This is an I-Heart podcast, Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

St. Petersburg 1759.

A man in full military dress stands before the court, as Empress Elizabeth prepares to make him general-in-chief of the imperial Russian army, the second highest military rank in the empire.

The man is black, African-born, and he has risen further than almost anyone around him.

Whatever the assembled nobility thought of the ceremony, there wasn't much they could say. The man

had earned it. Though foreign-born, the man had been in Russia for over 50 years. He had outlasted rivals,

survived exile, built fortresses at the edge of the known world, and engineered his way into

the upper ranks of one of Europe's great military powers. But the achievement is even more remarkable when you pull back and see the full picture

of how he got there.

He was born in Africa, most likely in the late 1690s, the son of a local chief.

He was captured as a child, trafficked through the Ottoman Empire, and eventually

shipped to Moscow as a gift for Tsar Peter the Great. The man arrived with nothing, no language,

no connections, no guarantee of anything beyond whatever use someone might find for him.

He could have remained a curiosity at court, a symbol of the empire's global reach,

comfortable maybe, but ultimately ornamental. He chose otherwise.

His name was Abram Petrovich Gannibal, and over six decades he transformed

himself into one of the most formidable military engineers in Russian history. He was a nobleman

with land and titles, a patriarch whose children would go on to distinguished careers of their

own, and a great-grandfather whose most famous descendant would become the greatest poet, arguably Russia

ever produced. This is the story of a child who had every conceivable thing taken from him

...