What I Am Reading: "The Stolen Prince" by Hugh Barnes
Abram Gannibal was an early-modern Afro-European, “Europe’s first black intellectual,” whom I first heard of while reading about Alex Dumas. I found him intriguing, because he was an opaque figure who required a bit of a paper chase and field research on the part of journalist Hugh Barnes to bring to light. He is not the subject of much English-language historical investigation; but he is more famous in his Russian homeland, where he was the subject of intense interest by (and as a result of) his great-grandson, poet Alexander Pushkin. Fittingly, I had some trouble tracking this book down, and had to rely on my old Massachusetts library network.
Gannibal was a military official, courtier, administrator, and intellectual attached to the court of Czar Peter the Great, and later the court of the Czarina Elizabeth. He was purchased or liberated as a slave from the Ottoman Sultan in the early 18th century, and adopted into Peter’s court first as a curiosity, and later as the Czar’s godson. He studied in France, and became skilled enough in the fields of fortification, artillery, languages, and other such areas to have a successful military career in the Czar’s expanding empire; and was close enough to Peter to wield considerable political influence. However, there are enough blank spots in his life, especially regarding his specific provenance and his time of internal exile, that Barnes is able to dig up a lot of interesting facts and tantalizing possibilities for this book, while also parsing the exaggerated, inaccurate, racist, or uncorroborated claims of Gannibal’s biographers: his son-in-law Rothkirkh, descendent Pushkin, and subsequent scholars. At the same time, some of the activity that does seem to be well-known, such as Gannibal’s statecraft under Elizabeth, receives only brief attention in this book, and as a confirmed non-expert on Russian history I might have appreciated a deeper dive on that. Regardless, the book provides enough (often-complicated) Russian history for appropriate context.
Unfortunately, late in life Gannibal burned his own memoirs, out of fear of Catherine the Great’s secret police and their pursuit of information on Peter’s reign. The information that is left does include second-hand accounts dictated to others, as well as some original documents by Gannibal. Though Rothkirkh’s biography, based on information dictated by the subject himself, was unreliable and blatantly embellished, some hints of verisimilitude did shine through; and Gannibal’s son Pyotr was a first-hand source for Pushkin as an old man.
Gannibal was born around 1696, somewhere in Africa. His race was referred to by various terms in various contexts; the Russians did not have as firm a catalogue of racial differences as other European countries did (or would later come to) from their Atlantic slave trade, so Gannibal was often referred to as a “Moor” despite not necessarily being from North Africa. Historiographically, a long-running school of Russian history identified him as Ethiopian in origin; this was especially popular in the 1890s while the Ethiopians were in the news and, as long-time Christians, were thought of in the nonsense race science of the day as not necessarily being “negroes.” Many of these subsequent analyses have had to do with affirming, discrediting, or enforcing bigotry against Pushkin on the basis of his ancestry. Barnes agreed with scholar Dieudonne Gnammankou, who parses certain surviving references to a kingdom called “Lagone” as referring to the Kotoko people near Lake Chad; and thinks Gannibal’s enslavement may have come at the hands of neighboring Bagirmi raiders. As further circumstantial evidence, he identifies the mysterious term “FUMMO,” later used on his wax seal below an elephant icon, as a Kotoko word for “homeland.” The section of the book on this subject was a fascinating glance backwards through the memoirs and dispatches of forgotten adventurers and agents, in the pursuit of linguistic and locational connections to known locations, rulers, and events. Though unconfirmed and likely unknowable, circumstantial evidence is dredged up for Gannibal to have in fact been, as he later claimed, an African prince; and even for he and his brother (a figure even more lost to the swirling vortex of history) to have been serendipitously but anonymously spotted by a French diplomat in Cairo during an escape attempt on their way to the Ottoman court.
Gannibal was brought to Istanbul by Muslim slave traders as a child in 1703. The Ottomans has a slave shortage after several new palaces had been built as a wedding present for a member of the Sultan’a family. He was assigned as a slave to Ahmed, a younger sibling of Sultan Mustafa II, who was luxuriously imprisoned in the harem to neutralize him as a political threat. However, a Janissary uprising brought him to the throne as Ahmed III that same year. At the same time, Russian intrigues and spy craft in the city, including Ambassador Count Pyotr Tolstoy, brought the Sultan’s “talented African Negroes” to the Czar’s attention in the course of other espionage matters. The Czar asked Tolstoy to send him some of the same; and with the help of adventurer Yefim Raguzinsky, Gannibal and a few others were either purchased or liberated (accounts are contradictory or ambiguous) and sent in a caravan to Moscow in 1704.
Peter the Great was, at the time, busying himself with the conduct of the Great Northern War against Sweden, but he took Gannibal into his cabinet of curiosities. Peter, a force for modernization and westernization, was a large, awkward, hard-working, hard-partying eccentric, enemy of the old Boyars. Gannibal was a lesson on the importance of education and of, to use our terms, the influence of nurture over nature (which of course did not convince everyone). Gannibal was often portrayed later as having grown up alongside the city of St. Petersburg, another of Peter’s utopian projects with a dark underside (slavery, danger, and control in Gannibal’s case; mass death of seed laborers in the city’s). Peter became fond of the clever Gannibal, who took well to his tutoring. Soon enough, Peter was back to the Livonian front to fight the Swedes, and brought Gannibal with him.
Gannibal was a boy soldier and an aide to Peter, at age 9. From a modern perspective, the activities sound horrific, with battles and parasites and flogging; in parts of the historiographic record, though, these episodes function as ribald anecdotes. As an aide, he was tutored to be useful to Peter in mathematics, engineering, and cryptography. It was around this time that he also developed a treat fear of travel by sea. He was adopted by Peter as a godson in a partially-farcical ceremony while at the front in Vilnius in 1705.
To continue his education, he was sent to France in 1717, around age 21. Like Dumas would be later, he was a figure of fascination: a social butterfly, a bit of a libertine. He fell in with the social circle of the Duc du Maine, an illegitimate son of the Sun King who hoped to transfer the regency of Louis XV, the Sun King’s great-grandson, to the king of Spain and away from the Duc d’Orleans. When this plot was busted and the non-magnetic backroom schemer Maine imprisoned, Gannibal was under a cloud of some opprobrium, and friends like Voltaire weren’t in a position to be of much use. He decamped south late in 1718, keeping his head above water through obsequious letters to Russian and French authorities.
He brought himself back into French good graces in 1719 when he joined their invasion of Spain, serving the army in an engineering position, and eventually promoted to the command of a unit of artillery. Only a few months into the campaign, he was injured in an accident and invalided back to Paris, which was again welcoming. He parlayed his status into enrollment in the first class of France’s new artillery academy, as part of the first class in 1720.
While studying, he also returned to his life as a man-about-town and interacted with many of the leading French figures of the Enlightenment; though here again accounts of specifics, in old letters and memoirs, can be contradictory. He was friends at least with Voltaire and probably with Montesquieu as well, though their esteem for him did not stop racist tropes from entering the Encyclopédie and their other works. He took the name Gannibal around this time, a reference to Hannibal Barca. After a couple of years of fobbing off Peter’s requests to return to Russia, always citing the usefulness of his studies, he did return in 1722, after losing his money investing in the Mississippi Bubble. Peter at the time had settled matters with Sweden, and was campaigning in Persia as part of his maneuvers against the Ottomans.
Peter put Gannibal to work on translations, mainly of the books he had brought with him, military and otherwise. Peter incorporated Gannibal into his court as an export on fortifications, engineering, and general foreign matters. This was also the timespan he complied his knowledge into his unpublished book, “Geometry and Fortification,” unfortunately barren of biographic details. There was a lot of court intrigue at the time, especially regarding the succession, and Gannibal was the frequent target of slander and back-biting. This turned out to be highly relevant when Peter died in 1725, and the Petrine era came to an abrupt close.
Gannibal was viewed as an enemy by another of Peter’s meritocratic favorites, the Czar’s childhood friend Prince Alexander Menshikov, who had risen from childhood serfdom to the nobility under Peter’s favor. Peter was succeeded but Catherine I, his wife, and Menshikov was an influential figure in her regime, as were Count Tolstoy and others of Peter’s more meritocratic hires (as opposed by the old Boyar establishment, to over-simplify). Gannibal, meanwhile, was the tutor of Peter’s grandson, also Peter. As such, he served as a go-between in the so-called Rabutin plot, run by icy Princess Agrafina Volkonskaya, an enemy of Menshikov and by Count Rabutin, ambassador for Austria. This plot never quite came together against the Menshikov and his Supreme Privy Council; Catherine died young in 1727 and Menshikov seized his chance to establish his influence over her successor. He scattered the plotters into exile. Gannibal wasn’t quite unpopular or guilty enough to punish (as Volkonskaya was, sent into internal exile). Instead, he was assigned to work in Kazan, far off on the frontier, and was subsequently sent further into Siberia.
There is not much info on the three years that Gannibal spent on the frontier, other than a visit in passing with Volkonskaya and some contact with others in her circle. He was assigned to built a fortress at Selenginsk, on Lake Baikal. Fortunately, then reappeared Raguzinsky, the adventurer and agent who had helped secure his freedom from the Ottomans decades earlier. They worked together to fortify the Mongolian frontier, where Gannibal enjoyed the geometry of the tundra despite the dreary circumstances. Barnes went in search of the remains of this fortress, and found that even the tiny, forgotten outpost’s name had been repurposed by another settlement. He did however find the earthen works, and the outline of the fortress that was carved into the tundra.
Another unknown is why Gannibal was recalled in 1730 after Peter II’s death, though it probably was the doing of Burkhard Münnich, another foreigner, a military reformer and the head of engineering with confidence in Gannibal’s skill. Münnich came out on top of the power struggle that ended Menshikov, and held power in the regime of Czarina Anna. There were too many foreigners in the military (many Germans, especially with the annexation of German-run Livonia), and interestingly Gannibal was viewed as a domestic, Russian talent, while still being foreign enough to carry Petrine confidence in foreign expertise. It is interesting how, in my analysis, the Enlightenment v. Boyar political conflict of the Petrine era transformed into the German v. Russian conflict of this later era. This conflict clearly shifted the battle lines somewhat: Gannibal was an Enlightenment product, but in the case of the Rabutin plot, and soon in the case of Czarina Elizabeth, sided with the Russian side against the Germans. For this time period, however, he was an agent of the pro-German regime. Perhaps loyalty to either blurry side was out of expedience and not ideology, though this may be complicated by loyalty to Peter’s memory. My struggle to understand this most likely results from an over-simplification of the conflict on my part, though Barnes pays close attention to the question of German influence. Gannibal was often, in my analysis, a passive politician, and usually called in higher-ranking friends to assist in his court struggles.
Gannibal was assigned to Pernau on the Baltic for engineering work, another dreary posting despite being closer to the metropole. He was unlucky in marriage to the snobbish daughter of a Greek naval captain, Yevdokiya Dioper, and, not for the first time, faced racist and politically-motivated whisper campaigns about his temper and unfitness for duty. There are unreliable and, again, racist claims from enemies and later biographers that he beat and was cruel to his wife, though the culture of the Russian nobility was highly patriarchal at the time and this was hardly unheard-of. What is recorded is that his wife bore a (white) child by a lover, and was eventually arrested for trying to poison Gannibal. She was imprisoned and eventually sent to a convent, while he divorced her and remarried (not quite in that order) to Christina Schöberg. a Scandinavian. This was a much happier marriage, and produced Gannibal’s children.
Gannibal retired in 1733, not quite in disgrace, but smarting from his failed first marriage and the resulting stress. He was also afraid of Ernst Biron, the Duke of Courland and Czarina Anna’s lover, the unofficial autocrat while Anna pursued her interest in hunting and court life. This was still the era of German influence. However, Biron was dealt with by Münnich in 1740 when Anna died and her grandnephew Ivan IV became Czar; Münnich did not want the ruling German clique jeopardized by Biron’s unpopularity. Again, Münnich (through Anna, the Czar’s mother and new regent) recalled Gannibal, in this case to serve at Reval (Talinn), now as a Lieutenant-Colonel and working on fortifications. Münnich even backed him against the Livonian German officers (often disloyal pro-Swedes) who opposed his efforts.
Münnich and Ivan and Anna were deposed, however, in 1741, when time finally ran out for the German faction. Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter, led a coup with Swedish help, and Gannibal enthusiastically backed the new regime. He was put in command of Reval as a reward.
The old anti-German clique was back in power, and Gannibal had never had it so good. When Czarina Elizabeth turned on her Swedish backers, he led the mapping of territory conquered from Sweden. He petitioned for his nobility, producing a document that is one of the few surviving first-hand biographic sources. He spent years in various other military and engineering responsibilities in Elizabeth’s court, as she often delegates administrative power. He also engaged in turns like defending his serfs against the abuses of the tenants who leased his land, an interesting liberal-but-not-radical relationship with slavery for a former slave. The statecraft of this time period is the book’s section that I wish went into greater detail.
It does cover his recall to St. Petersburg in the early 1750s in the run-up to the Seven Years’ War; and his conflicts with the head of the army, Stepan Apraxin, “the snuff-box general” who thought that Gannibal spent too much time and efforts on his pyrotechnics work. In 1759 he was relieved of his work in the capital and placed in charge of coastal fortifications and canal-building (this latter work was what Catherine the Great’s secret police later wanted his knowledge of). He made many surveys in this field and advances in pyrotechnics, but politics turned against him again when Elizabeth died and Peter III came to power in 1762.
Gannibal was insultingly handed his discharge in the midst of a fireworks display he had arranged in St. Petersburg. However, this time his dismissal was not a source of worry, as his promotions had netted him increased wealth and larger (though still humble by later standards) estates. Despite his setbacks in the early 1730s, he had effectively outlasted his enemies. He was never able to relax though, as he knew he had no friends at court, and was a man-out-of-place, a ghostly figure of the past, arranging his gardens in unfashionable Enlightenment geometric style. As mentioned, he burned his memoirs in 1774 because he feared the secret police, and dwelled on his estates in partial melancholy. He died in 1781, leaving behind some works and many descendants to keep his memory alive.
In addition to those discussed, the book had several other illustrations of the research that the author made into Gannibal’s obscurity, including on several portraits that probably were not actually of him, and obscure archives in small-town churches and such. The only confirmed image of Gannibal is a tiny illustration of him as a child in an engraving by Dutch artist Adrian Schönebeck, who was engaged to illustrate the house that Peter the Great happened to be staying in with young Gannibal at the time.
I find research like this book fascinating, and the visits to Africa and Siberia make it romantic. However, perhaps this focus on new information or analysis accounts for the comparatively brief coverage of Gannibal’s presumably better-documented administrative work, which scholars of Russia may know about but I do not. Regardless, this was a very interesting look into an almost-unique Afro-European figure. Subject to racism and never quite fitting in, Gannibal was at various times enslaved, exoticized, normalized, and lionized; and the historiography of scholarship on him is revelatory of later racial attitudes in Russia. More than a curiosity, he was an important conduit of the Enlightenment, and a great inspiration to his great-grandson, Pushkin; who spent a lot of time and spilled a lot of ink exploring his African heritage, and was embraced by later Black writers for it. Gannibal’s career is a very interesting item in the history of relations between Europe and Africa, and attitudes within Europe; I think especially in conjunction with my previous reading on Alex Dumas. Tellingly, there was Gannibal in Russia and later Dumas in France, but no comparable figure in the contemporary establishments of the Anglosphere.