It was published in two volumes under the title Alcorani Textus Universus Arabicè et Latinè in Padua, Italy by Ludovico Marracci, an Italian Oriental scholar and professor of Arabic in the College of Wisdom at Rome.
Marracci believed that for Christians to effectively rebut Islamic doctrine, they had to know it, which contributed to his desire to produce an Arabic edition and translation of the Quran.
Marracci employed a range of Quran commentaries to inform his work, including those of Ibn Abī Zamanīn, Thaʿlabī, Zamakhsharī, Bayḍāwī, and Suyūtī, as well as texts of the hadith literature, especially Sahih al-Bukhari.
For example, Andreas Acoluthus, who had developed a friendship with Marracci after seeing his Prodromus appear in 1691, would wait after the 1698 edition came out and, in 1701, publish the Tetrapla Alcoranica, which was only the opening surah of the Quran but with a long introduction.
Though he died only two years later, Acoluthus' criticisms of some elements of Marracci's translation and his anti-Islamic polemic would prove influential among German orientalists.
In 1733 Emo Lucius Vriemoet from the University of Franeker published Arabismus; exhibens grammaticam Arabicam novam, et monumenta quaedam Arabica.
In 1772, David Friederich Megerlin produced the first direct translation of the Quran into German from the Arabic edition: Die türkische Bibel, oder des Korans allererste teutsche Uebersetzung aus der Arabischen Urschrift selbst verfertiget.
Johann David Michaelis also believed that Marracci's work could be improved considerably, and offered a specimen in a 1754 publication involving the first 116 verses from the second surah.