Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and we finished
Speaker 1: our Medici series a while back that we're still getting
Speaker 1: mail about it, about this illustrious, scheming clan of bankers
Speaker 1: and statesmen. You all really really love the Medici and
Speaker 1: Helen and Mississippi sent us a note saying you might
Speaker 1: be interested to hear that new Italian research published in
Speaker 1: the American Journal of Medicine shows there were at least
Speaker 1: two fewer violent deaths in the Medici family than previously thought.
Speaker 1: Wait tell me more so. It's pretty awesome already, but
Speaker 1: it gets better because the more we looked into those
Speaker 1: two particular deaths, that of Grand Duke Francesco, the first
Speaker 1: de Medici, and his wife, the Grand Duchess, the weirder
Speaker 1: it all got. And despite dying more than four hundred
Speaker 1: years ago, the couple was the subject of another recent
Speaker 1: scientific paper, this one published in the British Medical Journal,
Speaker 1: which also explored their cause of death, but came up
Speaker 1: with a different answer. So we'll talk more about those
Speaker 1: medical studies later, but first, because suspicious deaths are so
Speaker 1: often preceded by controversial lives. Our story will start in
Speaker 1: Venice with a beautiful young girl named Bianca. Bianca Capello
Speaker 1: was born in fifty eight to a noble Venetian family.
Speaker 1: She makes the first bold move of her life when
Speaker 1: she elopes with Florentine Pietro Buonaventuri, and they have a
Speaker 1: daughter together, Virginia. But she's not in Florence for long
Speaker 1: before she becomes the mistress of Francesco the First, and
Speaker 1: he is the son and heir of Cosimo the First,
Speaker 1: which makes him heir to the Grand Dukedom of Tuscany.
Speaker 1: But since Francesco doesn't want to do anything to mess
Speaker 1: with his chances of becoming Grand Duke, he and Bianca
Speaker 1: keep things on the downlow and he'll at least her
Speaker 1: husband mysteriously dies in fiftie mysterious death number one. Keep
Speaker 1: Jack of these guys. So really, people do not want
Speaker 1: Francesco to be with Bianca though everyone is against it,
Speaker 1: his family, his people, the Habsburg Emperor, and you might
Speaker 1: be wondering, well, what does he have to do with it?
Speaker 1: He actually should have some major sway since he's Francesco
Speaker 1: is a good grand duke and should be a good
Speaker 1: servant to the Emperor. It reminds me of Lola Montez,
Speaker 1: how everyone was so and did not like the mistress,
Speaker 1: but Francesco doesn't seem to care about anyone else's opinions.
Speaker 1: He does marry Joanna of Austria and becomes grand Duke
Speaker 1: in fifteen seventy four, but he sticks with Bianca. And
Speaker 1: just to give you a little background on Francesco, He's
Speaker 1: got this really, really weird family, but he's a pretty
Speaker 1: smart guy. He's not terribly interested in politics, unlike most
Speaker 1: medici we know, and he'd much prefer to be working
Speaker 1: on out me or patronizing the arts. But in case
Speaker 1: you think that they're very unpopular, relationship is the only
Speaker 1: sketchy thing going on in this family, and it's not
Speaker 1: at all. It's pretty tame, actually, because in fifteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: Francesco's brother Pietro murders his wife the same year that
Speaker 1: Francesco's sister is murdered by her husband. So, like we said,
Speaker 1: this family is crazy, and who knows, maybe after a
Speaker 1: few violent murders in his immediate family, Francesco is facing
Speaker 1: his own mortality. He needs a male heir, and so
Speaker 1: far his wife Joanna has only had girls. And we
Speaker 1: have a little note we'd like to make here about
Speaker 1: this being a choose your own ending podcast. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: so many different sources that say so many different things
Speaker 1: about these people. It's really strange. It's kind of like exactly,
Speaker 1: and I'll try to make it clear when there's a
Speaker 1: lot of controversy, but this is actually one place. The
Speaker 1: number of chill and that Francesco and Joanna have together,
Speaker 1: as well as those children's sexes. For example, the excellent
Speaker 1: Medici archive, which I would advise any of you big
Speaker 1: Medici fans to check out for cool letters and such
Speaker 1: written by the family. The Medici archive has them having
Speaker 1: six girls, followed by one boy. Well, the American Medical
Speaker 1: Journal article that we mentioned his seven sons, which seems
Speaker 1: kind of unlikely since it would make the rest of
Speaker 1: the story rather pointless. One offspring we should definitely all
Speaker 1: make note of, though, is Murrie de Medici, who is
Speaker 1: Joanna and Francesco's daughter, and she closed out our earlier
Speaker 1: super series. She's kind of why these people are still
Speaker 1: famous because she's pretty famous. But back to our story,
Speaker 1: It's fifteen seventy six and Francesco needs a son, so
Speaker 1: he makes an offer. His mistress can't refuse. Give him
Speaker 1: a son, and when his sickly wife finally dies, he'll
Speaker 1: marry her and make her Grand Duchess. And according to
Speaker 1: Eleanor Herman very wonderful book Sex with Kings, the story
Speaker 1: proceeds in a rather romantic comedy like fashion from there.
Speaker 1: So Bianca knows that she won't get pregnant, or at
Speaker 1: least she doesn't want to risk waiting, so she gets
Speaker 1: an accomplice to pick out three impoverished, single pregnant women.
Speaker 1: She houses and feeds them through their pregnancies, telling Francesco
Speaker 1: she's pregnant, she's patting her clothes and for all you
Speaker 1: arrested Development fans out there, we're thinking Maggie Lizar. Two
Speaker 1: of the women end up having girls. We have to
Speaker 1: imagine Bianco would be really getting a little nervous here,
Speaker 1: but the third fortunately has a boy, which is quickly
Speaker 1: whisked off to the palace where Bianca goes into labor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they sneak the baby into the bed with the
Speaker 1: Dramatically in labor, Bianca she was apparently very good at
Speaker 1: faking it, and suddenly, look, Francesco, you have a male heir. Hooray,
Speaker 1: And the proud parents name their baby in tone eo
Speaker 1: and no one's really the wiser. But in a turn
Speaker 1: that had to have shaken Bianca, who has gone to
Speaker 1: all this trouble and probably considerable expense housing these women.
Speaker 1: Not long after Antonio is born, Joanna finally has a son, Felippo.
Speaker 1: But Joanna dies pretty soon after that, and Francesco at
Speaker 1: last marries his mistress only two months after his wife dies.
Speaker 1: Not a classy move. No in the secret ceremony, he
Speaker 1: makes it public. A year later, he crowns her at
Speaker 1: the Palazzo Vecchio. And the people didn't like this couple
Speaker 1: when it was just a grand duke and his mistress.
Speaker 1: They really really don't like that Bianca is now grand
Speaker 1: Duchess and this may be the best part her position secure.
Speaker 1: Bianca eventually fesses up to Francesco about this baby swap,
Speaker 1: calling it a fun joke she's played on him. She's
Speaker 1: like him, happy, not trying to deceive him or anything.
Speaker 1: But isn't it hilarious ha ha? How we got this baby?
Speaker 1: But surprisingly there isn't that big of a deal made
Speaker 1: of it. He already has a son, But then his
Speaker 1: son with Joanna dies and Francesco legitimizes his son with
Speaker 1: Bianca on October nineteenth fifty three and starts paving the
Speaker 1: way for him to become his heir. And again, the
Speaker 1: seriously sounds like a romantic quick romantic comedy, So it's
Speaker 1: not going to be a romantic comedy for the rest
Speaker 1: of the story. Sorry, folks, it's time to get back
Speaker 1: to the controver drama is a trauma. Ultimately, obviously Francesco's
Speaker 1: real heir, who is his brother. Cardinal Ferdinando is not
Speaker 1: so thrilled about this development, and he's not a fan
Speaker 1: of Bianca. Pretty much no one is, and he doesn't
Speaker 1: want this mistress's son taking his place. So when Ferdinando
Speaker 1: visits the couple at the Medici villa at Poggio, the
Speaker 1: couple falls ill only a few weeks later, and people
Speaker 1: are kind of suspicious after all the Medici and then
Speaker 1: the medicine, and they don't really like each other. Eleven
Speaker 1: days later, Francesco and Bianca are both dead and Ferdinando
Speaker 1: is the new grand Duke, not his young nephew Antonio.
Speaker 1: But we have to go back to that amazing baby
Speaker 1: swap story. There's another theory about that. Most sources agree
Speaker 1: that Antonio was probably swapped as an infant and bore
Speaker 1: no relation to either parents, so it's not terribly surprising
Speaker 1: that he wasn't able to succeed his father's throne as
Speaker 1: a boy. He's a commoner's bastard. But biographer Philipo Luti
Speaker 1: challenges that story. He suggests that it was Ferdinando who
Speaker 1: concocted the tail as a way to secure his own
Speaker 1: hold on the throne. So he lied to little Antonio
Speaker 1: and said that he was swapped as a baby, and
Speaker 1: he wasn't the real heir, but perhaps he was, so
Speaker 1: Lutie's theory goes like this, Worried that he had been supplanted,
Speaker 1: his air Cardinal Fernando poisons Bianca. Immediately after Frencho goes death,
Speaker 1: and he takes the grand ducal throne and persuades his
Speaker 1: boy nephew that he's not really a medicie at all,
Speaker 1: and to play NICs. He gives the child major properties,
Speaker 1: convinces them to join the Knights of Malta, which, interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: is a group where members are unable to form legal marriages,
Speaker 1: so you would you wouldn't have to worry about him
Speaker 1: having some descendants of his own. So this sounds pretty plausible,
Speaker 1: I think. But on the other hand, so does the
Speaker 1: story of the mistress who would try to pass off
Speaker 1: a baby as her own to secure her position and
Speaker 1: become Grand Duchess. And just to give you a little
Speaker 1: more on Antonio's life, after fighting the Turks and Hungary,
Speaker 1: he goes on to play medici patron in Florence, supporting
Speaker 1: Galileo and eventually alienating himself from the court. So that's
Speaker 1: the end of the story for our basket baby. But
Speaker 1: we need to go back to Ferdinando, Francesco, and Bianca
Speaker 1: and the medical controversy that surrounds their death. So Francesco
Speaker 1: and Bianca die within hours of each other in October seven.
Speaker 1: They have this agonizing illness that stretches on for days.
Speaker 1: They undergo immediate autopsies, and the official cause of death
Speaker 1: listed at the time it is malaria. So it's not
Speaker 1: long before whisperings of poison start at court, especially considering
Speaker 1: how much everyone knows Ferdinando dislikes Bianca and wants the
Speaker 1: throne for himself. So this is an old theory, the
Speaker 1: poison theory, and it's and then investigated in a lot
Speaker 1: of different ways over the years. In two thousand six,
Speaker 1: scientists at the University of Florence and the University of
Speaker 1: Pavia published a paper for the British Medical Journal. It
Speaker 1: said that malaria was not in fact the cause of
Speaker 1: death and brought back this idea that the couple died
Speaker 1: of acute arsenic poisoning. Their paper starts with some observational evidence.
Speaker 1: Cardinal Ferdinando acted strangely while the couple was ill. He
Speaker 1: dominated their medical care. He played down his brother's illness,
Speaker 1: spinning it as the result of poor eating habits and
Speaker 1: Bianca's as grief. He tried to isolate the couple and
Speaker 1: ordered immediate autopsies, which was normal for someone in Francesco's position,
Speaker 1: but not for Bianca. And they then move on to
Speaker 1: the historical records of the illness and the autopsies and
Speaker 1: the symptoms recorded by doctors sound a lot like arsenic poisoning.
Speaker 1: They don't sound like malarial fever. According to the British
Speaker 1: Medical Journal. The autopsies also look a lot like arsenic poisoning,
Speaker 1: and they make note of Francesco's exhamation, which happened centuries
Speaker 1: after his death. Is noted at the time how well
Speaker 1: preserved his body was. Arsenic can desiccate the body before
Speaker 1: and after death, setting it up for almost a state
Speaker 1: of momification. And another thing of note, the most popular
Speaker 1: poison in the medici era is white arsenic. I love
Speaker 1: that this is even mentioned in a medical journal paper.
Speaker 1: It's kind of great. But finally, after studying bone, hair,
Speaker 1: and tissue samples from Francesco and tissue samples believed to
Speaker 1: be from Bianca, Bianca didn't get a very well marked grave,
Speaker 1: the Steady found evidence of acute arsenic poisoning in the
Speaker 1: samples and concentrations in the soft tissue were really high,
Speaker 1: while concentration in the bone and hair were low. And
Speaker 1: that's probably because if they did dive arsenic poisoning, it
Speaker 1: happened really quickly, not enough time for the arsenic to
Speaker 1: set into their bones and grow out through their hair.
Speaker 1: But in June, another scholarly paper came out, the one
Speaker 1: published in the American Journal of Medicine that we mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: that was sent to us by Helen and For this study,
Speaker 1: the scientists wanted to see if the rumors of poison
Speaker 1: and the earlier b MJ study were off and find
Speaker 1: out if the real cause of death was the one
Speaker 1: made by court physicians malaria, which was a disease prevalent
Speaker 1: in central Italy until World War Two. They obtained a
Speaker 1: cancelous bone from one of Francesco's vertebra because they didn't
Speaker 1: get any from Bianca. As negative controls, they use samples
Speaker 1: from Francesco's family members, Calls the First, who died of pneumonia,
Speaker 1: and Joan of Austria who died in childbirth. Their other
Speaker 1: negative controls were from medieval bones outside of malarial regions
Speaker 1: um parts of Germany and France. And they found the
Speaker 1: presence of malaria in Francesco's samples and none in the others.
Speaker 1: And they're pretty confident about their conclusion. They say quote
Speaker 1: that with the use of modern methods, we provide robust
Speaker 1: evidence that Francesco the First had false a param malaria
Speaker 1: at the time of his death. Are immunologic results confirm
Speaker 1: the archival sources that describe the onset, course and fatal
Speaker 1: outcome of the disease. Our findings also absolved Fernando the
Speaker 1: First from the shameful allegation of being the murderer of
Speaker 1: his brother and sister in law. So, like we said,
Speaker 1: this is a choose your own ending podcast. I think
Speaker 1: it's so fascinating that too respected medical journals have put
Speaker 1: out food. I know, I wonder if it is a
Speaker 1: feud Americans versus the Brits. Just that so many people
Speaker 1: are actually doing studies on these people who died hundreds
Speaker 1: of years ago. It's fascinating. So choose your own ending, indeed,
Speaker 1: and let us know what you think. And that brings
Speaker 1: us to some really fantastic listener mail. So this edition
Speaker 1: of Listener Meal involves presents, making it a super exciting
Speaker 1: edition of Listener Meal indeed. And this is CC in
Speaker 1: Australia and she sent us these amazing cand knit animals.
Speaker 1: They're so cool. Katie got a narwhale and I got
Speaker 1: an awful lot, and she wrote I instructed them both
Speaker 1: to be on their best behavior and not fight on
Speaker 1: the journey from Australia to you. They I think they
Speaker 1: did all right. You would not want to fight with
Speaker 1: my narwhale. That tusk is pretty intense. My awful lot
Speaker 1: has closed eyes, and I was thinking c C probably
Speaker 1: left these clothes though, that he wouldn't get injured on
Speaker 1: the way. And we named them after things that have
Speaker 1: come up in our recent podcast. My narwhale is named
Speaker 1: Zara from our episode on the Crusades, and my awful
Speaker 1: is named Antonio after today's basket baby Medici because he
Speaker 1: showed up on my desk the same day this podcast
Speaker 1: was initiated, So a big, big thank you to c C.
Speaker 1: And we'll put up a picture of our lovely little
Speaker 1: animals on our Facebook and also on our Twitter at
Speaker 1: Miston History, you should follow us, and if you search
Speaker 1: our home page at ww dot how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: you can find my article on mar walls, although Sarah
Speaker 1: hasn't gotten to write one about ocelts not yet. And
Speaker 1: if you're not a crafty type of person, but you're
Speaker 1: a wonderful letter writer instead, you can send us an
Speaker 1: email at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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