LE SYMPOSIUM INTERNATIONAL LE LIVRE. LA ROUMANIE. L ...

608 KRISTA ZAcH
the english and French specialists’ interest in these works going24 – as
happened with Cantemir’s large hand-drawn map of Moldavia.
possibly due to their contacts with St. petersburg, the map and the fact
that Dimitrie Cantemir had been working on a description of Moldavia did
not escaped the French geographers’ attention either. Guillaume Delisle
(1675–1726) was known for his international scientific network25 reaching
as far as St. petersburg. thus, it was Guillaume Delisle who had asked in a
letter dated from 1721 and addressed to peter the Great’s librarian, Johann
Daniel Schumacher for Cantemir’s map, even though it might not yet be
perfect:
… si le prince de Moldavie a des Cartes manuscrites de son pays,
on serait bien ause [it were important] d’en avoir copié, quand
même elle seraient encore imparfait à cause de peu connaissance
que nous avons ici de ce pays. 26
It is not clear what may have happened later on, Dimitrie Cantemir and
Guillaume Delisle dying at few years’ distance from 1721. What is known,
points to the fact that the Delisle family did not make use of Cantemir’s
new data. Because several territorial maps of the hungarian Kingdom resp.
of Central europe, Moldavia included, published later on under Guillaume
Delisle’s name ignore Cantemir using the old German and Dutch patterns. 27
Guillaume’s brother Joseph-nicolas Delisle (1688–1768) went to
russia in 1721 and 1725/26, staying there till 1747. he wrote in his XIth Memorandum that he had seen Dimitrie Cantemir’s large hand-drawn
map of Moldavia in St. petersburg in 1726 but lacked the time to copy
either. later he claimed from memory that the Amsterdam 1737 map was
a smaller-size copy of the hand-drawn Cantemirean map. 28 Be this as it
may, the 1737 Amsterdam map is part of J.-n. Delisle’s legacy of maps in
Bibliotheque nationale, paris. he may have acquired it after 1737.
Antioch Cantemir, russian Ambassador to the Court of St. James
(1732–1737) and then to France (1738–1744, the year of his premature
death at the age of 36), took pains to have his father’s autograph map of
Moldavia published. it seems that he failed to do so, possibly, as Eşanu
suggests, because he himself did not have the money. 29 only few details
24 MÜLLER: Vorrede, 28, 29.
25 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Delisle;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Guillaume_Delisle (11.05.2011).
26 quote from EŞANU – EŞANU: Descrierea Moldovei, 106 f., 114.
27 o See e.g. Archive nord-rhein Westfalen (nrW), Bestände, n 16728.
28 EŞANU – EŞANU: Descrierea Moldovei, 99 f., 107, 118 f.
29 EŞANU – EŞANU, idem, 115.