OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Guntram

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​GUNTRAM, or Gontran (561–592), king of Burgundy, was one of the sons of Clotaire I. On the death of his father (561) he and his three brothers divided the Frankish realm between them, Guntram receiving as his share the valleys of the Saône and Rhone, together with Berry and the town of Orleans, which he made his capital. On the death of Charibert (567), he further obtained the civitates of Saintes, Angoulême and Périgueux. During the civil war which broke out between the kings of Neustria and Austrasia, his policy was to try to maintain a state of equilibrium. After the assassination of Sigebert (575), he took the youthful Childebert II. under his protection, and, thanks to his assistance against the intrigues of the great lords, the latter was able to maintain his position in Austrasia. After the death of Chilperic (584) he protected the young Clotaire II. in the same way, and prevented Childebert from seizing his dominions. His course was rendered easier by the fact that his own sons had died; consequently, having an inheritance at his disposal, he was able to offer it to whichever of his nephews he wished. The danger to the Frankish realm caused by the expedition of Gundobald (585), and the anxiety which was caused him by the revolts of the great lords in Austrasia finally decided him in favour of Childebert. He adopted him as his son, and recognized him as his heir at the treaty of Andelot (587); he also helped him to crush the great lords, especially Ursion and Berthefried, who were conquered in la Woëvre. From this time on he ceased to play a prominent part in the affairs of Austrasia. He died in 592, and Childebert received his inheritance without opposition. Gregory of Tours is very indulgent to Guntram, who showed himself on occasions generous towards the church; he almost always calls him “good king Guntram,” and in his writings are to be found such phrases as “good king Guntram took as his servant a concubine Veneranda” (iv. 25); but Guntram was really no better than the other kings of his age; he was cruel and licentious, putting his cubicularius Condo to death, for instance, because he was suspected of having killed a buffalo in the Vosges. He was moreover a coward, and went in such constant terror of assassination that he always surrounded himself with a regular bodyguard.
See Krusch, “Zur Chronologie der merowingischen Könige,” in the Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, xxii. 451-490; Ulysse Chevalier, Bio-bibliographie (2nd ed.), s.v. “Guntram.” (C. Pf.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gura, Eugen

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​GURA, EUGEN (1842–1906), German singer, was born near Saatz in Bohemia, and educated at first for the career of a painter at Vienna and Munich; but later, developing a fine baritone voice, he took up singing and studied it at the Munich Conservatorium. In 1865 he made his début at the Munich opera, and in the following years he gained the highest reputation in Germany, being engaged principally at Leipzig till 1876 and then at Hamburg till 1883. He sang in 1876 in the Ring at Bayreuth, and was famous for his Wagnerian rôles; and his Hans Sachs in Meistersinger, as performed in London in 1882, was magnificent. In later years he showed the perfection of art in his singing of German Lieder. He died in Bavaria on the 26th of August 1906.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mauve, Anton

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​MAUVE, ANTON (1838–1888), Dutch landscape painter, was born at Zaandam, the son of a Baptist minister. Much against the wish of his parents he took up the study of art and entered the studio of Van Os, whose dry academic manner had, however, but little attraction for him. He benefited far more by his intimacy with his friends Jozef Israels and W. Maris. Encouraged by their example he abandoned his early tight and highly finished manner for a freer, looser method of painting, and the brilliant palette of his youthful work for a tender lyric harmony which is generally restricted to delicate greys, greens, and light blue. He excelled in rendering the soft hazy atmosphere that lingers over the green meadows of Holland, and devoted himself almost exclusively to depicting the peaceful rural life of the fields and country lanes of Holland—especially of the districts near Oosterbeck and Wolfhezen, the sand dunes of the coast at Scheveningen, and the country near Laren, where he spent the last years of his life. A little sad and melancholy, his pastoral scenes are nevertheless conceived in a peaceful soothing lyrical mood, which is in marked contrast to the epic power and almost tragic intensity of J. F. Millet. There are fourteen of Mauve’s pictures at the Mesdag Museum at the Hague, and two (“Milking Time” and “A Fishing Boat putting to Sea”) at the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam. The Glasgow Corporation Gallery owns his painting of “A Flock of Sheep.” The finest and most representative private collection of pictures by Mauve was made by Mr J. C. J. Drucker, London.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mawkmai

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​MAWKMAI (Burmese Maukmè), one of the largest states in the eastern division of the southern Shan States of Burma. It lies approximately between 19° 30′ and 20° 30′ N. and 97° 30′ and 98° 15′ E., and has an area of 2,787 sq. m. The central portion of the state consists of a wide plain well watered and under rice cultivation. The rest is chiefly hills in ranges running north and south. There is a good deal of teak in the state, but it has been ruinously worked. The sawbwa now works as contractor for government, which takes one-third of the net profits. Rice is the chief crop, but much tobacco of good quality is grown in the Langkö district on the Têng river. There is also a great deal of cattle-breeding. The population in 1901 was 29,454, over two-thirds of whom were Shans and the remainder Taungthu, Burmese, Yangsek and Red Karens. The capital, Mawkmai, stands in a fine rice plain in 20° 9′ N. and 97° 25′ E. It had about 150 houses when it first submitted in 1887, but was burnt out by the Red Karens in the following year. It has since recovered. There are very fine orange groves a few miles south of the town at Kantu-awn, called Kadugate by the Burmese.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mausoleum

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​MAUSOLEUM, the term given to a monument erected to receive the remains of a deceased person, which may sometimes take the form of a sepulchral chapel. The term cenotaph (κενός, empty, τάφος, tomb) is employed for a similar monument where the body is not buried in the structure. The term “mausoleum” originated with the magnificent monument erected by Queen Artemisia in 353 B.C. in memory of her husband King Mausolus, of which the remains were brought to England in 1859 by Sir Charles Newton and placed in the British Museum. The tombs of Augustus and of Hadrian in Rome are perhaps the largest monuments of the kind ever erected.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Maxentius, Marcus Aurelius Valerius

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​MAXENTIUS, MARCUS AURELIUS VALERIUS, Roman emperor from A.D. 306 to 312, was the son of Maximianus Herculius, and the son-in-law of Galerius. Owing to his vices and incapacity he was left out of account in the division of the empire which took place in 305. A variety of causes, however, had produced strong dissatisfaction at Rome with many of the arrangements established by Diocletian, and on the 28th of October 306, the public discontent found expression in the massacre of those magistrates who remained loyal to Flavius Valerius Severus and in the election of Maxentius to the imperial dignity. With the help of his father, Maxentius was enabled to put Severus to death and to repel the invasion of Galerius; his next steps were first to banish Maximianus, and then, after achieving a military success in Africa against the rebellious governor, L. Domitius Alexander, to declare war against Constantine as having brought about the death of his father Maximianus. His intention of carrying the war into Gaul was anticipated by Constantine, who marched into Italy. Maxentius was defeated at Saxa Rubra near Rome and drowned in the Tiber while attempting to make his way across the Milvian bridge into Rome. He was a man of brutal and worthless character; but although Gibbon’s statement that he was “just, humane and even partial towards the afflicted Christians” may be exaggerated, it is probable that he never exhibited any special hostility towards them.
See De Broglie, L’Église et l’empire Romain au quatrième siècle (1856–1866), and on the attitude of the Romans towards Christianity generally, app. 8 in vol. ii. of J. B. Bury’s edition of Gibbon (Zosimus ii. 9-18; Zonaras xii. 33, xiii. 1; Aurelius Victor, Epit. 40; Eutropius, x. 2).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Maxim, Sir Hiram Stevens

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​MAXIM, SIR HIRAM STEVENS (1840– ), Anglo-American engineer and inventor, was born at Sangerville, Maine, U.S.A., on the 5th of February 1840. After serving an apprenticeship with a coachbuilder, he entered the machine works of his uncle, Levi Stevens, at Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in 1864, and four years later he became a draughtsman in the Novelty Iron Works and Shipbuilding Company in New York City. About this period he produced several inventions connected with illumination by gas; and from 1877 he was one of the numerous inventors who were trying to solve the problem of making an efficient and durable incandescent electric lamp, in this connexion introducing the widely-used process of treating the carbon filaments by heating them in an atmosphere of hydrocarbon vapour. In 1880 he came to Europe, and soon began to devote himself to the construction of a machine-gun which should be automatically loaded and fired by the energy of the recoil (see Machine-Gun). In order to realize the full usefulness of the weapon, which was first exhibited in an underground range at Hatton Garden, London, in 1884, he felt the necessity of employing a smokeless powder, and accordingly he devised maximite, a mixture of trinitrocellulose, nitroglycerine and castor oil, which was patented in 1889. He also undertook to make a flying machine, and after numerous preliminary experiments constructed an apparatus which was tried at Bexley Heath, Kent, in 1894. (See Flight.) Having been naturalized as a British subject, he was knighted in 1901. His younger brother, Hudson Maxim (b. 1853), took out numerous patents in connexion with explosives.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Maury, Matthew Fontaine

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Among works published by Maury, in addition to those mentioned, are the papers contributed by him to the Astronomical Observations of the United States Observatory, Letter concerning Lanes for Steamers crossing the Atlantic (1855); Physical Geography (1864) and Manual of Geography (1871). In 1859 he began the publication of a series of Nautical Monographs.
See Diana Fontaine Maury Corbin (his daughter), Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury (London, 1888).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mausolus

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​MAUSOLUS (more correctly Maussollus), satrap and practically ruler of Caria (377–353 B.C.). The part he took in the revolt against Artaxerxes Mnemon, his conquest of a great part of Lycia, Ionia and of several of the Greek islands, his co-operation with the Rhodians and their allies in the war against Athens, and the removal of his capital from Mylasa, the ancient seat of the Carian kings, to Halicarnassus are the leading facts of his history. He is best known from the tomb erected for him by his widow Artemisia. The architects Satyrus and Pythis, and the sculptors Scopas, Leochares, Bryaxis and Timotheus, finished the work after her death. (See Halicarnassus.) An inscription discovered at Mylasa (Böckh, Inscr. gr. ii. 2691 c.) details the punishment of certain conspirators who had made an attempt upon his life at a festival in a temple at Labranda in 353.
See Diod. Sic. xv. 90, 3, xvi. 7, 4, 36, 2; Demosthenes, De Rhodiorum libertate; J. B. Bury, Hist. of Greece (1902), ii. 271; W. Judeich, Kleinasiatische Studien (Marburg, 1892), pp. 226–256, and authorities under Halicarnassus.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Naivasha

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​NAIVASHA, the name of a lake, town and province, in British East Africa. The lake, which is roughly circular with a diameter of some 13 m., lies at an altitude of 6135 ft. on the crest of the highest ridge in the eastern rift-valley between the Kikuyu escarpment on the east and the Mau escarpment on the west. It is fed from the north by the rivers Gilgal and Morendat, but has no known outlet. The rivers, which have a minimum discharge of 100 cub. ft. per second, run in deep gullies. The water of the lake is fresh; the shore in many places is lined with papyrus. North and north-west the lake is closed in by the volcanic Buru hills; to the south towers the extinct volcano of Longonot. Hippopotami and otters frequent the lake, and on an island about 1 m. from the shore are large numbers of antelopes and other game. Naivasha was discovered in 1883 by Gustav Adolf Fischer (1848–1886), one of the early explorers of the Tana and Masai regions, and the first to demonstrate the continuance of the rift-valley through equatorial Africa. Fischer was followed later in the same year by Joseph Thomson, the Scottish explorer. The railway from Mombasa to Victoria Nyanza skirts the eastern side of the lake, and on the railway close to the lake is built the town of Naivasha, 6230 ft. above the sea, 391 m. N.W. by rail of Mombasa and 193 m. S.E. by rail of Port Florence on Victoria Nyanza. Naivasha province contains much land suitable for colonization by white men, and large areas were leased to Europeans by the British authorities in 1903 and subsequent years. The East Africa Syndicate acquired a lease of 500 sq. m. in the valley, of the Gilgal and surrounding country north of Lake Naivasha. North-west of the lake and along the Molo river the 3rd Lord Delamere obtained a grant of 155 sq. m.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Najibabad

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​NAJIBABAD, a town of British India, in the Bijnor district of the United Provinces, 31 m. S.E. of Hardwar. Pop. (1901) 19,568. It was founded in the middle of the 18th century by a Rohilla chief, and still contains several architectural monuments of Rohilla magnificence. It has a station on the Oudh & Rohilkhand railway, with a junction for the branch to Kotdwara. There is considerable trade in timber, sugar and grain, and manufactures of metal-ware, shoes, blankets and cotton cloth.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Nakskov

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​NAKSKOV, a seaport of Denmark, in the amt (county) of Maribo, on a wide bay of the Laalands belt at the West end of the island of Laaland, 31 m. by rail W. of Nykjöbing. Pop. (1901) 8310. The church dates from the beginning of the 15th century. There is a large sugar factory. A great dike, ​extending S.E. to Rödby (20 m.), protects the coast against inundation, a serious inroad of the sea having occurred in 1872.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Najara, Israel ben Moses

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​NAJARA, ISRAEL BEN MOSES, Hebrew poet, was born in Damascus and wrote in the latter part of the 16th century (1587–1599). He was inspired by the mystical school, and his poems are marked by their bold, sensuous images, as well as by a depth of feeling unequalled among the Jewish writers of his age. He often adapted his verses to Arabic and Turkish melodies. To tunes which had been associated with light and even ribald themes, Najara wedded words which reveal an intensity of religious emotion which often takes a form indistinguishable from love poetry. Some pietist contemporaries condemned his work for this reason; but this did not prevent many of his poems from attaining wide popularity and from winning their way into the prayer-book. In fact, Najara could claim the authority of the Biblical “Song of Songs” (mystically interpreted) for his combination of the language of human love with the expression of the relationship between God and humanity.
He published during his lifetime a collection of his poems, Songs of Israel (Zemiroth Israel), in Safed in 1587; an enlarged edition appeared in Venice (1599–1600). Others of his poems were published at various times, and W. Bacher has described some previously unknown poems of Najara (Revue des études juives, Nos. 116 seq.).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Nairobi

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​NAIROBI, capital of the British East Africa protectorate and of the province of Ukamba, 327 m. by rail N.W. of Mombasa and 257 m. S.E. of Port Florence on Victoria Nyanza. Pop. ​(1907) 4737, including 350 Europeans and 1752 Indians. Nairobi is built on the Athi plains, at the foot of the Kikuyu hills and 5450 ft. above the sea; it commands magnificent views of Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya. It is the headquarters of the Uganda railway, of the military forces in the protectorate, and of the Colonists’ Association. It is divided into European, Indian and native quarters. Midway between the European and Indian quarters stands the town hall. The other public buildings include railway works, places of worship (Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mahommedan and Hindu) and schools, an Indian bazaar, a general hospital and waterworks—the water being obtained from springs 13 m. distant.
The site of Nairobi was selected as the headquarters of the Uganda railway, and the first buildings were erected in 1899. For some time nearly all its inhabitants were railway officials and Indian coolies engaged in the construction of the line. In 1902 the surrounding highlands were found to be suitable for European settlement, and Nairobi speedily grew in importance; in 1907 the headquarters of the administration were transferred to it from Mombasa. The town is provided with clubs, cricket and athletic grounds and a racecourse.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Nakhichevan

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​NAKHICHEVAN, or Nakhjevan, a city of Russian Armenia, in the government of Erivan, 85 m. S.E. of the town of Erivan. It occupies the brow of a spur of the Kara-bagh mountains, 2940 ft. above the sea, and looks out over the valley of the Aras. Pop. (1863) 6251, (1897) 8845. Built and rebuilt again and again, Nakhichevan is full of half-obliterated evidences of former prosperity. The present houses have for the most part been quarried from ancient ruins; of the palace of the princes of Azerbaijan there remains a gateway with a Persian inscription, flanked by two brick towers; and at a little distance stands the so-called Tower of the Khans, a richly decorated twelve-sided structure, 102 ft. in circumference and 75 ft. in height, dating, to judge by the inscription which runs around the cornice, from the 12th century. There are also ruins of a large mosque. Situated on the highroad to Tabriz and Teheran, Nakhichevan has a large transit trade. In the Persian period the city is said to have had 40,000 inhabitants; the population now consists chiefly of Tatars and Armenians, who carry on gardening, make wine and produce silk, salt and millstones.
Armenian tradition claims Noah as the founder of Nakhichevan (the Naxuana of Ptolemy), and a mound of earth in the city is still visited by many pilgrims as his grave. Laid waste by the Persians in the 4th century, Nakhichevan sank into comparative insignificance, but by the 10th century had recovered its prosperity. In 1064 it was taken by Alp Arslan, sultan of the Seljuk Turks, and in the 13th century it fell a prey to the Mongols of Jenghiz Khan. It afterwards suffered frequently during the wars between the Persians, Armenians and Turks, and it finally passed into Russian possession by the peace of Turkman-chai in 1828.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Nakhichevan-on-the-Don

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​NAKHICHEVAN-ON-THE-DON, a town of southern Russia, in the Don Cossacks territory, 6 m. by rail N.E. of the town of Rostov and on the right bank of the Don. Pop. (1900) 30,883. It was founded in 1780 by Armenian immigrants. It soon became a wealthy place, and still is the administrative centre of the “Armenian district,” a narrow strip along the banks of the Don, with a population of 27,250. The town has tobacco and wadding factories, tallow-melting works, soap-works, brickworks and tanneries. There is a large trade in cereals and timber.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Nakhon Sri Tammarat

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​NAKHON SRI TAMMARAT (also known as Lakhon and formerly as Ligore), a town of southern Siam, in the division of the same name, about 380 m. S. of Bangkok, on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula. It is one of the most ancient cities of Siam, and contains many buildings and ruins of antiquarian interest. The trade consists chiefly of the export of rice. In the bay, a short distance off, ships can lie safely at all seasons. The population (7000) is chiefly Siamese, but there is an admixture of Burmese, the descendants of prisoners of war and of refugees from Tenasserim. The town is the headquarters of a governor under the high commissioner at Singora. It has for long been a centre of the American Presbyterian Mission to Siam. It was once the capital of a feudatory state, the chief of which ruled the greater part of the Malay Peninsula in the name of the kings of Siam and bore the' brunt of all the wars with Malacca and other Malay states. It lies, however, north of the limit of Malay expansion, and has never at any time come under Malay rule. With the fall of the Siamese capital of Ayuthia in 1767 it became independent, but returned to its allegiance on the founding of Bangkok. In the 17th century British, Portuguese and Dutch merchants had factories here and carried on an extensive trade.