Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, born in Bologna to an old patrician family, had been educated in accordance with his rank, supplementing his training by studying mathematics, anatomy, and natural history with the best teachers and by personal observations.
After a course of scientific studies in his native city, he had traveled through the Ottoman Empire collecting data on its military organization, as well as on its natural history.
On his return, he had in 1682 entered the service of the Emperor Leopold and fought with distinction against the Turks, by whom he had been wounded and captured in an action on the river Rába, and sold to a pasha whom he had accompanied to the battle of Vienna.
After his release was purchased in 1684, he had returned to the imperial army and served as a talented military engineer.
Marsigli had contributed to the successful siege of Buda in 1696 and in the following years in the military operations of the liberation war against the Turks.
After the Treaty of Karlowitz, he had been commissioned to lead the Habsburg border demarcation commission.
Marsigli had mapped the eight hundred and fifty kilometer-long Habsburg-Ottoman border in the former Kingdom of Hungary (today Croatia, Serbia, Romania).
During the twenty years he spent in Hungary, he has collected scientific information, specimens, antiques, took measurements and observations for his work on the Danube.
He was assisted by Johann Christoph Müller of Nuremberg, who prepared the manuscript for printing and commissioned the engravers in Nuremberg.
The sample of the work, Prodromus, had been published in 1700 and the large work was expected by 1704.
He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in November 1691.
During the War of the Spanish Succession, Marsigli had been second in command under Count d'Arco at the fortress of Breisach, which had surrendered in 1703.
Count d'Arco was beheaded because he was found guilty of capitulating before it was necessary, while Marsigli had been stripped of all honors and commissions, and his sword was broken over him.
His appeals to the emperor were in vain.
Public opinion, however, has acquitted him later of the charge of neglect or ignorance.
After he had to leave the Habsburg army, he had made journeys to Switzerland and then France, spending a considerable time at Marseilles to study the nature of the sea.
He has drawn plans, made astronomical observations, measured the speed and size of rivers, studied the products, the mines, the birds, fishes, and fossils of every land he visited, and also collected specimens of every kind, instruments, models, antiquities, etc.
He had shown in 1711 that coral is an animal rather than a plant as previously thought.
Finally he had returned to Bologna and presented his entire collection to the Senate of Bologna in 1712.
Here he founds his "Institute of Sciences and Arts", which is formally opened in 1715.
Six professors are put in charge of the different divisions of the institute.
