Spoonmaker's Diamond

Set in silver, surrounded by a double row of 49 old-mine cut diamonds (brilliants), it hangs in a glass case on the wall of the third room in Imperial Treasury section of Topkapı's "Conqueror’s Pavilion".

These surrounding separate brilliants give it "the appearance of a full moon lighting a bright and shining sky amidst the stars" and are considered to have been commissioned either by Ali Pasha or by Sultan Mahmud II – though this, as all other details of the diamond's origins, is doubtful and disputed.

The museum's records do list a ring stone called the Spoonmaker's Diamond, which is noted as having already belonged to the 17th century Sultan Mehmet IV.

According to one tale, a poor fisherman in Istanbul near Yenikapi was wandering idly, empty-handed, along the shore when he found a shiny stone among the litter, which he turned over and over, not knowing what it was.

Variant versions, published in some Istanbul Travel guides, describe the original finder as "a farmer who found it on the ground, and who sold it to a dealer" from whom it eventually "came to a Sultan in the 17th century".

A persistent element in several accounts of the diamond's origin links it with the well-known Ali Pasha of Tepelena, who in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries was the Ottoman governor of much of present-day Albania and Greece, and who set himself up as a virtually independent ruler.

In 1797 the town was ceded to France and garrisoned by 700 of Napoleon I's French grenadiers under General La Salchette, together with some 200 armed Prevezian Greek citizens and some 60 Albanian Souliotes.

Camus remained in captivity until 1801, when he was ransomed and returned to a long and distinguished military career, eventually attaining the rank of general.

Onto the above historically attested facts was added an unattested story, according to which Captain Camus was the lover of Napoleon Bonaparte's mother Letizia Ramolino.

[citation needed] An additional detail appearing in some versions is that the diamond had previously belonged to the executed Queen Marie Antoinette.

Finally Captain Camus and the other French soldiers were liberated, while the diamond remained in the Topkapi Palace, in possession of Sultan Selim III and his successors.

In one passage he does mention that during their year in possession of Preveza, the French soldiers carrying out fortification work in a place called Mazoma revealed in their excavations the eastern cemetery of ancient Nicopolis.