Medici family mystery may be solved after more than 400 years

Posted by effects 5 days ago

Comments

Comment by srmatto 4 days ago

FWIW you can prepend `lite.` to cnn.com to get text only articles. https://lite.cnn.com/2026/07/15/science/medici-family-myster...

Comment by lormayna 4 days ago

I am living in Poggio a Caiano and I never expect it will be mentioned on HN. I know very well the history of Bianca Cappello and I am not surprised about the malaria. The area around Poggio a Caiano (Poggio means exactly "small hills") was a swamp and malaria was very common.

Comment by m00dy 4 days ago

Then Mussolini came to power and drained all those swamps.

Comment by lormayna 4 days ago

The area around Poggio a Caiano (west of Florence, between Campi Bisenzio and Signa, just for whom that know the area) was drained by the late Medici's and their successor, the Lorena's family.

After the first world war, they built a big area for blimps, with also a big hangar, but I am not sure if it happens during the Fascism or earlier.

Comment by broke303 3 days ago

and all the trains arrived on time

Comment by lormayna 2 days ago

And you can leave the keys into the door /s

Comment by bell-cot 5 days ago

tl;dr; - Scientists did DNA testing on the remains of the Grand Duke and his wife, and found malaria. The rival theory is poisoning by the relative who was next in line for the Ducal throne. HOWEVER, this test result solves nothing:

> But is there any guarantee that Francesco was not also poisoned?

> “Perhaps not,” Ochoa said, “but the genetic evidence presented in our study decreases the margin for speculation.”

> Gisella Caccone, a senior research scientist also at Yale and a study coauthor, agrees. “We can say that they had malaria, we cannot say that they were not poisoned as well,” Caccone said in an email.

Comment by shermantanktop 5 days ago

Maybe they were poisoned, had malaria, were stabbed, and also suffocated and drowned, all at the same time?

"solves" is a silly thing to ask for in matters of probability. I think this test result adds data which shifts probabilities, and that's the best we'll get.

Comment by themgt 5 days ago

Maybe they were poisoned, had malaria, were stabbed, and also suffocated and drowned, all at the same time?

Just now learning Grigori Rasputin died of malaria.

Comment by bell-cot 4 days ago

> "Solves" is a silly thing to ask for...

Maybe? If testing of their remains had revealed (say) LD95 of arsenic, or some other poison well-known at the time, it'd be pretty reasonable to call that "solved". (At least as to their cause of death. It wouldn't establish the perpetrator.)

Comment by shermantanktop 4 days ago

The justice system works in binary: legal vs. illegal, guilty vs. innocent, admissible vs. not. The whole process is dominated by driving uncertainty into binary certainty, with threshold tests at every turn.

Reality as experienced in the moment is often binary (I am walking vs sitting) but is often murkily probabilistic (am I am tired because I am jet-lagged, or because I flew to give a high stakes presentation?).

History is also a mix, but facts become murkier the older they are.

So sure, LD95 sounds pretty much like we would have solved it. But if enough people wanted them dead, it’s not impossible that a lethal dose could coincide with some other cause of death. That could be my defense if I were on trial for it.

Comment by senshan 5 days ago

Right. If one lives in an area prone to malaria, has good immune system, will the body tend to carry the antibodies all the time?

Comment by colingauvin 5 days ago

Yes, which is why the immunological tests done in 2006 were not seen as conclusive. However, this time they found actual plasmodium DNA which suggests active infection at time of death. Including from two species, suggesting double infection. Fun.

Comment by prmph 4 days ago

I live in Ghana, we have malaria as a common (not too common though) ailment. I have also had malaria several times, though the last time was almost 9 years ago.

As I understand it, some malaria parasites can remain dormant in the body for a long time. Clinical symptoms develop once the parasite burden and immune response become sufficient to cause illness.

Not sure if the couple had made trips to Tuscany before the last one, but it is interesting they found two species of malaria pathogens.

I thought that was also an interesting angle to consider.

Comment by toyg 4 days ago

> Not sure if the couple had made trips to Tuscany before

Dude, they were the royal family of Tuscany. They lived there. Which is why this test is not conclusive: sure, they had malaria, but at the time it was pretty common in the region and they likely had it for a long time.

Comment by prmph 4 days ago

Sorry, I meant if the couple were regular visitors to those areas in Tuscany known for malaria. I do agree that this test is still inconclusive, which was the point of my original comment.

From TFA:

> “Francesco and Giovanni, a young member of the family, both traveled 25 years apart to areas of Tuscany which were known for malaria,” Giuffra said.

“The court physicians tried to discourage some members of the Medici family from doing these trips, especially in autumn, which was a season particularly favorable for malaria...”

Comment by colingauvin 4 days ago

Your comment is a stark reminder that I take for granted that the single biggest killer of human beings in history is simply something I don't have to think about. For some reason, I'd have thought there'd be no overlap between HN commenters and malaria - shows my blind spot.

If what you say is accurate (that malaria can remain dormant) then I agree that I don't see how DNA is proof of how they died. Certainly, regardless of how they died the malaria didn't help, and a double infection is likely even worse, but yeah if you have it chronically then DNA alone is insufficient.

Comment by senshan 5 days ago

Interesting. Little brother brought a new version of malaria to try...

Comment by bell-cot 5 days ago

The pedantic answer is "yes".

The pragmatic answer is "if only it was that easy" -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#Immune_system_evasion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_malaria_deaths_201...

Comment by foobarian 2 days ago

Or, maybe the poisoner did it by releasing a jar of malaria-laden mosquitoes in the guy's bedroom. Such plausible deniability!

Comment by fragmede 4 days ago

In related news, tiny drones to take out mosquitoes.

https://tornyol.com

Comment by vessenes 4 days ago

Nerd baited. For a one acre dry-ish property, how many mosquitoes need to be killed on a given day in spring? This seems crazy to me.

Comment by boringg 4 days ago

The energy balance on that makes no sense. You will be zerg swarmed.

Comment by z2 4 days ago

Yeah, we're talking hundreds to thousands of mosquitoes per 1/10 of an acre, many or most of which are actually not actively flying, right? I can only see this working for dragonflies where the mosquito is the energy source.

Comment by terribleperson 4 days ago

I don't know that energy balance makes a difference here. Slapping a mosquito probably takes more energy than a mosquito uses in an hour of flight, but we do it.

Comment by Pigo 4 days ago

I went from laughing to wanting really quickly

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by claudiacsf 4 days ago

Yes, please. More drones for good.

Comment by DaveZale 5 days ago

so interesting.

I worked for a very small company getting funding by the Medici Fund a while back. First I ever heard of the name.

So much intrigue in the past. Guys like Montaigne were said to have "food tasters" to sample the goods before they ate themselves.

As a career trace analytical chemist, I can tell you for sure, that weird poisonings are so much less likely to occur now, because of the probability of detection. That's a little comforting. The same goes for the food supply. Mechanisms are in place to rapidly detect deliberately placed poisons.

Comment by mschuster91 4 days ago

> Mechanisms are in place to rapidly detect deliberately placed poisons.

Sure, but as soon as you add wild-collected fungi [1] or greens [1] to the food mix... it gets easy enough to slip in the bad doppelgangers into a meal.

That's also why I never deal with collecting any food in the wild, I don't trust myself (and certainly I don't trust any of the vibecoded AI apps!) to reliably tell the difference between "this is edible", "this probably will give you a few days of diarrhea" and "even touch that thing and you'll die a horrible painful death".

[1] https://niedersachsen.nabu.de/tiere-und-pflanzen/pilze/23048...

[2] https://www.wwf.de/aktiv-werden/tipps-fuer-den-alltag/famili...

Comment by jjmarr 5 days ago

My family has spent centuries marrying into an alternative claimant to the Grand Duke of Tuscany who did not inherit through Ferdinando I. We were planning to use this as an excuse to invade Italy and put the scion of our own dynasty on the throne and establish ourselves as royalty in the annals of history.

Unfortunately, this + the unification of Italy may have irredeemably foiled our plan.

Not sure what to do now, should I find a wife with a better claim?

Comment by satiric 5 days ago

Nah, ditch the wife. Become a cardinal in the Catholic church, then get elected pope. From there it should be fairly trivial to re-establish the Papal States to their largest extent.

Comment by sidewndr46 4 days ago

wouldn't it be simpler to just lead a conquest and be crowned holy roman emperor?

Comment by satiric 3 days ago

Let's test it out. I'll become pope, you become the emperor, and we'll see who gets there first.

Comment by CoastalCoder 5 days ago

Not sure, but I would 100% buy a copy of your family cookbook.

Just imagine the titles you could use.

Comment by throwup238 4 days ago

Unfortunately most of the recipes call for “tears of a noble bloodline.”

Comment by unsungNovelty 5 days ago

> Not sure what to do now, should I find a wife with a better claim?

Naah. You start an AI company!

Comment by Terr_ 5 days ago

The signature Hapsburg hallucinations, developed through generations of self-distillation.

Comment by Avicebron 5 days ago

CharlesGPT II

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by twothreeone 5 days ago

Just fund your own group of grave diggers with PhDs and an attached museum.

Comment by oersted 4 days ago

Very Crusader Kings :)

Comment by Apocryphon 5 days ago

You could marry your claim to an ideological framework upholding the Divine Right of Kings and traditionalist conservatism, causing it to live for centuries longer in the form of monarchy enthusiast cranks.

Comment by senshan 5 days ago

No, do not stop the efforts! The story here tells us that risks of being poisoned (once the throne is obtained) are greatly exaggerated.

Comment by skrebbel 4 days ago

> + the unification of Italy

I choked on my latte

Comment by asdfman123 5 days ago

Nice work science, but 400 years is a long time to hold onto old grudges. I go by what the "Good Book" says and "forgive and forget."

(sorry guys channeling my ken m)

Comment by Mistletoe 4 days ago

I miss him.

Comment by efebarlas 4 days ago

What's this one? Fable or Sol?

Comment by yieldcrv 4 days ago

what a mess, what is the significance of resolving this? land claims? title? access to frozen assets? recarving borders? treaties?

Comment by dombiscoff 4 days ago

I too am astounded by humanities desire to know things without a monetary benefit. Don't they understand the money spent on this could've gone to a vulture capital?

Comment by yieldcrv 4 days ago

I see, and thats not my point

proving the strains of malaria was interesting

proving whether they died from arsenic or malaria isn’t, unless its of consequence half a millenia later

Comment by dombiscoff 4 days ago

Says you, wouldn't historians find this interesting? The medici family is a prominent part of Italian history. But again, think of the vulture capital!

Comment by yieldcrv 4 days ago

I don’t really appreciate the sarcasm because I asked for an ELI5 not a “in favor of something profitable”

There could be a consequential angle I’m not aware of

Comment by lbriner 4 days ago

Trying to be positive, there are lots of researchers in the world trying to improve forensic anthropomorphic techniques for the betterment of mankind and this is an interesting enough project to work on?