrates an account wherein Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria, mentions Saracens in a letter while describing the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Decius: "Many were, in the Arabian mountain, enslaved by the barbarous 'sarkenoi'." The Historia Augusta also refers to an attack by "Saraceni" on Pescennius Niger's army in Egypt in 193, but provides little information as to identifying them.

Saracen (disambiguation)

Saracen is a European medieval term for Muslims, adopted from Latin.

Saracen or Saracens may also refer to:

Art, entertainment,and media

Fictional characters

Literature

Opera

Television

Enterprises

Military

Sports

Saracen (comics)

Saracen is a fictional villain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character is usually depicted as an enemy of the antihero the Punisher. He was created by Mike Baron and Erik Larsen, and first appeared in The Punisher Vol. 2, #22 (August 1989)

Publication history

Saracen was introduced in The Punisher Vol. 2, #22-23, and reappeared in The Punisher War Journal #25-27, as well as The Punisher Vol. 2, #47-48, and The Punisher War Journal #33. The character was then killed off in the one-shot comic book The Punisher: Empty Quarter, though a version of him from an alternate universe was later featured in Exiles Vol. 1, #99.

Saracen received profiles in Marvel Encyclopedia #5, and Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A-Z Update #1.

Fictional character biography

A globe-trotting mercenary and assassin whose actions, such as plundering cruise ships and blowing up airliners, have resulted in him being branded a terrorist, Saracen hails from an undisclosed Arabian country, and is said to be happily married.