Francois Pouqueville - Travels in Epirus and Albania 1806

French historian and diplomat François Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville (1770-1838), born in Le Merlerault (Orne) in Normandy, was educated in Caen and Lisieux and studied medicine at the Sorbonne in Paris under Antoine Dubois. As a physician, he took part in the French expedition to Egypt. On 25 November 1798, on his way back to France, he was captured by pirates and sent to Navarino in the Peloponnese, where he was imprisoned and held for ransom by the Turks. He spent two years in prison in Istanbul and returned to France in 1801. It was in prison that he began writing his first travel memoirs, which were dedicated to Napoleon and published in the three-volume edition: "Voyage en Morée, à Constantinople, en Albanie et dans plusieurs autres parties de l’Empire othoman pendant les années 1798, 1799, 1800 et 1801,” Paris 1805 (Travels in the Morea, to Constantinople, Albania and several other parts of the Ottoman Empire in the years 1798, 1799, 1800 and 1801). The book, translated into German, English and Italian, was exceptionally successful and attracted the attention of the French government, which appointed him as consul general in Janina, to the court of Ali Pasha Tepelena. He remained in Epirus from 1806 to 1815, had a close personal relationship with the "Lion of Janina” and was able to travel widely in the region. The following extract from the English translation of his "Travels in Epirus, Albania, Macedonia, and Thessaly,” London 1820, offers a detailed description of his impressions of Epirus and southern Albania in early 1806. The modern placenames have been added here in square bracket.