Bibliotheca vivens is dedicated to the examination of processes of knowledge change in the period of the early Phanariot “dynasty” of the Mavrokordatos family in the Ottoman Empire (1641–1769). Based on the concepts of the Collaborative Research Center 980 “Episteme in Motion. Transfer of Knowledge from the Ancient World to Early Modern Period”, Volume I focuses on intellectual entanglements in the library of these Greek homines novi by framing the oikos of knowledge and the self-fashioning of this Ottoman elite between Istanbul and Bucharest, capturing the knowledge in motion and backlighting its shape. Volume II undertakes a reconstruction of the library of Nikolaos Mavrokordatos (1680–1730), assumed to be the most important library in South-East Europe in the early modern era. Phanariot prince of Moldavia and Wallachia, contemporary of the Ottoman Tulip Age and the European Republic of Letters, Nikolaos performs a commercium litterarium that transacts between the Ottoman Empire, Paris, London, Amsterdam and Leipzig, Vienna and Venice.