janissaries, and Mahomet was placed under charge of his grandmother, who carried on the government for a time, but afterwards shared a similar fate. The state was governed by "eunuchs and women" until a vizier of ability arose in the person of Koprili, who adopted vigorous measures, hanged the patriarch, put the empire into a state of defence, fought the Venetians, captured Transylvania, and ruled the janissaries with a rod of iron. This Koprili was followed by another of the same name who acquired the reputation of being the best minister Turkey ever had. In this reign the Turks besieged Vienna, but without success. Disaster followed disaster, and the Turkish soldiery demanded the abdication of the sultan, which took place in 1687.—P. E. D.
MAI, Angelo, Cardinal, a celebrated philologist and palæographer, born at Schilpario in the province of Bergamo, on the 7th March, 1781 or 1782; died of inflammation of the bowels at Castelgandolfo, 9th September, 1854. He became a jesuit in 1797. In 1804 he was appointed professor of belles-lettres in Naples. During the French occupation he removed to Orvieto and to Venice, and became an ardent admirer of ancient literature and of palæography. In 1813 he was nominated curator of the Ambrosian library in Milan; and here he commenced a series of literary discoveries which raised him to the very highest place among the scholars of that class, although not on a par with some others in point either of the knowledge of ancient languages, or of ingenuity in conjectural emendations of texts. In 1814 he deciphered a palimpsest (or MS. written over by another MS.) of some orations of Cicero; and afterwards the discourses of the same writer Pro Scauro, In Curionem, &c. They were published in the same year. In 1815 Mai published the yet inedited works of M. Aurelius and some others, and added to the list of his discoveries. In 1816 he found and published what he considered to be a part of the Antiquitates Romanæ of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Leopardi, Struve, and other scholars, however, showed that these extracts were already known; and in 1828 Mai acknowledged them to be in the right. In 1817 he published "Sybillæ liber xiv.," and in 1818 restored a part of the Chronicle of Eusebius. The year 1819 installed him in a new and still ampler sphere of similar work, the Vatican library, of which he was made sub-librarian, and soon librarian-in-chief. Here he made his most signal discovery, the six books of Cicero de Republicâ, of which work only fragments had been previously known. The MS. was a palimpsest triply over-written, and conjectured by Mai to form about a quarter of the whole text. After publishing this work in 1822, and in 1823 many fragments from jurisconsults before Justinian, Mai commenced a series of collections exhibiting the general scope of his singularly happy discoveries, and which he continued editing from 1825 till the close of his life. These are—Scriptorum Veterum nova Collectio; Classicorum Auctorum Collectio; Spicilegium Romanum; and Nova Patrum Bibliotheca. His literary integrity was worthy of all praise: he scrupulously published what he found as he found it, even if contrary to Roman catholic orthodoxy. The Codex Vaticanus, one of the most ancient MSS. of the New Testament, differing in parts from the authorized text, was the object of his serious study; it was not till towards the end of his life that he received permission to publish it. In another respect he was less laudable; he monopolized the inspection of the Vatican palimpsests, and treated all applicants for admission to the library as unauthorized intruders. His extraordinary merit was rewarded by many successive offices, culminating in the cardinalate in 1838, and the post of librarian of the Roman church in 1853. He left his entire property to the poor of his native village.—W. M. R.
MAIANO. See Majano.
MAIMBOURG, Louis, a celebrated jesuit preacher and writer on ecclesiastical history, was born at Nancy in Lorraine, in 1620. Having defended in his history of the church of Rome the principles generally maintained by the Gallican bishops, he incurred the displeasure of the papal court, and was expelled from the order of jesuits. To console him in these circumstances Louis XIV. endowed him with a pension, on which he lived at the abbey of St. Victor at Paris. he died there suddenly on the 13th of August, 1686. The works which he published are two volumes of sermons; histories of Arianism, of the iconoclasts, of the crusades, of the Western schism, of the Greek schism, of the fall of the Empire, of the League, of Lutheranism and of Calvinism; and treatises on the Church of Rome and on the pontificate of St. Leo.—D. W. R.
MAIMONIDES, properly MOSEH BEN MAIMON, was born at Cordova, 30th March, 1135, and died at Cairo, after a brilliant career of authorship and public usefulness, 13th December, 1204. His ancestors for six generations had been distinguished for learning, and his father had obtained celebrity as a writer not only on religious subjects, but also on astronomy. To his father Maimonides was mainly indebted for his initiation into Rabbinic and Arabian literature and learning. The persecutions of Caliph Abdelmumen, who became master of Cordova in 1148, obliged Maimon to remove with his family to Fez, where he externally professed Mahometanism, while still keeping up the domestic observance of Judaism. He hoped for more liberty from the accession of the next caliph; but when this hope was disappointed, in 1165 he took ship with his family to Acre, from which he went on to Jerusalem, where he died. Maimonides then removed to Cairo, where he supported himself for some time by the sale of precious stones; but ere long he began to practise the medical art and was made physician to Saladin, in whose favour and service he took a high position. His attainments in learning had by this time became immense. He had not only studied the Bible and Talmud profoundly, but had made himself master of the whole extent of Arabian science, and of Greek philosophy too, in so far as it had been made accessible by Arabic translations. He wrote Arabic treatises on astronomy, mathematics, and medicine, which were highly commended by Arabian scholars. In addition to his work as court physician he gave lectures in the rabbinical college of Old-Cairo, whither many young students flocked to hear him; and these lectures, together with his publications on subjects of Jewish theology and law, spread his fame so widely that he was frequently consulted by dignified rabbis and whole congregations on questions of difficulty, as numerous Judicia still existing among his works, and called forth by such applications, testify. What gained him this wide-spread influence in the Jewish community was not his learning merely, but the peculiar view which he took of the Jewish law and tradition—a view which gave freshness and new life to his whole teaching. As observed by the erudite Dr. Jost, his latest biographer and critic, "it had been usual up to his time to look upon the law simply as the will of God, demanding obedience and submission, and all inquiry was directed to the ascertaining what was commanded and what was forbidden, without permitting the further inquiry why. Nay, all such inquiry into the grounds and reasons of the law had been looked upon as somewhat heretical; and on questions of faith, as distinguished from law, very few of the Jewish doctors had ventured into the field of abstract speculation. Maimonides started from quite a different ground-principle. He was inspired with the conviction that the Mosaic law and the oral tradition had not been revealed to Israel to oblige them to a blind obedience; but that as the whole of revelation consists of the highest truth, the highest excellence consists not in the mere observance of the law, but in an observance resting upon a knowledge of its inner grounds, and that the most incumbent duty of the Israelite is to make a thorough study of it, so as to fulfil it not only according to the letter, but in the right spirit. This conviction accompanies him in all his representations, which are equally free from rabbinico-scholastic subtleties, and from the admixture of foreign philosophical elements either mystical or Aristotelian." His chief theological works were three in number—1. A "Commentary on the Mischna," written in Arabic, begun in Fez in 1158, and finished in Egypt in 1168. It was afterwards translated by various hands into Hebrew, and in this form incorporated with editions of the Talmud. It contained the thirteen articles which every Jew, in the opinion of Maimonides, is bound to hold and confess, if he is not to be considered an apostate, and which were afterwards included in the synagogue ritual, to be daily recited by every worshipper. This work also contained the Book of Commandments, or a collection of all the biblical precepts, which had always been reckoned six hundred and thirteen in number, but had not always been correctly gathered. Maimonides aimed at a more exact enumeration. 2. His greatest work, and a truly gigantic undertaking, which occupied him during the best ten years of his life, 1170-1180, was a complete collection of Jewish law, arranged according to the Talmud in fourteen books, and published under the title of "The Second Law." The first book, which sets forth the duties of knowledge and is chiefly theological, is prized by Jewish divines as of inestimable worth. 3. His "guide to the
