Abram Petrovich Gannibal
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Major-General Abram Petrovich Gannibal, also Hannibal or Ganibal, (1696 – 14 May 1781) was an African slave who was brought to Russia by Peter the Great and became major-general, military engineer and governor of Reval. He is perhaps best known today as the great-grandfather of Aleksandr Pushkin, who wrote an unfinished novel about him, The Moor of Peter the Great.
His origins are uncertain. Early writings about Gannibal suggest he was born in 1696 in a village called "Logon," near the town of Debarwa in the province of Hamasien in modern-day Eritrea (formerly in northern Ethiopia). He was rumored to be the 19th son of some lesser ruler or warlord. "As the other sons were brought to their father with their hands trussed up with a rope, he enjoyed freedom of the youngest son swimming in his father's fountains" (Pushkin's notes to Eugene Onegin). The research (1996) of Dieudonné Gnammankou suggests he may actually be from what is now the Sultanate of Logone-Birni in Cameroon south of Lake Chad. In an official document that Gannibal submitted in 1742 to Empress Elizabeth, while petitioning for the rank of nobility and a coat of arms, he asked for the right to use a family crest emblazoned with an elephant and the mysterious word "FVMMO". It means homeland in Kotoko. However, FVMMO has also been suggested to stand for the Latin expression "Fortuna Vitam Meam Mutavit Oppido" which means "Fortune has changed my life in the city".
At the age of seven (c. 1703) Gannibal was taken to the court of the Ottoman Sultan at Istanbul. Based on the year the Sultan was either Mustafa II (reigned 1695 – 1703) or Ahmed III (reigned 1703 – 1730). The German biography of Gannibal, compiled anonymously from his own words, explains that "the children of the noble families were taken to the ruler of all the Muslims, the Turkish sultan, as hostages", to be killed or sold into slavery if their fathers misbehaved. Gannibal's sister Lahan was taken into captivity at the same time but died during the voyage.
In 1704, after one year in the capital, Gannibal was taken away by the deputy of the Russian ambassador Savva Raguzinsky, who was following the orders of his superiors (one of whom was Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy, great-grandfather of the great writer Lev Tolstoy.)
All of this was done by order of Peter the Great. Apparently, Gannibal wasn't the only "arap" boy to be taken. While it was fashionable at the time to have black children at the courts of European monarchs, this was not the main reason for the Tsar's orders; he was pursuing an educational goal. "Araps" were considered to be savage and uncivilized at that time, but Peter wanted to prove that these children were as good in the arts and sciences as their Russian peers were and to show that he valued people by their abilities and not their skin color.
Gannibal was baptized in 1705, in Vilnius, with Peter as his godfather.
In 1717, Gannibal was taken to Paris to continue an education in the arts, sciences, and warfare. By then he was fluent in several languages and knew mathematics and geometry. He fought with the forces of Louis XV of France against those of Louis' uncle Philip V of Spain and rose to the rank of captain. It was during his time in France that Gannibal adopted his surname in honor of the Carthaginian general Hannibal (Gannibal being the traditional transliteration of the name in Russian). In Paris he met and befriended such Enlightenment figures as Denis Diderot, the Baron de Montesquieu, and Voltaire. (This claim by his biographer Hugh Barnes is disputed by reviewer Andrew Kahn.) Voltaire called Gannibal the "dark star of the Enlightenment".
Gannibal's education was completed by 1722 and he was due to return to Russia. He wrote to Peter and begged for permission to return to Russia by land, not sea. It is rumored that he was met on his return by Peter himself, a few kilometers away from Moscow.
After the death of Peter in 1725, Gannibal was exiled to Siberia in 1727. He was pardoned in 1730 for his skills in military engineering. After Peter's daughter Elizabeth became the new monarch in 1741, he became a prominent person at her court, rose to the rank of major-general and became governor of Tallinn. It is rumored that the great general Aleksandr Suvorov owed his life as a soldier to Gannibal, who convinced Suvorov's father to let his son pursue a military career.
Gannibal married twice. His first wife was Evdokia Dioper, a Greek woman. The couple married in 1731 and had one daughter. Unfortunately Dioper despised her husband, whom she was forced to marry. When Gannibal found out she was cheating on him, he had her arrested and thrown into prison, where she spent eleven years living in terrible conditions. Gannibal began living with another woman, Christina Regina Siöberg, and married her in Revel (now: Tallinn), Estonia in 1736, a year after the birth of their first child and while still married to his first wife. The divorce from Dioper would not become final until 1753, upon which a fine and a penance were imposed on Gannibal, and Dioper was sent to a convent for the rest of her life. Gannibal's second marriage was nevertheless deemed legal. On her paternal side, Gannibal’s second wife, Christina Regina Siöberg, descended from noble families in Scandinavia and Germany: Siöberg (Sweden), Galtung (Norway) and Grabow (Denmark and Brandenburg). Abram Gannibal and Christina Regina Siöberg had ten children, including a son Osip. Osip in turn would have a daughter Nadezhda, the mother of Aleksandr Pushkin. Gannibal's oldest son Ivan became an accomplished naval officer who founded the city of Kherson in 1779 and reached the rank of General-in-Chief, the 2nd highest rank of tzarist Russia.
[edit] Biographies
- Life of Ganibal by D. S. Anuchin, 1899
- Notes on prosody: And Abram Gannibal by Vladimir Nabokov, 1964
- Abraham Hanibal - l’aïeul noir de Pouchkine by Dieudonné Gnammankou, paperback, Paris 1996
- Жизнь Ганнибала – прадеда Пушкина [The Life of Hannibal, Pushkin's Great Grandfather] by Наталья Константиновна Телетова [Natalja Konstantinovna Teletova], hardback, St. Petersburg 2004
- The Moor of St Petersburg: In the Footsteps of a Black Russian, by Frances Somers Cocks, paperback 2005
- Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg, by Hugh Barnes, hardback 2005
- Предки А. С. Пушкина в Германии и Скандинавии: происхождение Христины Регины Шёберг (Ганнибал) от Клауса фон Грабо из Грабо [Ancestors of A. S. Pushkin in Germany and Scandinavia: Descendancy of Christina Regina Siöberg (Hannibal) from Claus von Grabow zu Grabow] by Э. Г. Лихауг [E. G. Lihaug]. // Генеалогический вестник [Genealogical herald]. – Санкт-Петербург [St. Petersburg], 2006. – № 27. – pp. 31–38.
- Abraham Hannibal and the Raiders of the Sands, by Frances Somers Cocks, paperback 2003 [historical novel for children]
- Abraham Hannibal and the Battle for the Throne, by Frances Somers Cocks, paperback 2003 [historical novel for children]
