Leibniz Discovers Asia:
Historical Linguistics & Social networking
in the Republic of Letters
Michael C. Carhart

The on-going publication of the Academie Ausgabe of Leibniz’s Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe enables us for the first time to see the extent of Leibniz’s network of correspondents on the topic of the history of language. Literally hundreds of letters in the 1690s – the Akademie Ausgabe is now up to about the year 1702 – seeking linguistic information from scholars across Europe and Asia – Britain, Sweden, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, Moscow, and Beijing. It’s like email to him. Leibniz: famous for mathematics, metaphysics, law, and theology, plus his life’s work on the history of the house of Guelf – what was he doing dabbling in comparative linguistics?

Leibniz’s principal assignment at the Hanoverian court was to write a history of the noble house that ruled Lower Saxony in Protestant northern Germany. The purpose of that noble family history was to elevate the dukes of Hanover to the status of Elector, the highest rank in the Holy Roman Empire. In the wake of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), the Braunschweig-Lüneburg dynasty had acquired a de facto power that rivaled the most powerful houses of the Empire. But power could be fleeting. Leibniz’s task was to demonstrate genealogically that the ancient dignity of this House of Guelf made it worthy of permanent Electoral status.

Writing accolades of his employer threatened to make Leibniz appear the most fawning of courtiers, an image he was keen to avoid. So he came up with a scheme to make his assignment of Origines Guelficae a genuine contribution to scholarship: he would append two preliminary discourses – on the land of Lower Saxony (a geohistory, Protogaea [1694]); and on the people of Lower Saxony, who they were, and where they had come from (migrationes gentium). It was this second preliminary discourse – impossible to write, as Leibniz eventually learned – that derailed the completion of the Guelf history.

Nevertheless Leibniz was a dogged researcher. From 1691 when he conceived of the two preliminary discourses, through the end of his life in 1716, Leibniz built a series of increasingly complex networks of correspondence in order to collect the linguistic data that he sought: Florentine bibliographers, Roman mathematicians, the entire Jesuit network in Paris, Antwerp, Warsaw, and Rome, as well as the legion of missionary-astronomers whom the order had dispatched around the globe to Isfahan, Goa, and Beijing. We see the scholar, isolated and lonely in little Hanover or even littler Wolfenbüttel, with his hands on knowledge trickling in from scientific centers across Europe and around the world. By the end of 1697 – the year his network finally began to work – Leibniz laughed to one of his patrons, “I should just post a sign on my door reading, ‘Bureau of Address for China’!”

Were the Goths the original Germanic tribe? Did they originate in Scandinavia or in Scythia on the Black Sea? A century and a half earlier it had been reported that a remnant of the Gothic population still lived in the Crimea – were they still there? Had they ever been? Were the Goths Germanic at all, and why did so little evidence remain of their three-hundred-year kingdom in Spain? The Goths being long gone, who were the present inhabitants of Scythia and Grand Tartary? Why were Germanic words to be found in the Persian language? What was the relationship between the various “Tartars” on the Black and Caspian Seas and the other peoples who intersected there, Siberians, Mongols, Uzbeks, Turks, Finno-Hungarians, as well as Slavic and Germanic speakers?

My purpose with this book is to show the state of the art of human prehistory at the end of the seventeenth century. The Leibniz correspondence gives us access to discussions about astronomy and mapping; ethnology and missionary work; the contest of the Asiatic empires of Muscovy, Persia, and Ottomania for control of the Caucasus region; and above all, language, as the best indicator of the prehistoric genealogy of the myriad peoples from Central Asia to Western Europe.

By reconstructing Leibniz’s network of linguistic correspondents, this book offers extensive insight into how the international Republic of Letters actually functioned at the turn of the eighteenth century.