Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/686

Rh 654 M A Z M A Z family, at Mazepintzui in tlie palatinate of Podolia. At an early age he became a page at the court of John Casimir, king of Poland. After some time he returned to his native province ; but, engaging in an intrigue with a Polish matron of high rank, he was detected by the injured husband, and was sentenced to be bound naked on the back of an untamed horse. The animal on being let loose gal loped off to its native wilds of the Ukraine. Mazeppa, half- dead and insensible, was released from his fearful position, and restored to animation by some poor peasants. In a short time his agility, courage, and sagacity rendered him popular among the Cossacks. He was appointed secretary and adjutant to Samoilovitch, their hetman or chief, and succeeded that functionary in 1687. The title of prince was afterwards conferred upon him by his friend and patron, Peter the Great, who long believed confidingly in his good faith, and banished or executed as calumnious traitors all who, like Palei, Kotchubey, and Iskra, ventured to accuse him of conspiring with the enemies of Russia. Bent, however, upon casting off the Russian yoke, Mazeppa became, in his seventieth year, and after much hesitation and inconstancy of purpose, an ally of the Swedish monarch, Charles XII. After the disastrous battle of Pultowa, fought, it is said, by his advice, Baturin, his capital, was taken and sacked by Menshikoff, and his name anathematized throughout the churches of Russia, and his effigy suspended from the gallows. A wretched fugitive, he escaped to Bender, but only to end his life by poison in 1709. Pushkin made Mazeppa the hero of his drama &quot; Pultowa.&quot; MAZZARA DEL VALLO, a city of Italy, on the coast of Sicily, in the province Trapani, 13 miles by rail south east of Marsala. It is surrounded by a wall 37 feet in height, strengthened by towers rising at intervals; and it possesses a castle and a cathedral, both founded by Count Roger in the llth century. The harbour is spacious but badly sheltered from the south winds. The population of the city was 11,756 in 1871 ; that of the commune was 10,999 in 1861 and 13,505 in 1881. Mazara or Mazaris appears from Diodorus Siculus (xiii. 54) to have been a trading establishment of Selinus, and it was captured by the Carthaginian general in 409 B.C. on his march against that city. It was in this neighbourhood that the Saracens landed in 827 A.D. ; and the name of Val di Mazzara long indicated one of the three divisions of Sicily. MAZZINI, GIUSEPPE (1805-1872), Italian patriot, was born on June 22, 1805, at Genoa, where his father, Giacomo Mazzini, was a physician in good practice,* and a professor in the university. His mother is described as having been a woman of great personal beauty, as well as of active intellect and strong affections. During infancy and childhood his health was extremely delicate, and it appears that he was nearly six years of age before he was quite able to walk ; long before this, however, he had learned to read, and otherwise begun to show great intel lectual precocity. His first tutor was an old priest who taught him Latin, but his omnivorous reading was not directed by any master. At the age of thirteen he began to attend classes in the faculty of arts at the university; he afterwards studied anatomy with a view to following his father s profession, but finally (1826) graduated in laws. Apart from his professional studies, he took lessons in music, English, and fencing. Of his student days little more is recorded than that his exceptional abilities as well as the remarkable generosity and benevolence of his impulses and aims were quickly recognized by his comrades, his professors, however, having frequent occasion to complain of his disregard for conventional rules. As to his inner life during this period, we have only one brief but significant sentence ; &quot; for a short time,&quot; he says, &quot; my mind was somewhat tainted by the doctrines of the foreign material istic school ; but the study of history and the intuitions of conscience the only tests of truth soon led me back to the spiritualism of our Italian fathers.&quot; For some time after his admission as an advocate Mazzini was occupied in the Ufiicio dei Poveri ; but, although he seems to have discharged the duties arising from this with zeal and success, he never really overcame his repugnance to the dry and technical details of legal practice. The natural bent of his genius was towards literature, and, in the course of the four years of his nominal connexion with the legal profession, he wrote a considerable number of essays and reviews, some of which have been wholly or partially reproduced in the critical and literary volumes of his Life and Writings. His first essay, characteristically enough on &quot; Dante s Love of Country,&quot; was sent to the editor of the Antologia Fiorentina in 1826, but did not appear until some years afterwards in the Subalpino. He was an ardent supporter of romanticism as against what he called &quot; literary servitude under the name of classicism&quot;; and in this interest all his critiques (as, for example, that of Giannoni s Exile in the Indicatore Livornese, 1829) were penned. But in the meantime the &quot; republican instincts &quot; which he tells us he had inherited from his mother had been developing, and his sense of the evils under which Italy was groaning had been intensified ; and at the same time he became possessed with the idea that Italians, and he himself in particular, &quot; could and therefore ouglit to struggle for liberty of country.&quot; His literary articles accordingly became more and more suggestive of advanced liberalism in politics, and led to the suppression by Government of the Indicatore Genovese and the Indicatore Livornese successively. Having joined the Carbonari, he soon rose to one of the higher grades in their hierarchy, and was entrusted with a special secret mission into Tuscany ; but, as his acquaintance grew, his dissatisfaction with the organization of the society in creased, and he was already meditating the formation of a new association having closer bonds of union and more definite aims when shortly after the French revolution of 1830 he was betrayed, while initiating a new member, to the authorities of Piedmont. He was imprisoned in the fortress of Savona on the western Riviera for about six months, when, a conviction having been found impractic able through deficiency of evidence, he was released, but upon conditions involving so many restrictions of his liberty that he preferred the alternative of leaving the country. He withdrew accordingly into France, living chiefly in Marseilles. While in his lonely cell at Savona, in presence of &quot; those symbols of the infinite, the sky and the sea,&quot; with a greenfinch for his sole companion, and having access to no books but &quot; a Tacitus, a Byron, and a Bible,&quot; he had finally become aware of the great mission or &quot; apostolate &quot; (as he himself called it) of his life ; and soon after his release his prison meditations took shape in the programme of the organization which was destined soon to become so famous throughout Europe, that of La Giovine Italia, or Young Italy. Its publicly avowed aims were to be the liberation of Italy both from foreign and domestic tyranny, and its unification under a republican form of government ; the means to be used were education, and, where advisable, insurrection by guerrilla bands ; the motto was to be &quot; God and the people,&quot; and the banner was to bear on one side the words &quot; Unity&quot; and &quot;Independence&quot; and on the other &quot; Liberty,&quot; &quot; Equality,&quot; and &quot; Humanity,&quot; to describe respectively the national and the international aims. In April 1831 Charles Albert, &quot;the ex-Carbonaro conspirator of 1821,&quot; succeeded Charles Felix on the Sardinian throne, and towards the close of that year Mazzini, making himself, as he afterwards confessed, &quot; the interpreter of a hope which he did not share,&quot; wrote the new king a letter, published at Marseilles, urging him to take the lead in the impending