page_title: Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent
section_title: Scientific Expedition to Morea (1829)
hierarchical_section_title: Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent / Life / Scientific Expedition to Morea (1829)
caption_attribution_description: English: Lithograph (detail) by Prosper Baccuet representing the scientists of the Morea Expedition studying the stadium of the antic city of Messene in 1829 (1836)
context_page_description: Jean-Baptiste Geneviève Marcellin Bory de Saint-Vincent was a French naturalist, officer and politician. He was born on July 6, 1778 in Agen and died on December 22, 1846 in Paris. Biologist and geographer, he was particularly interested in volcanology, systematics and botany. The standard author abbreviation Bory is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
context_section_description: A war of Independence had been raging in Greece since 1821, but the Greek victories were short-lived and the Turkish-Egyptian troops had reconquered the Peloponnese in 1825. King Charles X, supported by a strong current of philhellenism, decided to intervene alongside the Greek insurgents. After the naval Battle of Navarino (20 October 1827), which saw the annihilation of the Turkish-Egyptian fleet by the Allied Franco-Russo-British fleet, a French expeditionary force of 15,000 men landed in the south-west of the Peloponnese in August 1828. The purpose of the Expédition de Morée was to liberate the area from the Turkish-Egyptian occupation forces and return it to the young independent Greek state; this would be accomplished in just one month.
  Towards the end of the year 1828, the Viscount of Martignac, Interior minister of King Charles X and the real head of the government at that time (as well as being a childhood friend of Bory in Bordeaux), charged six academicians of the Institute de France (Georges Cuvier, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Charles-Benoît Hase, Desiré-Raoul Rochette, Jean-Nicolas Hyot and Jean-Antoine Letronne) with appointing the chief-officers and members of each section of a scientific committee to be attached to the Morea expedition, just as had been done previously with the Commission of Sciences and Arts during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. Bory was thus appointed director of the commission. The minister and the academicians also determined the routes and objectives. Bory wrote, "Messrs. De Martignac and Siméon had asked me expressly not to restrict my observations to Flies and Herbs, but to extend them to places and to men later..." .
  Bory and his team of 19 scientists (including Edgar Quinet, Abel Blouet and Pierre Peytier) representing various scientific disciplines, such as  natural history and antiquities (archaeology, architecture and sculpture) disemabarked from the frigate Cybèle at Navarino on March 3, 1829 and there joined General Nicolas Joseph Maison, who was commanding the French expeditionary force. Bory then met General Antoine Simon Durrieu, chief of staff of the expedition, who was also from the Landes region and with whom Bory had been connected for a decade. Bory stayed in Greece for 8 months, until November 1829, and explored the Peloponnese, Attica and the Cyclades The scientific work of the commission was of major importance to the increase knowledge of the country. The topographic maps they produced, which were widely acknowledged, were of an unprecedented high quality and surveys, drawings, cuts, plans and proposals for the theoretical restoration of the monuments were a new attempt to systematically and exhaustively catalogue the ancient Greek vestiges. The Morea expedition and its scientific publications offered a near complete description of the regions visited and formed a scientific, aesthetic and human inventory that remained for a long time one of the best achieved about Greece. Bory registered all the results of his research and published them later in his major opus of 1832.
caption: Bory de Saint-Vincent and the members of the scientific commission of the Morea Expedition studying the ruins of the stadium of ancient Messene (detail of a lithograph by Prosper Baccuet)
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