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Report: Malaria, not murder, killed Medicis

BY BRYN NELSON | STAFF WRITER

March 9, 2005

Two brothers in the Medici dynasty of Renaissance Italy likely were not the long-rumored victims of murder, a new analysis of their centuries-old bones has concluded.

Despite the tremendous wealth and power of the Florence-based family, one that produced popes and intellectuals, commissioned art by Michelangelo and protected Galileo from persecution, the two teenagers and their mother instead may have succumbed to a disease that killed without regard to fame or fortune: malaria.

"We found no signs of violence at all, none at all," said Long Island University archaeologist and mummy expert Bob Brier to a crowd of about 200 gathered for his public presentation Tuesday at the C.W. Post Campus in Brookville.

Brier, who assisted a research team from the University of Florence and University of Pisa during last summer's exhumations, said the scientists had received permission to examine up to 49 bodies in crypts beneath Florence's famed Chapel of the Medici within the larger Chapel of San Lorenzo.

The researchers, led by University of Pisa pathologist Dr. Gino Fornaciari, had time to exhume only five family members, but found many surprises.

During their explorations of the "Renaissance lifestyles of the rich and famous," the colleagues discovered a priceless golden crown, crucifix, and funerary medals in the flood-damaged tomb of Gian Gastone, grand duke of Tuscany. The eccentric end of the Medici family line, Gastone died in 1737.

A mid-19th century reburial, after several Medici coffins had been plundered, left behind bronze plaques to denote the location of each body interred beneath the chapel's marble floor, but no specifics as to the type of tombs used. A clumsy anthropological exhumation in 1947 further complicated matters, as did the 1966 flooding of the Arno River, which filled the chapel with five feet of water.

Beneath a mysterious circular slab, though, Brier and his colleagues discovered steps that descended into a crypt containing several damaged coffins, including Gastone's.

The coffin, with its lid fallen in, initially appeared empty, and Brier returned home, convinced that grave robbers had beaten the team to the site. A more thorough cleaning by his Italian colleagues, however, revealed the grand duke's remains beneath the lid, complete with his precious golden crown, crucifix and medals.

The revelations began with the exhumation of Cosimo I, his wife, Eleanora di Toledo, and two of their sons, Giovanni Cardinale and Don Garcia.

The 16-year-old, Garcia, was rumored to have slain his 19-year-old brother, Giovanni, after an argument during a hunting trip in 1562. In a rage, Cosimo I then supposedly ran Garcia through with his sword, and Eleanora died less than a week later from a broken heart.

But Brier said neither boy bore any marks on the sternum, rib, or vertebrae bones that would suggest foul play. And in an archive, historian Donatella Lippi from the University of Florence found a letter from the Medici family physician, warning of a malaria infestation at the chosen site. A second letter, written by Cosimo himself, describes Giovanni's high fever and death, perhaps hinting at malaria instead of a family cover-up for Cosimo's rage, as had been suggested.

A team led by Dr. Arthur Aufderheide, director of the paleobiology laboratory at the University of Minnesota at Duluth School of Medicine, is now testing samples from the boys' vertebrae for DNA evidence of Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite responsible for the deadliest of all forms of malaria.

Despite their incredible wealth, the family's bones already have borne the evidence of many health problems: chronic illness throughout Garcia's childhood, a painful condition later in Cosimo's life in which three of his vertebrae fused together, and a severe calcium deficiency for Eleanora.

"Eleanora may have been literally the wealthiest woman in the world," Brier said, "but her teeth were terrible."

Even fame and fortune, it seems, had their limits in the Renaissance.