Page:EB1911 - Volume 18.djvu/795

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MONTEFALCO—MONTEIL
765


supplement to Militär. Wochenblatt (Berlin, 1878); Organ des militärwissenschaftl. Vereins (Vienna, 1881); Reale instituto veneto di scienze, viii. 5, 6 (Venice, 1881); Rivista militare Italiana (March and April 1882); Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, vol. xxii. (Leipzig, 1885). Important controversial works are those of Turpin and Warnery, two distinguished soldiers of the 18th century (Commentaires sur les mémoires, &c. (Paris), 1769, and Commentaires sur les comm. . . . du comte Turpin, Breslau, 1777). A critical estimate of Montecucculi’s works will be found in Jähns Gesch. der Kriegswissenschaften, ii. 1162–1178 (Leipzig, 1890).

MONTEFALCO, a town of the province of Perugia, Italy, 6 m. S.W. of Foligno, situated on a hill, 1550 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1901), 3397 (town); 5726 (commune). Its churches contain a number of pictures of the Umbrian school; S. Francesco has good frescoes (scenes from the life of S. Francis) of 1452, by Benozzo Gozzoli, in the choir. There is also a communal picture-gallery in the picturesque Palezzo Comunale.


MONTEFIASCONE, a town and episcopal see of the province of Rome, Italy, built on a hill (2077 ft.) on the S.E. side of the Lake of Bolsena, 70 m. by rail N.W. of Rome. Pop. (1901), 3041 (town); 9731 (commune). The cathedral (1519) is one of the earliest structures by Sammicheli, S. Maria della Grazie is also by him. The town has in San Flaviano (built in 1032, repaired and enlarged in the Gothic style late in the 14th century), a curious double church of importance in the history of architecture (cf. G. T. Rivoira, Origini dell’ architettura lombarda, i. 326 sqq.); in its interior some 14th-century frescoes were discovered in 1896. In the crypt is the grave of a traveller, who succumbed to excessive drinking of the local wine known as Est, est, est. The story is that his valet who preceded him wrote “est” on the doors of all the inns where good wine was to be had, and that here the inscription was thrice repeated. It is possible that Montefiascone occupies the site of the Fanum Voltumnae, at which the representatives of the twelve chief cities of Etruria met in the days of their independence; while under the Empire the festival was held near Volsinii.


MONTEFIORE, SIR MOSES HAIM (1784–1885), Jewish philanthropist, eldest son of Joseph Elias Montefiore, a London merchant, and of Rachel, daughter of Abraham Lumbroso de Mattos Mocatta, was born at Leghorn, on the 24th of October 1784. His paternal ancestors were Jewish merchants who settled at Ancona and Leghorn in the 17th century, whilst his grandfather, Moses Haim Montefiore, emigrated from the latter town to London in 1758. Montefiore entered the Stock Exchange, his uncle purchasing for him at a cost of £1200 the right to practise as one of the twelve Jewish brokers licensed by the city of London. Although belonging to the Sephardic or “Spanish” congregation of Jews, he married in 1812 Judith, a daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, of the “German” Jews, another of whose daughters was the wife of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the head of the great banking firm; this relationship led to a close connexion in business between Montefiore and that house, and his brother Abraham married Henrietta Rothschild, a sister of the financier. In 1824 Montefiore, having amassed a fortune, retired from the Stock Exchange. From his forty-third year Montefiore devoted all his energies to ameliorating the lot of his co-religionists. His first pilgrimage to Palestine was undertaken in 1827, and resulted in a friendship with Mehemet Ali which was to lead to much practical good. Immediately on his return, Montefiore began to take an active part in the struggle which British Jews were then carrying on to obtain full political and civic rights. In 1837 he became the city of London’s second Jewish sheriff, and was knighted. In 1838, accompanied by Lady Montefiore, he started on a second voyage to Palestine, in order to submit to Mehemet Ali a scheme for Jewish colonization in Syria. Though political disturbances rendered his efforts again unsuccessful, the year 1840 brought Montefiore once more before Mehemet, this time to plead the cause of some Jews imprisoned at Damascus on a charge of ritual murder. He obtained their release, and on his way back wrung from the Porte a decree giving Jews throughout Turkey the utmost privileges accorded to aliens. In 1846 the threatened re-issue in Russia of an Imperial ukase (first promulgated in 1844) ordering the withdrawal of all Jews from within 50 versts of the German and Austrian frontiers, caused Montefiore to proceed to St Petersburg, where in an interview with the tsar he succeeded in getting the ukase rescinded. On his return, Queen Victoria, on the recommendation of Sir Robert Peel, made him a baronet. In 1859 a case of injustice which attracted the attention of all Europe brought Sir Moses to the gates of the Vatican. A Jewish child named Mortara had been secretly baptized by its nurse and stolen from its mother, who died of grief. Cardinal Antonelli, in the name of the pope, refused to give up the boy, who became a priest. In 1863 we find Montefiore on a mission in Constantinople to obtain from the Sultan, Abdul Aziz, the confirmation of his predecessor’s decrees in favour of the Jews; in 1864 in Morocco to combat an outbreak of anti-Semitism; in 1866 in Syria, relieving the distress resulting from a plague of locusts and an epidemic of cholera; and in 1867 in Rumania, once more pleading the cause of the oppressed Jews with Prince Charles. In 1872 Montefiore was deputed by the British Jews to present to Alexander II. their congratulations on the bicentenary of the birth of Peter the Great, and was received by the tsar with great honour at the Winter Palace. His seventh and last pilgrimage to the Holy Land was made in 1875, of which he wrote an account in his Narrative of a Forty Days’ Sojourn in the Holy Land, published in that year. The last decade of his life was passed in comparative quiet upon his estate near Ramsgate, in Kent; and there, after having received general congratulations on the completion of his hundredth year, he passed peacefully away on the 28th of July 1885. Sir Moses Montefiore was a strictly orthodox Jew, scrupulously observant of both the spirit and the letter of the Scriptures; in his grounds he had a synagogue built where services are still held twice a day, a college where ten rabbis live and expound the Jewish law, and a mausoleum that contains the remains of himself and of Lady Montefiore, who died in 1862.


MONTEFRIO, a town of southern Spain, in the province of Granada, on the river Bilano. Pop. (1900), 10,725. Montefrio is largely Moorish in character, and dominated by a Moorish castle. Being built midway between the Sierra de Priego and Sierra Parapanda, and commanding the open valley between these ranges, it became one of the chief frontier fortresses of the Moors in the 15th century. Its industries include manufactures of cotton stuffs, alcohol and soap.


MONTÉGUT, JEAN BAPTISTE JOSEPH ÉMILE (1825–1895), French critic, was born at Limoges on the 14th of June 1825. He began to write for the Revue des deux mondes in 1847, contributing between 1851 and 1857 a series of articles on the English and American novel, and in 1857 he became chief literary critic of the review. Émile Montégut translated Essais de philosophies américaine (1850) from Emerson; Révolution de 1688 (2 vols. 1853) from Macaulay’s History; and also produced the Œuvres completès (10 vols. 1868–1873) of Shakespeare. Among his numerous critical works are Écrivains modernes d’Angleterre (3rd series, 1885–1892) and, Heures de lecture d’un critique (1891), studies of John Aubrey, Pope, Wilkie Collins and Sir John Mandeville. Montégut died in Paris on the 11th of December 1895.


MONTEIL, AMANS ALEXIS (1769–1850), French historian, was born at Rodez in 1769, and died at Cely (Seine-et-Marne) in 1850. His tastes were historical, and he taught history at Rodez, at Fontainebleau and at St Cyr. He held that a disproportionate importance had been given to kings, their ministers and generals, and that it was necessary rather to study the people. In his Histoire des français des divers états, ou histoire de France aux cinq derniers siècles (10 vols., 1828–1844) he undertook to describe the different classes and occupations of the community. For this he made a collection of manuscripts, which he sold in 1835 (many of them passed into the library of Sir Thomas Philipps), drawing up a catalogue under the singular title of Traité de matériaux manuscrits de divers genres d’histoire. He boasted of having been the first to write really “national” history, and he wished further to show this in a memoir entitled L’Influence de l’histoire des divers états, ou comment fût allée la France si elle eût eu cette histoire (1840; reprinted in 1841 under