MARKIRCH (French, Ste-Marie-aux-Mines), a town of Germany, in Upper Alsace, prettily situated in the valley of the Leber, an affluent of the Rhine, near the French frontier. Pop. (1900), 12,372. The once productive silver, copper and lead mines of the neighbourhood were practically unworked during the whole of the 19th century, but have recently been reopened. The main industries of the place are, however, weaving and dyeing, and it is estimated that there are about 40,000 work-people in the industrial district of which Markirch is the centre. The small river Leber, which intersects the town, was at one time the boundary between the German and French languages, and traces of this separation still exist. The German-speaking inhabitants on the right bank were Protestants, and subject to the counts of Rappoltstein, while the French inhabitants were Roman Catholics, and under the rule of the dukes of Lorraine.
See Mühlenbeck, Documents historiques concernant Ste-Marie aux Mines (Markirch, 1876-1877); Hauser, Das Bergbaugebiet von Markirch (Strass., 1900).
MARKLAND, JEREMIAH (1693-1776), English classical scholar, was born at Childwall in Lancashire on the 29th (or 18th) of October 1693. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He died at Milton, near Dorking, on the 7th of July 1776.
His most important works are Epistola critica (1723), the Sylvae of Statius (1728), notes to the editions of Lysias by Taylor, of Maximus of Tyre by Davies, of Euripides’ Hippolytus by Musgrave, editions of Euripides’ Supplices, Iphigenia in Tauride and in Aulide (ed. T. Gaisford, 1811); and Remarks on the Epistles of Cicero to Brutus (1745).
See J. Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes (1812), iv. 272; also biography by F. A. Wolf, Literarische Analekten, ii. 370 (1818).
MARKO KRALYEVICH, Servian hero, was a son of the Servian king or prince, Vukashin (d. 1371). Chagrined at not himself becoming king after his father’s death, he headed a revolt against the new ruler of the Servians. Later he passed into the service of the sultan of Turkey, and was killed in battle about 1394. Marko, however, is more celebrated in legend than in history. He is regarded as the personification of the Servian race, and stories of strength and wonder have gathered round his name. He is supposed to have lived for 300 years, to have ridden a horse 150 years old, and to have used his enormous physical strength against oppressors, especially against the Turks. He is a great figure in Servian poetry, and his deeds are also told in the epic poems of the Rumanians and the Bulgarians. One tradition relates how he retired from the world owing to the advent of firearms, which, he held, made strength and valour of no account in battle. Goethe regards Marko as the counterpart of Hercules and of the Persian Rustem.
The Servian poems about him were published in 1878; a German translation by Gröber (Marko, der Königssohn) appeared at Vienna in 1883.