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The article presents the library of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730), scientist, military engineer and diplomat of the Habsburgs during the Hungarian wars, then founder of the Istituto delle Scienze in Bologna, in order to understand his image of the Balkan world. For this purpose, the paper discusses the creation of Marsigli's library, by ascertaining when he gathered it (mainly between 1696 and 1703), in which way (contacts with intellectuals and booksellers, thematic bibliographies) and on the basis of what criteria (to build a reference library for politicians); then, it identifies the 37 works about Balkan matters Marsigli got and analyzes them quantitatively and qualitatively. The emerging image is heavily conditioned at a cultural level: Marsigli chose important books, but solely written in Western languages and mainly referring to the Hungarian regions and to the Greek-Turkish world, and he neglected the Slavic and Romanian areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]