Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari
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Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, KCB, CSI, (1841-1879), British military administrator, was the son of Count Louis Adolphus Cavagnari, of an old Italian family from Parma in the service of the Bonaparte family, by his marriage in 1837 with an Irish lady, Caroline Lyons-Montgomery. Cavagnari was born at Stenay, in the département of the Meuse, France, on July 4, 1841.
He nevertheless obtained naturalization as a British citizen, and entered the military service of the East India Company. After passing through college at Addiscombe, he served through the Oudh campaign against the mutineers in 1858 and 1859. In 1861 he was appointed an assistant commissioner in the Punjab region of British India, and in 1877 became deputy commissioner of Peshawar (now in Pakistan) and took part in several expeditions against the Pashtun tribes.
In September 1878 he was attached to the staff of a British mission to Kabul, Afghanistan, which the Afghans refused to allow to proceed through the Khyber Pass. In May 1879, after the British-Indian forces had invaded Afghanistan, and the death of Afghan Emir Sher Ali Khan, Cavagnari negotiated and signed the Treaty of Gandamak with Sher Ali Khan's son and successor, Mohammad Yaqub Khan. With this treaty, the Afghans agreed to admit a British resident to Kabul, and the post was conferred on Cavagnari, who also received the Star of India and was made a K.C.B. He took up his residence in July of 1879, and for a time all seemed to go well, but on September 3 of that year Cavagnari and the other European members of the mission, along with their guards who were made up of The Guides, were killed after he disregarded many warnings and the demands of mutinous Afghan troops. Cavagnari was survived by his wife, Lady Cavagnari (nee Mercy Ellen Graves), who he had married in 1871.
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- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
