74 MAMELUKES succession among the Mamelukes were not un- knos ii, they were comparatively rare, and it was generally from master to slave, and not from father to son. Volney, who visited Egypt in the latter part of the 18th century, asserted that all Mameluke children perished in the first or second descent. Each of the 24 beys maintained 500 or 600 followers, thor- oughly armed and equipped, and forming an admirable cavalry force. Each of the Mame- lukes was attended by two armed slaves who fought on foot. In 1798, when Bonaparte in- vaded Egypt, his army first encountered the Mamelukes while on the march from Alexan- dria to Cairo. "The whole plain was covered with Mamelukes," says Scott, "mounted on the finest Arabian horses, and armed with pistols, carbines, and blunderbusses of the best English workmanship, their plumed turbans waving in the air, and their rich dresses and arms glitter- ing in the sun. Entertaining a high contempt for the French force, as consisting almost en- tirely of infantry, this splendid barbaric chiv- alry watched every opportunity for charging them, nor did a single straggler escape the un- relenting edge of their sabres. Their charge was almost as swift as the wind, and as their severe bits enabled them to halt or wheel their horses at full gallop, their retreat was as rapid us their advance. Even the practised veterans of Italy were at first embarrassed by this new mode of fighting, and lost several men ; espe- cially when fatigue caused any one to fall out of the ranks, in which case his fate became certain. But they were soon reconciled to fighting the Mamelukes, when they discovered that each of these horsemen carried about him his fortune, and that it not uncommonly amounted to considerable sums in gold." At the battle of the Pyramids, July 21, 1798, the Mamelukes mustered their full force, consisting of 7,000 men under Murad Bey, and attacked the French with desperate courage ; but they were repulsed with terrible slaughter, and about 2,500 of them who survived fled to Up- per Egypt. " Could I have united the Mame- luke horse to the French infantry," said Na- poleon, " I would have reckoned myself master of the world." After the French were driven from Egypt by the British, the Mamelukes re- gained in some degree their power, and a civil war broke out between them and the Turks. They were twice victims of treacherous mas- sacres, and were completely crushed March 1, 1811, when Mehemet AH beguiled 470 chiefs into the citadel of Cairo, and then closed the gates and ordered his Albanian soldiers to fire upon them. Only one escaped, a bey who leaped his horse from the ramparts and alighted uninjured, though the animal was killed by the fall. Immediately afterward a general mas- sacre of the Mamelukes in every province of Egypt was ordered. The few who escaped fled to Nubia, and especially to the province of Sennaar, where they built the town of New Dongola and attempted to keep up their force MAMIANI by disciplining negroes in their peculiar tac- tics. They did not succeed, however, and a few years later their number was reduced to about 100, when they dispersed, and the Mame- lukes ceased to exist. MAMERTUiES. See MESSINA. MAMIAJVI, Terenzlo della Rovere, count, an Ital- ian philosopher, born in Pesaro about 1800. He received a superior education, and in 1831 took part in the revolutionary movement in the Romagna, and was proscribed. He took refuge in Paris, where he was occupied in lit- erary labors until he was permitted to return to Italy by the amnesty granted in 1846 by Pius IX. He became prominent among the liberal statesmen who gathered around the pope, and accepted a place in the administra- tion. The vacillating policy of Pius IX., how- ever, soon led to his retirement, and he went to Turin, where with Gioberti and others he founded a patriotic society, of which he became president. In November, 1848, after the flight of the pope to Gaeta, he returned to Rome and became minister of foreign affairs ; . but he soon retired in consequence of the predomi- nance of the ultra-republican element, and also resigned his seat in the constituent assembly. After the restoration of the papal power in 1849 he went to Piedmont, and subsequently became professor of philosophy in the Turin university, and a member of parliament. He warmly supported the policy of Cavour, and in 1860 was appointed minister of public in- struction. From 1861 to 1865 he was minister at Athens. In 1866 he was accredited to Switzerland, but soon afterward became a member of the Italian senate. In 1870 he was restored to the chair of the philosophy of history in the Sapienza college at Rome, which he had formerly held. He is promi- nent among Italian ontologists. In his ear- liest philosophical work, Del rinnovamento dell 1 antica filosofia italiana (1834), he ad- hered to the doctrine of empiricism based on psychological investigation. But he soon be- came a convert to Rosmini's opinion that the experimental method alone cannot philosophi- cally reconstruct the science of nature and mind; and in his' Discorso sulV ontologia e sul metodo (1841), and Dialoghi di scienza prima (1846), he strove to find a philosophical basis in common sense, and expressed for the first time his doctrine of immediate perception as the only foundation of a full insight into real- ity. This last phase of his doctrine is ex- pounded in his Confessioni di un metafisico (1865), which is divided into two parts, re- spectively relating to ontology and cosmology. A complete edition of his poetical works was published by M. Lemonnier (Florence, 1857). An English translation of his Princi- pii della filosofia del diritto (" Rights of Na- tions "), edited by Roger Acton, was published in London in 1860. Among his later works are: Rinascimento cattolico (1862) ; Saggi di filosofia civile (1865); Meditazioni cartesian*
