A medieval warlord and patron of the poet Dante was killed by poisoning. That’s at least what his poop tells us.
Described as the most powerful man in the history of Verona, Cangrande della Scala died at the age of 38 in 1329. He had fought a long campaign to control the entire region of Veneto in northern Italy, and died in what is thought to have been a political assassination shortly after taking a city north of Venice.
“He became sick with vomit and diarrhea just a few days after winning control over the city of Treviso,” Gino Fornaciari, professor of history of medicine and paleopathology at the University of Pisa, told Discovery News.
Historical accounts say that Cangrande had contracted a disease involving gastrointestinal symptoms a few days before his death by “drinking from a polluted spring.” After he died, rumors of poisoning immediately started to spread. In 2004, 675 years later, Fornaciari’s team exhumed his body from an ornate marble tomb in the church of Santa Maria Antica in Verona. They used CT scans and digital X-ray to examine it, and found useful fecal matter in the rectum of the man who had once seen Dante dedicate part of “the Divine Comedy” to him.
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