18 Facts About Dimitrie Cantemir

Dimitrie Cantemir twice served as voivode of Moldavia.

Dimitrie Cantemir was a prolific writer, variously a philosopher, historian, composer, musicologist, linguist, ethnographer, and geographer.

Dimitrie Cantemir is the Romanian form of the name Latinized as Demetrius and, less often, anglicized as Demeter.

Dimitrie Cantemir is known as Dimitri Kantemiroglu in Turkish contexts, Dymitr Kantemir in Polish, and Demetrios Kantimeres in Greek.

Dimitrie Cantemir's mother was a learned daughter of a local noble family.

Dimitrie Cantemir learned Greek and Latin to read the classics as a child.

Between 1687 and 1710, Dimitrie Cantemir spent most of his time as a hostage or envoy in Constantinople, living in the palace he owned, where he learned Turkish and studied Ottoman history at the Patriarchate's Greek Academy.

When his brother Antioh eventually succeeded to the control of Moldavia, Dimitrie Cantemir served as his envoy to the Porte.

In 1710, Dimitrie Cantemir was appointed voivode in his own right.

Dimitrie Cantemir was made both a Russian prince by Peter and a prince of the Holy Roman Empire by Charles VI.

Dimitrie Cantemir lived on an estate at Dmitrovka near Oryol, with a sizable boyar retinue.

Dimitrie Cantemir was married twice: to Princess Cassandra Cantacuzino, daughter of Prince Serban Cantacuzino and supposed descendant of the Byzantine Kantakouzenoi, in 1699, and to Princess Anastasiya Trubetskaya in 1717.

Dimitrie Cantemir's son Antioch was the Russian ambassador at London and Paris, a friend of Voltaire and Montesquieu, and so influential a poet, satirist, and essayist as to be considered "the father of Russian poetry".

Dimitrie Cantemir was a polyglot known as one of the greatest linguists of his time, speaking and writing eleven languages.

Dimitrie Cantemir published the first critical history of Romania as a whole, the Chronicle of the Antiquity of the Romano-Moldavo-Wallachians, from 1719 to 1722.

Dimitrie Cantemir wrote his Descriptio Moldaviae in 1714 at the request of the Royal Academy in Berlin.

Dimitrie Cantemir's name is among those who were considered to be the brightest minds of the world on a plaque at the Library of Sainte-Genevieve in Paris, next to those of Leibniz, Newton, Piron, and other great thinkers.

In 1999, the Bezmara ensemble recorded Yitik Sesin Pesinde from the Dimitrie Cantemir transcriptions using period instruments.