Pushkin's African great-grandfather became a general of imperial Russia
As a boy, Abram Gannibal was seized by Ottoman forces, then bought through a bribe and sent to Peter the Great as a court curiosity. Peter became his godfather instead. Gannibal was educated in France, rose to general-in-chief and chief military engineer, and his great-grandson was Alexander Pushkin.
His early life is hazy because the main account is Pushkin's unfinished biography, The Moor of Peter the Great, and scholars suspect the poet polished his ancestor's story. The Ethiopian studies historian Richard Pankhurst believed he was born around 1698, the son of a minor chief with many wives and 19 children, who died fighting Ottoman expansion along the Red Sea. The boy was carried to Constantinople and spent about a year in the sultan's household before a Russian envoy, seeking clever African boys for the tsar's palace, ransomed him. He reached Moscow in 1704.
Peter took to the child's intelligence. Baptised in Vilnius in 1705 with the tsar as godfather, Abram adopted that date as his birthday since he never knew the real one, and served as Peter's valet on military campaigns. In 1717 he was sent to Metz in France to study, joined the French army, entered the artillery school at La Fere and was wounded and captured while fighting Spain before returning to his studies. In France he took the surname Gannibal, after the Carthaginian general Hannibal. Claims that he befriended Voltaire and Montesquieu are disputed.
Peter's death in 1725 left him exposed. Prince Menshikov, suspicious of his foreign birth and education, exiled him to Siberia in 1727, where he built a fortress near the Mongolian border before being pardoned in 1730 for his engineering skill. Under Empress Elizabeth from 1741 his career soared: superintendent of Reval, now Tallinn, the Mikhailovskoye estate with hundreds of serfs, chief military engineer in 1756 and general-in-chief in 1759.
His coat of arms bore an elephant and the puzzling word FVMMO, read by some as homeland in the Kotoko language and by another writer as a Latin motto meaning fortune changed my life entirely. With his second wife he had ten children; one son helped found Kherson, and a granddaughter became Pushkin's mother. He died in 1781.
Source: Abram Petrovich Gannibal
