MARGHELAN, or Marghilan, a town of Asiatic Russia, situated in 40° 28′ N. and 71° 45′ E., the administrative centre of the province of Ferghana. Pop. (1900), 42,855, mostly Sarts, with Tajiks and Jews. It is a very old town, with high earthen walls and twelve gates, commanded by a fort. It lies in a beautiful, extraordinary fertile and well irrigated district. The heat in summer is excessive. The principal industry is the manufacture of silk; camels’ hair and woollen fabrics are also made. The new Russian town, founded in 1877, is 10 m. distant to the south-east, and has a population (1897) of 8977.
MARGRAVE (Ger. Markgraf), a German title meaning literally “count of the March” (Lat. marchio, comes marchae, marchisus). The margraves had their origin in the counts established by Charlemagne and his successors to guard the frontier districts of the empire, and for centuries the title was always associated with this function. The margraves had within their own jurisdiction the authority of dukes, but at the outset they were subordinate to the dukes in the feudal army of the empire. In the 12th century, however, the margraves of Brandenburg and Austria (the north and east marks) asserted their position as tenants-in-chief of the empire; with the break-up of the great duchies the others did the same; and the margraves henceforward took rank with the great German princes. The title of margrave very early lost its original significance, and was borne by princes whose territories were in no sense frontier districts, e.g. by Hermann, a son of Hermann, margrave of Verona, who assumed in 1112 the title of margrave of Baden. Thus, too, when the elector Albert Achilles of Brandenburg in 1473 gave Bayreuth and Ansbach as apanages to his sons and their descendants these styled themselves margraves. The title, however, retained in Germany its sovereign significance, and has not, like “marquis” in France and “marchese” in Italy, sunk into a mere title of nobility; it is not, therefore, in its present sense the equivalent of the English title “marquess.” The German margraviates have now all been absorbed into other sovereignties, and the title margrave is borne only as a subsidiary title in the full style of their sovereigns.
MARGUERITE, the popular name for the plant known botanically as Pyrethrum (or Chrysanthemum) frutescens (natural order Compositae), a shrubby perennial with smooth leaves cut pinnately into narrow segments and flower-heads two to three inches across produced singly in summer and autumn on slender erect stalks. The white ray-florets surround a yellow disk. It is a native of the Canary Isles, and a favourite for decoration and for greenhouse cultivation, window-boxes and open ground in the summer. The yellow marguerite (étoile d’or) has somewhat larger pale yellow flowers and glaucous leaves. The plant is propagated from cuttings taken in autumn from old plants and placed in sandy loamy soil in cold frames. By pruning the shoots in autumn the plants may be grown into very large specimens in the course of a few seasons.
MARGUERITE DE VALOIS. The name Marguerite was common in the Valois dynasty, and during the 16th century there were three princesses, all of whom figure in the political as well as in the literary history of the time, and who have been not unfrequently confounded. The first and last are the most important, but all deserve some account.
I. Marguerite d’Angoulême (1492-1549). This, the most celebrated of the Marguerites, bore no less than four surnames. By family she was entitled to the name of Marguerite de Valois; as the daughter of Charles d’Orléans, count d’Angoulême, she is more properly, and by careful writers almost invariably, called Marguerite d’Angoulême. From her first husband she took, during no small part of her life, the appellation Marguerite d’Alençon, and from her second, Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre, that of Marguerite de Navarre. She was born at Angoulême on the 11th of April 1492, and was two years older than her brother Francis I. She was betrothed early to Charles, duke d’Alençon, and married him in 1509. She was not very fortunate in this first marriage, but her brother’s accession to the throne made her, next to their mother Louise of Savoy, the most powerful woman of the kingdom. She became a widow in 1525, and was sought in marriage by many persons of distinction, including, it is said, Charles V. and Henry VIII. In 1527 she married Henri d’Albret, titular king of Navarre, who was considerably younger than herself, and whose character was not faultless, but who seems on the whole, despite slander, to have both loved and valued his wife. Navarre was not reconquered for the couple as Francis had promised, but ample apanages were assigned to Marguerite, and at Nérac and Pau miniature courts were kept up, which yielded to none in Europe in the intellectual brilliancy of their frequenters. Marguerite was at once one of the chief patronesses of letters that France possessed, and the chief refuge and defender of advocates of the Reformed doctrines. Round her gathered C. Marot, Bonaventure Des Périers, N. Denisot, J. Peletier, V. Brodeau, and many other men of letters, while she protected Rabelais, E. Dolet, &c. For a time her influence with her brother, to whom she was entirely devoted, and whom she visited when he was imprisoned in Spain, was effectual, but latterly political rather than religious considerations made him discourage Lutheranism, and a fierce persecution was begun against both Protestants and freethinkers, a persecution which drove Des Périers to suicide and brought Dolet to the stake. Marguerite herself, however, was protected by her brother, and her personal inclinations seem to have been rather towards a mystical pietism than towards dogmatic Protestant sentiments. Nevertheless bigotry and the desire to tarnish the reputation of women of letters have led to the bringing of odious accusations against her character, for which there is not the smallest foundation. Marguerite died at Odot-en-Bigorre on the 21st of September 1549. By her first husband she had no children, by her second a son who died in infancy, and a daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, who became the mother of Henry IV. Although the poets of the time are unwearied in celebrating her charms, she does not, from the portraits which exist, appear to have been regularly beautiful, but as to her sweetness of disposition and strength of mind there is universal consent.
Her literary work consists of the Heptameron, of poems entitled Les Marguerites de la marguerite des princesses, and of Letters. The Heptameron, constructed, as its name indicates, on the lines of the Decameron of Boccaccio, consists of seventy-two short stories told to each other by a company of ladies and gentlemen who are stopped in the journey homewards from Cauterets by the swelling of a river. It was not printed till 1558, ten years after the author’s death, and then under the title of Les Amants fortunés. Internal evidence is strongly in favour of its having been a joint work, in which more than one of the men of letters who composed Marguerite’s household took part. It is a delightful book, and strongly characteristic of the French Renaissance. The sensuality which characterized the period appears in it, but in a less coarse form than in the great work of Rabelais; and there is a poetical spirit which, except in rare instances, is absent from Pantagruel. The Letters are interesting and good. The Marguerites consist of a very miscellaneous collection of poems, mysteries, farces, devotional poems of considerable length, spiritual and miscellaneous songs, &c. The Dernières poésies, not printed till 1896 (by M. A. Lefranc), are interesting and characteristic, consisting of verse-epistles, comédies (pieces in dramatic form on the death of Francis I., &c.), Les Prisons, a long allegorical poem of amorous-religious-historical tenor; some miscellaneous verse chiefly in dizains, and a later and remarkable piece, Le Navire, expressing her despair at her brother’s death. Of the other works, never yet completely edited, the best editions are, for the Heptameron, Leroux de Lincy (1855); for the Lettres, Genin (1841-1842); and for the Marguerites, &c., Frank (1873). English translations of the Heptameron are rather numerous: one appeared in 1887 by A. Machen, with an introduction by Miss A. M. F. Robinson (Mme Darmesteter) and another (anonymous) in 1894, with an essay by G. Saintsbury. The religious poem, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse was translated by Queen Elizabeth. Books on Marguerite and her court are also many. There may be noted Durand’s Marguerite de Valois et la cour de François Ier (1848); La Ferrière’s Marguerite d’Angoulême (1891); Lotheissen’s Königin Margareta von Navarra (1885); Miss Edith Sichel’s Women and Men of the French Renaissance (1901), and P. Courtault’s Marguerite de Navarre (1904).