Abraham Petrovitch Hanibal, or Abram Petrovitch Gannibal born in 1696, died May 14, 1781. He is the maternal great-grandfather of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. The life of Abraham Hanibal is a real adventure novel. Abducted from Logone in the north of present-day Cameroon in 1703, Abraham Hanibal became page of the Ottoman sultan Ahmed III in Constantinople. At the end of 1704, he was secretly taken to Russia to the Court of Tsar Peter the Great with the complicity of his ambassador Pierre Tolstoy, great-grandfather of the famous writer Leo Tolstoy.
Born in 1696, died on May 14, 1781, his first African first name is Broua. It is an African prince, son of Prince Brouha de Logone, captured in 1703 by slavers and brought to Istanbul, he is bought there secretly by a Russian diplomat on behalf of Peter the Great, who wanted to make an experiment - conclusive - on the intellectual capacities of a black child, or more generally, demonstrate by practice that intelligence and other human qualities do not depend in any way on birth.
In 1717, Hanibal was sent to France (to Paris or to Metz?), In order to continue his education in the arts, sciences and war. There he learned several languages and revealed great dispositions in mathematics, especially in geometry. In 1720, he studied at the artillery school of La Fère (today in Aisne) and obtained the king's engineer certificate there. He fought in the armies of Louis XV against those of his uncle Philippe V of Spain and received the rank of captain. It was during this stay that Hannibal adopted its nickname in honor of the Carthaginian general Hanibal (Gannibal being the traditional transliteration of the name in Russian). In Paris, he became friends with several figures of the Enlightenment, whether Diderot, Montesquieu or Voltaire. This fact, defended by his biographer Hugh Barnes, is nevertheless disputed by the critic Andrew Kahn.
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