Dimitrie Cantemir

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Dimitrie Cantemir (1716)
Postage stamp from the Soviet Union dedicated to Dimitrie Cantemir, 1973 (Michel 4175, Scott 4132)

Dimitrie Cantemir ( Russian : Дмитрий Кантемир , Turkish : Kantemiroğlu , Greek : Δημήτριος Καντεμίρης * 26. October 1673 in Silişteni , Moldavia , † 21st August 1723 in Dmitrovka in Kharkov , Kiev Governorate , Russian Empire ) was a Moldovan Universal scientists, historians , Music theorist , composer, geographer and encyclopedist . Cantemir served as voivodethe Moldau and after moving to Russia he was employed as His Highness of Russia in the court of Peter the Great from 1711 .

Origin and family

Cantemir was born the son of the Moldovan voivod Constantin Cantemir , the scion of the boyar family Cantemir , which was of lower Moldovan nobility. His mother Ana Bantăş was a highly educated enlightenment woman, also of noble origin. Dimitrie Cantemir, however, later withheld his parental origin, which he thought was insufficient to pretend a descent from Khan Temir .

He received lessons in Greek and Latin from private tutors and acquired a profound knowledge of the ancient classics. Between 1688 and 1710 he was exiled to Constantinople , where he studied the Turkish language and the history of the Ottoman Empire at the Greek Academy of the Orthodox Patriarch. During his stay in Constantinople, he also served as a kind of hostage to vouch for his father's loyalty to the Ottomans. He served as a mediator for Ottoman educated people to European culture. He was friends with the grand vizier and writer Rami Mehmed Pascha , among others . 1710 he returned as voivode in Moldavia back.

He ruled there for only a few weeks until he joined Peter the Great's campaign against the Ottoman Empire in 1711 and placed Moldova under Russian sovereignty. This change of sides seems to be the result of a dispute with the Ottoman Grand Vizier over the amount of the tribute to the High Porte . After losing the battle against the Ottomans, Cantemir fled to Russia , where he was able to settle. Peter the Great gave him the title of Prince ( Seren ) of the Russian Empire. From Charles VI. he received the honorary title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire . In the last years of his life he is said to have been filled with a deep yearning for Constantinople and the Ottoman culture. Now he tried more and more to make Ottoman views known in the West. He died north of what is now Kharkiv and was buried in Moscow.

Cantemir was married twice. First he married in Iași on May 9, 1699 Cassandra Cantacuzene (1682-11 May 1713) and on January 14, 1717 in Saint Petersburg Anastassija Trubezkaja (October 14, 1700 to November 27, 1755).

Children of Dimitrie Cantemir

historian

In 1714 Cantemir became a member of the Brandenburg Society of Sciences in Berlin . In the years from 1711 to 1719 he wrote his most important works. He was one of the great linguists of his time, not just because he spoke eleven languages. The knowledge he acquired in the Ottoman Empire was also exceptional . As a highly respected and original author, he gained great influence in many subject areas. His most important work was the well-known story of the emergence and decline of the Ottoman Empire . It circulated unprinted as a manuscript in Europe for several years before it was printed in London in 1734 and translated into German and French. It was regarded as a standard work until the middle of the 19th century. It was later challenged because of dubious sources. This work is interpreted as a justification for his betrayal of the Ottoman Empire. He did not want his betrayal to be viewed by his overlord as a simple apostasy of a vassal. Cantemir used an Ottoman figure of thought for this, but in a completely different sense. According to Ottoman historians, the figure of thought was that the Ottoman Empire was in decline from the 17th century onwards, but that this could be stopped by wise policy, which the historians expressed in their advice. Cantemir, on the other hand, saw the difficulties of the Ottoman Empire as a favorable opportunity for his own politics, and said that he was only anticipating the independence of his state with his apostasy. Cantemir's work is based on two traditions: The text is very much based on Ottoman imperial chronicles with a structure according to the years of reign of the sultans. The fictional literal quotations of the protagonists that Cantemir puts in their mouths are more in the tradition of Greco-Roman historiography. In his work he takes sides with the Orthodox Church and, less obviously, with the Russian tsar. Nevertheless, he shows admiration for the Ottoman state order, e.g. B. the gratuities for the soldiers, the balance of power between Grand Vizier and Sultan etc.

Other books dealt with oriental music (lost) and critically the first history of Romania under the title Historia Hieroglyphica , in which he had the characters appear encoded as animals. Furthermore, he described the history of the two ruling families, those of Brâncoveanu and Cantacuzino , whereby - damaging to his reputation - he made a few mistakes through forgeries and mystifications. A philosophical treatise under the Romanian title Divanul sau Gâlceava Înțeleptului cu lumea sau Giudețul sufletului cu trupul was translated into Greek, Arabic, French ( Le divan ou la dispute du sage avec le monde ou le jugement de l'âme avec le corps ) and into English ( The Divan or The Wise Man's Parley with the World or The Judgment of the Soul with the Body ).

Musicologist

Cantemir worked as a composer and as a theorist of Ottoman music . His book Kitâbu 'Ilmi'l-Mûsikí alâ Vechi'l-Hurûfât ( The Book of Written Musicology , published in Iași in 1698 ) not only deals with the practice of melody and rhythm of Ottoman music, but also includes contemporary and previous work in one of his self-developed notation, works that would otherwise have been lost without Cantemir.

geographer

At the request of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Cantemir wrote the first geographical, ethnographic, and economic synopsis of Moldova under the title Descriptio Moldaviae in 1714 . The manuscript was circulated again before it was printed (in German) in a magazine in 1769 and as a monograph in 1771. At the time the work was created, Cantemir also made a handwritten map of Moldova , the very first map of this region. It contained geographical and administrative-political information and was printed in the Netherlands in 1737 and was long considered a standard work.

Romanist

In his work Descriptio Moldaviae Cantemir also showed himself to be an early Romanist . He proved the origin of Romanian from Latin , compared it with Italian and discussed numerous contact languages ​​that had left their mark on Romanian.

Others

A house in Istanbul 's Fener district , which Cantemir used as his residence during his stay in the Ottoman Empire, has been turned into a museum.

Fonts

Secondary literature

In terms of secondary literature on Cantemir, particular mention should be made of publications by the Romanian historian and musicologist Eugenia Popescu-Judetz , which have been translated into various languages, e . B.

  • Eugenia Popescu-Judetz: Prince Dimitrie Cantemir. Theorist and Composer of Turkish Music. Pan Yayıncılık, Istanbul 1999, ISBN 975-7652-82-2 .

Also:

Web links

Commons : Dimitrie Cantemir  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stefan Lemny: Les Cantemir: L'Aventure Européenne d'une Famille Princière au XVIIIe Siecle. Editions Complexes, Paris 2009, p. 51.
  2. ↑ Reissued by Owen Wright as
    Demetrius Cantemir: The Collection of Notations. Volume 1: Text. 1992, ISBN 978-0-7286-0191-8
    Demetrius Cantemir: The Collection of Notations. Volume 2: Commentary. 2001, ISBN 978-0-7546-0281-1
    Edited by Yalçın Tura:
    Kantemiroğlu: Kitābu ʿİlmi'l-Mūsīkī ʿalā vechi'l-Ḥurūfāt. = Mûsikiyi Harflerle Tesbit ve İcrâ İlminin Kitabı. 2 volumes. Yapı Kredi Yayınları, Istanbul 2001, ISBN 975-08-0167-9 .
    Facsimile edition by the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Sciences in cooperation with the Musicological Seminar of the University of Münster in preparation, see Website of the Department of Ethnomusicology
personal data
SURNAME Cantemir, Dimitrie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cantemir, Demetrius; Kantemir, Dimitrie; Kantemiroğlu
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Moldovan-Romanian historian, music theorist, geographer and universal scientist
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1673
PLACE OF BIRTH Silișteni
DATE OF DEATH August 21, 1723
Place of death Dmitrowka , Kharkiv in Ukraine