François Pouqueville

French diplomat, writer and scholar

François Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville (French: [pukvil]; 4 November 1770 – 20 December 1838) was a French diplomat, writer, explorer, physician and historian, member of the Institut de France.

First as the Turkish Sultan's hostage, then as Napoleon Bonaparte's general consul at the court of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, he travelled extensively throughout Ottoman occupied Greece from 1798 to 1820.

With his far reaching diplomacy and with his writings, he became a prominent architect of the Philhellenism movement throughout Europe, and contributed eminently to the liberation of the Greeks, and to the rebirth of the Greek Nation.