Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was born in Northern Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in the 1690s. Abram was kidnapped from Ethiopia when he was eight years old by a “Frenchman collecting animals and other curiosities for Louis XIV” of France. Shipped to Istanbul, he was placed in the Sultan’s seraglio where the Russian ambassador found him and sent him back to Russia as a present to Peter the Great.
Peter was so taken by Abram that he baptized the child and became his godfather.