OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ferdinand IV. of Castile

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​FERDINAND IV., El Emplazado or “the Summoned,” king of Castile (d. 1312), son of Sancho El Bravo, and his wife Maria de Molina, is a figure of small note in Spanish history. His strange title is given him in the chronicles on the strength of a story that he put two brothers of the name of Carvajal to death tyrannically, and was given a time, a plazo, by them in which to answer for his crime in the next world. But the tale is not contemporary, and is an obvious copy of the story told of Jacques de Molay, grand-master of the Temple, and Philippe Le Bel. Ferdinand IV. succeeded to the throne when a boy of six. His minority was a time of anarchy. He owed his escape from the violence of competitors and nobles, partly to the tact and undaunted bravery of his mother Maria de Molina, and partly to the loyalty of the citizens of Avila, who gave him refuge within their walls. As a king he proved ungrateful to his mother, and weak as a ruler. He died suddenly in his tent at Jaen when preparing for a raid into the Moorish territory of Granada, on the 7th of September 1312.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mason, James Murray

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​MASON, JAMES MURRAY (1798–1871), American political leader, was born in Fairfax county, Virginia, on the 3rd of November 1798, the grandson of George Mason (1723–1792). Educated at the university of Pennsylvania and the college of William and Mary, he was admitted to the bar in 1820. He was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates in 1826–1827 and 1828–1831, of the state Constitutional Convention of 1829, of the National House of Representatives (1837–1839), of the United States Senate from 1847 until July 1861 (when, with other Southern senators he was formally expelled—he had previously withdrawn), and of the Virginia Secession Convention in April 1861. Entering politics as a Jacksonian Democrat, Mason was throughout his career a consistent strict constructionist, opposing protective tariffs, internal improvements by the national government, and all attempts to restrict or control the spread of slavery, which he sincerely believed to be essential to the social and political welfare of the South. He was the author of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and in 1860 was chairman of the Senate committee which investigated the John Brown raid. After Lincoln’s election as President he was one of the strongest advocates of secession in Virginia. He was appointed in August 1861 commissioner of the Confederate States to Great Britain. The British ship “Trent,” upon which he and John Slidell, the commissioner to France, sailed, was intercepted (Nov. 8, 1861) by a United States ship-of-war (the “San Jacinto,” Captain Charles Wilkes), and the two commissioners were seized and carried as prisoners to Boston. Great Britain immediately demanded their release, and war for a time seemed imminent; but owing mainly to the tactful diplomacy of the prince consort, Lincoln acknowledged that the seizure of Mason and Slidell was a violation of the rights of Great Britain as a neutral, and on the 1st of January 1862 released the commissioners. The incident has become known in history as the “Trent Affair.” Mason at once proceeded to London, where, however, he was unable to secure official recognition, and his commission to Great Britain was withdrawn late in 1863. He remained in Europe, spending most of his time at Paris and holding blank commissions which he was authorized to fill in at his discretion in case the presence of a Confederate commissioner should seem desirable at any particular European court. These commissions, however, he did not use. After the war he lived for several years in Canada, but returned in 1869 to Virginia, and on the 28th of April 1871 died at Alexandria.
See The Public Life and Diplomatic Correspondence of James M. Mason, with some Personal History (Roanoke, Va., 1903), by his daughter, Virginia Mason; Sir Theodore Martin, Life of the Prince Consort.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mason and Dixon Line

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​MASON AND DIXON LINE, in America, the boundary line (lat. 39° 43′ 26.3″ N.) between Maryland and Pennsylvania, U.S.A.; popularly the line separating “free” states and “slave” states before the Civil War. The line derives its name from Charles Mason (1730–1787) and Jeremiah Dixon, two English astronomers, whose survey of it to a point about 244 m. west of the Delaware between 1763 and 1767 marked the close of the protracted boundary dispute (arising upon the grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn in 1681) between the Baltimores and Penns, proprietors respectively of Maryland and Pennsylvania. The dispute arose from the designation, in the grant to Penn, of the southern boundary of Pennsylvania mainly as the parallel marking the “beginning of the fortieth degree of Northerne Latitude,” after the northern boundary of Maryland had been defined as a line “which lieth under the fortieth degree of north latitude from the equinoctial.” The eastern part of the line as far as Sideling Hill in the western part of the present Washington county, was originally marked with milestones brought from England, every fifth of which bore on one side the arms of Baltimore and on the opposite side those of Penn; but the difficulties in transporting them to the westward were so great that many of them were not set up. Owing to the removal of the stone marking the north-east corner of Maryland, this point was again determined and marked in 1849–1850 by Lieut.-Colonel J. D. Graham of the U.S. topographical engineers; and as the western part of the boundary was not marked by stones, and local disputes arose, the line was again surveyed between 1901 and 1903 under the direction of a commission appointed by Pennsylvania and Maryland.
The use of the term “Mason and Dixon Line” to designate the boundary between the free and the slave states (and in general between the North and the South) dates from the debates in Congress over the Missouri Compromise in 1819–1820. As so used it may be defined as not only the Mason and Dixon Line proper, but also the line formed by the Ohio River from its intersection with the Pennsylvania boundary to its mouth, thence the eastern, northern and western boundaries of Missouri, and thence westward the parallel 36° 30′—the line established by the Missouri Compromise to separate free and slave territory in the “Louisiana Purchase,” except as regards Missouri. It is to be noted, however, that the Missouri Compromise did not affect the territory later acquired from Mexico.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mason, Sir John

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​MASON, SIR JOHN (1503–1566), English diplomatist, was born of humble parentage at Abingdon in 1503, and was educated at Oxford, where he became Fellow of All Souls in 1521. He was ordained before 1531. Most of his early years were spent on the Continent, where he witnessed the meeting between Henry VIII. and Francis I. at Calais in 1532, and where he was employed in collecting information for the English government, gaining in this work the reputation of a capable diplomatist. By his never-failing caution, moderation and pliancy, Mason succeeded in keeping himself in favour with four successive sovereigns of the Tudor monarchy. In 1537 he became secretary to the English ambassador at Madrid, Sir Thomas Wyat; but when the latter was put on his trial for treason in 1541 Mason was unmolested, and soon afterwards was appointed clerk of the privy council, and procured for himself sundry other posts and privileges. Mason was knighted and made dean of Winchester by Edward VI. He was one of the commissioners to negotiate the treaty by which Boulogne was restored to France in 1550, and in the same year he became English ambassador in Paris, where he helped to arrange the betrothal of Edward VI. to the princess Elizabeth of France. He returned to England at the end of 1551, became clerk of parliament, received extensive grants of land, and in 1552 was made chancellor of Oxford University. He was elected member of parliament in the same year. On the death of Edward VI., he at first joined the party of Northumberland and the Lady Jane Grey; but quickly perceiving his mistake he took an active part in procuring the proclamation of Mary as queen. Mason now received fresh tokens of royal favour, being confirmed in all his secular, though not in his ecclesiastical, offices; and in 1553 he was appointed English ambassador at the court of the emperor Charles V., of whose abdication at Brussels in October 1555 he wrote a vivid account. He took a prominent share in the ​administrative business of the government in the first years of Elizabeth’s reign, and largely influenced her foreign policy until his death, which occurred on the 20th of April 1566. Sir John Mason married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Thomas Isley of Sundridge, Kent, and widow of Richard Hill. He had no children, and his heir was Anthony Wyckes, whom he had adopted, and who assumed the name of Mason and left a large family.
See J. A. Froude, History of England (12 vols., London, 1856–1870); Charles Wriothesley, Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, edited by W. D. Hamilton (Camden Soc., 2 vols., London, 1875); P. F. Tytler, England under the Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary (2 vols., London, 1839); John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (3 vols., Oxford, 1824) and Memorials of Thomas Cranmer (3 vols., Oxford, 1848); Acts of the Privy Council of England (new series), edited by J. R. Dasent, vols. i.–vii.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mason City

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​MASON CITY, a city and the county-seat of Cerro Gordo county, Iowa, U.S.A., on Lime Creek, in the northern part of the state. Pop. (1905, state census), 8357 (929 foreign-born); (1910) 11,230. It is served by the Chicago Milwaukee & St Paul, the Chicago & North-Western, the Chicago Great Western, the Iowa Central and the St Paul & Des Moines railways, and also by the Mason City & Clear Lake (electric) railway, which connects Mason City with Clear Lake, a pleasure resort, 10 m. west of the city. At Mason City is Memorial University (co-educational; founded in 1900 by the National Encampment of the Sons of Veterans, and opened in 1902), dedicated to the Grand Army of the Republic, the special aim of which is to teach American history. The city is situated in a good agricultural region, and there are valuable stone quarries in the vicinity. The manufactures include lime, Portland cement, brick and tile. Mason City was settled in 1853, laid out in 1855, incorporated as a town in 1870 and chartered as a city in 1881.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mason, Lowell

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​MASON, LOWELL (1792–1872), American musician, was born at Medfield, Massachusetts. For some years he led a business life, but was always studying music; and in 1827, as the result of his work in forming the collection of church music published in 1821 at Boston by the Handel and Haydn Society, he moved to Boston and there first became president of the society and then founder of the Boston Academy of Music (1832). He published some successful educational books, and was a pioneer of musical instruction in the public schools, adopted in 1838. He received the degree of doctor of music from New York University in 1855. He died at Orange, New Jersey, on the 11th of August 1872.
His son William Mason (1829–1908), an accomplished pianist and composer, published an interesting volume of reminiscences, Memoirs of a Musical Life, in 1901.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mason, Sir Josiah

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​MASON, SIR JOSIAH (1795–1881), English pen-manufacturer, was born in Kidderminster on the 23rd of February 1795, the son of a carpet-weaver. He began life as a street hawker of cakes, fruits and vegetables. After trying his hand in his native town at shoemaking, baking, carpentering, blacksmithing, house-painting and carpet-weaving, he moved in 1814 to Birmingham. Here he found employment in the gilt-toy trade. In 1824 he set up on his own account as a manufacturer of split-rings by machinery, to which he subsequently added the making of steel pens. Owing to the circumstance of his pens being supplied through James Perry, the London stationer whose name they bore, he was less well known than Joseph Gillott and other makers, although he was really the largest producer in England. In 1874 the business was converted into a limited liability company. Besides his steel-pen trade Mason carried on for many years the business of electro-plating, copper-smelting, and india-rubber ring making, in conjunction with George R. Elkington. Mason was almost entirely self-educated, having taught himself to write when a shoemaker’s apprentice, and in later life he felt his deficiencies keenly. It was this which led him in 1860 to establish his great orphanage at Erdington, near Birmingham. Upon it he expended about £300,000, and for this munificent endowment he was knighted in 1872. He had previously given a dispensary to his native town and an almshouse to Erdington. In 1880 Mason College, since incorporated in the university of Birmingham, was opened, the total value of the endowment being about £250,000. Mason died on the 16th of June 1881.
See J. T. Bunce, Josiah Mason (1882).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mason, John Young

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​MASON, JOHN YOUNG (1799–1859), American political leader and diplomatist, was born in Greenesville county, Virginia, on the 18th of April 1799. Graduating at the university of North Carolina in 1816, he studied law in the famous Litchfield (Connecticut) law school, and in 1819 was admitted to practice in Southampton county, Virginia. He served in the Virginia house of delegates in 1823–1827, in the state constitutional convention of 1829–1830, and from 1831 to 1837 in the National House of Representatives, being chairman of the committee on foreign affairs in 1835–1836. He was secretary of the navy in President Tyler’s cabinet (1844–1845), and was attorney-general (1845–1846) and secretary of the navy (1846–1849), succeeding George Bancroft, under President Polk. He was president of the Virginia constitutional convention of 1851, and from 1853 until his death at Paris on the 3rd of October 1859, was United States minister to France. In this capacity he attracted attention by wearing at the court of Napoleon III. a simple diplomatic uniform (for this he was rebuked by Secretary of State W. L. Marcy, who had ordered American ministers to wear a plain civilian costume), and by joining with James Buchanan and Pierre Soulé, ministers to Great Britain and Spain respectively, in drawing up (Oct. 1854) the famous Ostend Manifesto. Hawthorne called him a “fat-brained, good-hearted, sensible old man”; and in politics he was a typical Virginian of the old school, a state’s rights Democrat, upholding slavery and hating abolitionism.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Memnon of Rhodes

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​MEMNON OF RHODES, brother of Mentor (q.v.), with whom he entered the services of the rebellious satrap Artabazus of Phrygia, who married his sister. Mentor after the conquest of Egypt rose high in the favour of the king, and Memnon, who had taken refuge with Artabazus at the Macedonian court, became a zealous adherent of the Persian king; he assisted Mentor in subduing the rebellious satraps and dynasts in Asia Minor, and succeeded him as general of the Persian troops. In the pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomica, ii. 28, stories are told of his methods of obtaining money, and evading his obligations; thus he extorted a large sum of money from the conquered inhabitants of Lampsacus and cheated his soldiers out of a part of their pay. He owned a large territory in eastern Troas (Arrian i. 17, 8; Strabo xiii. 587). He gained some successes against Philip II. of Macedon in 336 (Diod. xvii. 6; Polyaen. v. 44, 4, 5) and commanded the Persian army against Alexander’s invasion. Convinced that it was impossible to meet Alexander in a pitched battle, his plan was to lay waste the country and retire into the interior, meanwhile organizing resistance on sea (where the Persians were far superior to the Macedonians) and carrying the war into Greece. But his advice was overridden by the Persian satraps, who forced him to fight at the Granicus. After his defeat he tried to organize the maritime war and occupied the Greek islands, but in the beginning of 333 he fell ill and died (Arrian ii. 1, 1). (Ed. M.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Memorandum of Association

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​MEMORANDUM OF ASSOCIATION, in English company law, a document subscribed to by seven or more persons associated for any lawful purpose, by subscribing to which, and otherwise complying with the requisitions of the Companies Acts in respect of registration, they may form themselves into an incorporated company, with or without limited liability (see Company).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Memorial Day

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​MEMORIAL DAY (or Decoration Day), a holiday observed in the northern states of the United States on the 30th of May, in honour of soldiers killed in the American Civil War, and especially for the decoration of their graves with flags and flowers. Before the close of the Civil War the 30th of May was thus celebrated in several of the southern states; in the North there was no fixed day commonly celebrated until 1868, when (on the 5th of May) Commander-in-Chief John A. Logan, of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued a general order designating the 30th of May 1868 “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion”; Logan did this “with the hope that it will be kept up from year to year.” In 1882 the Grand Army urged that the “proper designation of May 30 is Memorial Day”—not Decoration Day. Rhode Island made it a legal holiday in 1874, Vermont in 1876, and New Hampshire in 1877; and by 1910 it was a legal holiday in all the states and territories save Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. In Virginia the 30th of May is observed as a Confederate Memorial Day. The 3rd of June (the birthday of Jefferson Davis) is observed as Confederate Memorial Day in Louisiana and Tennessee; the 26th of April in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi; and the 10th of May in North Carolina and South Carolina.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menagerie

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​MENAGERIE, a collection of wild animals kept for show or exhibition. The word is particularly applied to travelling exhibitions of wild animals, attached to a circus or other show, “zoological gardens” (q.v.) being the term generally applied to large stationary and permanent exhibitions, arranged on a scientific system. The French ménagerie (from ménage, O. Fr. mesnage, Lat. mansionaticum, mansio, house, cf. “manage”) originally meant the administration of a household or farm, with special reference to the live stock.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menahem

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​MENAHEM (Hebrew for “consoler”), a king of Israel. He was the son of Gadi (i.e. perhaps, a man of Gad), and during the disturbances at the death of Jeroboam II. seized the throne and reigned ten years (2 Kings xv. 14–18). The scene of his revolt was Tirzah, the old seat of the kings of Israel between Jeroboam I. and Omri (which period the present closely resembles), and it was only after perpetrating nameless cruelties at Tappuah on the border of Ephraim and Mannasseh that the counter revolt of Shallum, son of Jabesh (perhaps a Gileadite), was suppressed. Towards the end of his reign, Tiglath-Pileser IV. marched against north Syria, and among his tributaries mentions Menahem together with Rezin of Damascus, and kings of Tyre, Gebal, &c. (c. 738 B.C.). According to the Old Testament account the Assyrian king even advanced against Israel, and only withdrew in consideration of a tribute amounting to about £400,000. A thousand talents (i.e. about 3,000,000 shekels) was raised by assessing every wealthy person at 50 shekels. The act was hardly popular, and the internal troubles which he had quelled ​broke out again at or shortly after his death. The Gileadites again conspired, and having slain his son Pekahiah set up Pekah the son of Remaliah in his place This meant a return to an anti-Assyrian policy. (See Ahaz.) (S. A. C.)
* ↑ Scarcely Tiphsah (2 Kings xv. 16) on the Euphrates.
* ↑ The identification of the Israelite king with Me-ni-hi-(im)-ml of Sa-me-ri-na-ai on the Ass. inscription has been unnecessarily doubted.
* ↑ The chronology in xv. 2, 23, 32, appears to confuse Pekah and Pekahiah, and the view has been held that they were originally one and the same; cf. Cheyne, Ency. Bib., col. 3643.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mena, Juan de

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​MENA, JUAN DE (1411–1456), Spanish poet, was born at Córdova in 1411. In his twenty-fourth year he matriculated at the university of Salamanca, and studied later at Rome. His scholarship obtained for him the post of Latin secretary at the court of Castille; subsequently he became historiographer to John II. and magistrate at Córdova. According to the Epicedio of Valerio Francisco Romero, Mena died from natural causes in 1456; popular tradition, however, ascribes his death to a fall from his mule. Though nominally the king’s chronicler, Mena had no share in the Crónica de Don Juan II.; the statement that he wrote the first act of the Celestina (q.v.) is rejected; but three authentic specimens of his cumbrous prose exist in the commentary to his dull poem entitled La Coronacion or Calamacileos, in the Ilíada en romance (an abridged version of Homer), and in the unpublished Memorias de algunos linajes antiguas é nobles de Castilla. He is conjectured to be the author of the satirical Coplas de la panadera; but, apart from the fact that these verses are ascribed by Argote de Molina to Iñigo Ortiz de Zúñiga, they are instinct with a tart humour of which Mena was destitute. His principal work is his allegorical poem, El Laberinto de Fortuna, dedicated to John II.; in the oldest manuscripts it consists of 297 stanzas, but three more stanzas were added to it later, and hence the alternative, popular title of Las Trezientas. The Laberinto is modelled on Dante, and further contains reminiscences of the Roman de la rose, as well as episodes borrowed from Virgil and Lucan. It is marred by excessive emphasis and pedantic diction, and the arte mayor measure in which it is written is monotonous; but many octaves are of such excellence that the arte mayor metre continued in fashion for nearly a ​century. The poem, as a whole, is tedious; yet its dignified expression of patriotic spirit has won the admiration of Spaniards from Cervantes’ time to our own.
A critical edition of the Laberinto has been issued by R. Foulché-Delbosc (Mâcon, 1904).