VERBIEST'S MANUSCRIPTS ON ASTRONOMY AND MECHANICS (1676): FROM BEIJING TO MOSCOW AND CONSTANTINOPLE

摘要

The article presents two manuscripts authored by Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J., written in 1676 in Beijing for the attention of the Russian tsar and brought to Moscow by the legate Nicolas Spathary Milescu. Both texts represent the oldest version of the Astronomia Europaea corpus, and had until recently been forgotten. Their recent discovery was in the form of a manuscript copy, produced by Chrysanthos Notaras in Moscow in 1693, which has languished in obscurity in the library of the Metochion of the patriarchate of Jerusalem in Constantinople. In this paper, we situate the manuscripts within the corpus of Verbiest's Latin writings and present the sections that were subsequently included in the Compendium Latinum and Astronomia Europaea edition (Dillingen, 1687) and those that were eventually omitted. We also trace the history of the Moscow manuscripts and their Constantinopolitan copy - the only remaining testimonium of them - and present Verbiest's science (astronomy, engineering and physics), as it appears in the manuscripts copied by Chrysanthos