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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...”
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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?
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.
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.
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?
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!
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?
But yes, if they had malaria, does it make it their cause of death? Who knows?
FWIW you can prepend `lite.` to cnn.com to get text only articles. https://lite.cnn.com/2026/07/15/science/medici-family-myster...
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.
Then Mussolini came to power and drained all those swamps.
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.
and all the trains arrived on time
And you can leave the keys into the door /s
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.
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.
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.
> "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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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...”
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.
Interesting. Little brother brought a new version of malaria to try...
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...
Or, maybe the poisoner did it by releasing a jar of malaria-laden mosquitoes in the guy's bedroom. Such plausible deniability!
In related news, tiny drones to take out mosquitoes.
https://tornyol.com
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.
The energy balance on that makes no sense. You will be zerg swarmed.
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.
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.
I went from laughing to wanting really quickly
Yes, please. More drones for good.
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.
> 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...
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?
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.
wouldn't it be simpler to just lead a conquest and be crowned holy roman emperor?
Let's test it out. I'll become pope, you become the emperor, and we'll see who gets there first.
Not sure, but I would 100% buy a copy of your family cookbook.
Just imagine the titles you could use.
Unfortunately most of the recipes call for “tears of a noble bloodline.”
> Not sure what to do now, should I find a wife with a better claim?
Naah. You start an AI company!
The signature Hapsburg hallucinations, developed through generations of self-distillation.
CharlesGPT II
Just fund your own group of grave diggers with PhDs and an attached museum.
Very Crusader Kings :)
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.
No, do not stop the efforts! The story here tells us that risks of being poisoned (once the throne is obtained) are greatly exaggerated.
> + the unification of Italy
I choked on my latte
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)
I miss him.
What's this one? Fable or Sol?
what a mess, what is the significance of resolving this? land claims? title? access to frozen assets? recarving borders? treaties?
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?
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
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!
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
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?
But yes, if they had malaria, does it make it their cause of death? Who knows?
Historical curiosity
Just finding out the truth?
It's Italy, there's probably a dispute over a dozen tenements in Florence.