Cantemir was born in 1673 in Moldavia, in what is now northeastern Romania. His father Constantin Cantemir had served as a vassal prince under Ottoman suzerainty, and Dimitrie grew up understanding that his family's fate was intertwined with the empire to the south. Between 1687 and 1710 he lived in Istanbul, partly as a hostage guarantee of his father's loyalty, partly by inclination: the city offered libraries, teachers, and musical life that Moldavia could not. He enrolled in the Patriarchate's Greek Academy, learned Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, and began studying music with Kemani Ahmed. His musical output was not modest. He composed more than 350 instrumental works and developed his own notation system to transcribe the Ottoman classical repertoire — a system preserved in his Edvar-i Musiki, one of the most important collections of pre-modern Ottoman and Middle Eastern music.

Sometime after the Battle of Vienna in 1683, Cantemir purchased a structure on the Bosphorus waterfront from a brother of the Grand Vizier. The timing mattered: the Ottoman defeat at Vienna had reshuffled power at the Sublime Porte, and properties changed hands in its wake. Cantemir bought, expanded the palace in 1690–1691, and expanded it again in 1693–1694. The location — along the pier where the Ortaköy Mosque would later be built — offered a view of the Bosphorus that was extraordinary even by Istanbul's standards. Cantemir drew the palace himself; the image survives in Nicolas Tindal's English translation of his History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire, published in London in the 1730s. It is the only visual record we have. The building itself no longer exists.

In 1710, Cantemir was appointed ruling prince of Moldavia by the Ottoman sultan. Almost immediately he made a fateful choice: he allied with Tsar Peter the Great against the Ottomans in the Russo-Turkish War of 1710–1711. The alliance failed. The Russian and Moldavian forces were defeated at the Pruth River in July 1711, and Cantemir fled with Peter into Russian exile, never to return to Moldavia or Istanbul. In Russia he continued writing. His History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire — originally composed in Latin — was translated into English, French, and German and became a standard European reference on the Ottoman world for generations. In 1714 the Berlin Academy elected him as a member. He died in Russia in 1723.

The Ortaköy Mosque that replaced Cantemir's palace on that waterfront pier is itself a striking structure — a Neo-Baroque building completed in 1856, its twin minarets rising against the backdrop of the Bosphorus Bridge. It has become one of Istanbul's most photographed vistas: the mosque's white stonework reflected in the water, the great suspension bridge arching overhead. Cantemir's palace is nowhere in that picture. What survives of him in Istanbul is purely archival: his own drawing of the building, preserved in translation; his musical notation system, which musicologists still study; and the reputation of a man who managed, in the years he spent in this city, to become a master of both its political world and its cultural one. The Romanian literary scholar Liviu Brătuleani devoted a monograph to the forgotten residence. Otherwise, the ground holds its silence.