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A map of Dalmatia dated August 22, 1699 has been rediscovered within the historical librarian heritage of the Institute of Marine Sciences of Venice (ISMAR-CNR). The cartouche reports that the map is a copy of that submitted by the General Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili to the ambassadors during the peace negotiations between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire. Marsili spent a long time as an Habsburg Emperor’s Officer in the Danubian regions along the front with the Turks, during the Austro Turkish conflict (1684-1699).
Trained in Bologna, his hometown, by the leading scientists in the university as Marcello Malpighi, Geminiano Montanari and Gian Domenico Cassini, he had a rich correspondence with foreign leading scientist as Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton of the newly formed Royal Society of London, and he used his scientific culture to deepen the knowledge of the entire Danubian area. Maps and geological and hydrographic profiles became with him real scientific instruments, as well as key strategic documents and diplomats. The map found in Venice is perhaps a copy of a map without cartouche preserved in the Biblioteca Universitaria Bolognese, that as was written on the back, presented at the Peace of Carlowitz (January 1699). Many other papers, including unpublished manuscripts, which were found at the older headquarters of Venetian ISMAR, the former Istituto di Studi Adriatici, concern the same area and time span from the end of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
Thanks to a collaboration initiated with the University IUAV of Venice is ongoing cataloging, digitization and geolocation of historical maps, which will make available to scholars and the public a documentary heritage still largely unexplored.