Gannibal : The Moor of Petersburg

Gannibal : The Moor of Petersburg by Hugh Barnes. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781861973658.

When Major-General Gannibal died in 1781 in his eighties, he could look back on a long and successful life. He was the godson of Peter the Great, the Empress Elizabeth had given him nobility, thousands of acres, villages of serfs. His French education and a natural gift for mathematics had led him to fame as a fireworks expert and the building of a string of fortifications from the Arctic Circle to China. As a husband he was a provincial Bluebeard but his descendants would include the great poet Pushkin and a bevy of British aristocrats. Yet Abram Petrovich Gannibal had been born in very different circumstances. He was a black African, perhaps from Ethiopia, perhaps from modern Chad, sold as a child into slavery. In a brilliant biography Hugh Barnes who has tracked Gannibals footsteps across three continents restores an extraordinary life to history.