Vincent-Yves Boutin
Vincent-Yves Boutin (1 January 1772,
Le Loroux-Bottereau,
Province of Brittany - August 1815,
Syrian Coastal Mountain Range,
Ottoman Empire) was a French engineer, adventurer, officer and spy who participated in the
French Revolutionary wars and the
Napoleonic Wars. He was born into a humble family in western France and served in the
French revolutionary army in the
United Provinces, in the
Italian campaign and in
Dalmatia. He was tasked with undertaking intelligence and espionage missions for
Napoleon I in
Egypt,
Syria, and
Algiers. Additionally, he participated in defending
Constantinople against the British forces of
Admiral Duckworth in 1807.
In 1808,
Napoleon granted him the
Chevalier de l'Ordre de la Légion d'Honneur for his espionage and intelligence work. Sultan
Selim III awarded him the
Imperial Order of the Crescent for his victorious defence of Constantinople in the
Anglo-Turkish war.
He was romantically involved with
Lady Hester Stanhope, the explorer and niece of
British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. In the summer of 1815, when he was 43 years old, he vanished under mysterious circumstances in the Syrian Coastal Mountain Range.
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