Mining Myths of the Medicis
For more than 400 years, Florentine society has simmered with rumors about the supposed violent deaths of the teenage sons of the wealthy Cosimo de Medici, one stabbed to death by his brother over a hunting argument and the second run through with a sword by his father in a fit of rage.
But the rumors about the wealthiest family in Renaissance Italy are apparently without foundation, said researchers who exhumed the bones of the two youths and submitted them to a modern scientific investigation.
“There were no signs of violence at all,” said archeologist Bob Brier of the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, who participated in the project. “You might expect a cut or two on the vertebrae if someone was run through with a sword, but there was nothing.”
Perhaps more important, the study found that despite their great wealth and influence, family members suffered from a variety of medical conditions that made their lives uncomfortable, at best, or more likely, chronically painful.
Cosimo suffered from a hitherto unsuspected genetic disease that would have made it difficult for him to bend and perform other activities in his later years. His wife, Eleanora di Toledo, bore 11 children in 14 years and paid dearly for her pregnancies. She had a severe calcium deficiency that left her bones weak and her mouth full of cavities and abscesses.
The younger son, Don Garcia, suffered from a severe childhood illness, indicated by periods of interrupted growth in his bones.
The mother and two sons died within a month of one another of what researchers now believe was malaria.
“They were the wealthiest family in the world, but did it help their health? No,” Brier said. Medically, their lives were not much better than those of poor people who worked in the fields.
The Medici family built its fortune in banking, but members included popes, soldiers, intellectuals and politicians. They were patrons of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and protected Galileo from the Inquisition.
Indeed, they were strong supporters of the arts; the Uffizi Gallery in Florence is crammed with their treasures.
But they also had a dark side. Their history is dotted with stories of strangled wives, poisoned husbands and slain brothers and sons.
At least 10 generations of Medicis are buried in the Medici Crypt in the Chapel of San Lorenzo in Florence.
In 2004, paleopathologist Gino Forniciari of the University of Pisa was permitted to exhume 49 bodies from the crypt. Forniciari built his career on studying the diseases of common men and women, but this is the first time he has analyzed those of the rich and powerful.
The task proved much more difficult than anticipated. The bodies were buried beneath the chapel’s floor, but there were no drawings or architectural plans.
“Nobody had ever recorded what the graves were like, how deep they were, where sewer lines were or anything else,” Brier said.
The task was further complicated by a 1947 exhumation -- largely undocumented -- in which researchers had made plaster casts of the corpses’ heads in an effort to understand the source of the Medici genius.
The “excavators from hell,” as Forniciari’s team soon began to call them, took the bodies out of their coffins and removed clothing and other objects for display in museums. Then they placed the bones in zinc ossuaries, which were reburied. Leftover bones that didn’t make it back into the ossuaries were simply scattered in the rubble, Brier said.
Forniciari’s team began with the bodies of Cosimo I, Eleanora and their sons Giovanni Cardinale, 19, and Don Garcia, 16, whose graves were identified by brass plaques on the floor. The mother and boys died in 1562, and the sons’ bodies showed no indications of the cause of death.
The team’s historian, Donatella Lippi of the University of Florence, found two letters in the Italian National Archives that shed new light on the deaths. One, from the family physician, warned Cosimo not to take the boys on a hunting trip to a region of Tuscany that was infested with malaria.
On Nov. 20, Cosimo wrote to another son that Giovanni “suffered from a high fever, but became worse and died.” Don Garcia soon followed and Eleanora, who cared for the boys, died six days after him.
Dr. Arthur Aufderheide of the University of Minnesota at Duluth School of Medicine is studying bone samples, searching for traces of Plasmodium falciparum, which causes malaria.
Cosimo’s bones showed that he suffered from a metabolic disease called diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis. The disorder probably didn’t bother him much when he was young, but in his old age he was probably “racked with pain,” Brier said. Many of his teeth had fractures.
Eleanora’s body was the most interesting. “She was pregnant most of her adult life, and her skeleton showed it,” Brier said. She was small, and her pelvis was damaged every time she had a baby.
Her sacrum was “flattened by all those children coming down the birth canal,” he said.
Although Eleanora was beautiful when she married Cosimo at 16, when she died her teeth “were in terrible condition, with multiple tooth losses and abscesses” due, in part, to calcium being leached from her body for the fetuses’ bone development.
Before their excavation season ended, the team opened the tomb of Gian Gastone, the last legitimate male Medici, who died in 1737. Gian Gastone spent the last five years of his life in bed -- not because he was sick, but because he liked it there.
When the team finally broke through the floor of the crypt, they discovered a room, at least 30 by 30 feet, with 15-foot vaulted ceilings. Although the vault was built by Leopold II of Belgium in 1857, apparently no one knew it was there.
The interior of the vault was damaged by a flood in 1966. The team found more than a dozen coffins, bones of infants strewn around the floor, along with other artifacts of the Medicis.
When they finally opened Gian Gastone’s coffin, they found that he still had his golden crown and two large, gold medallions. There also were remnants of a crucifix around his neck.
The wooden cross had disintegrated, leaving only the metal figure of Jesus.
