From Discovery News:
Scientists who exhumed the remains of several members of the Medicis, the clan that dominated the Florentine Renaissance, have conclusively dismissed the theory of family murders, solving a more than 400-year-old cold case.Malaria, not poison as long rumored, killed Francesco I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his second wife, Bianca Cappello, according to research to be published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
The couple died a few hours apart in October 1587 after 11 days of agony. Their almost simultaneous deaths led to speculation that they had been murdered.
“It appears it wasn’t poison. We carried an immunologic investigation and found evidence of the protozoan parasite Plasmodium falciparum. … We are talking of the most deadly of the Plasmodium species that cause malaria,” Gino Fornaciari, professor of forensic anthropology and director of the Pathology Museum at the University of Pisa, told Discovery News.
2 users commented in " Cause of death: Malaria, not murder "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackHas anyone said anything about Nostradams’ predictions? Supposedly, Catherine de’ Medici got him to do predictions for her sons. He said that they would all be kings, but then they all ended up being the king of France. Are there any studies and/or exhibits about that?
Much has been said about Nostradamus’ predictions over the years, but I think you’ve gotten the history a bit backwards, here. Not all of Catherine’s sons became king — the youngest son didn’t, though three of his older brothers reigned as king. None of Nostradamus’ quatrains (as far as I know) reference her sons all being kings; the closest is the line Puis longue vie au regne par grand heur.
The quatrain generally thought to apply to Catherine’s husband’s death in a jousting tournament (Le lion jeune le vieux surmontera, / En champ bellique par singulier duelle: / Dans caige d’or les yeux lui crevera, / Deux classes une, puis mourir, mort cruelle) are really more interesting, historically speaking. You might enjoy reading this part of Nostradamus: The Good News for one author’s interpretation of each quatrain, and an actual event that it can be applied to, but frankly, there are a lot of Nostradamus interpretations out there.)
For what it’s worth (to get back to the original posting above), Catherine and Francesco were fairly distant cousins, I think, if I’m reading the family tree correctly. Catherine’s daughter Marguerite married Henri de Bourbon, later Henry IV; when Marguerite died, he married Francesco’s daughter Marie.
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