Was Napoleon murdered?

Mar 10th, 2012 by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett

Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile at the age of 52 on the Island of St Helena on May 5, 1821. The official cause of death according to the autopsy carried out by Napoleon’s personal physician, Francesco Antommarchi, was stomach cancer.

The valet’s diaries

However, when the diaries of Napoleon’s valet, Louis Marchand, were first published in 1955, they fuelled some concern that the emperor may not have died of natural causes. These diaries described symptoms of Napoleon’s illness in St Helen, many of which incidentally correspond to those found in arsenic poisoning (vomiting, dry cough, nausea, drowsiness, headaches, excessive thirst). The valet’s journal shows that symptoms often came and went and were followed by periods of general well being.

Arsenic poisoning?

In 1961, Dr. Sten Forshufvud argued that the emperor’s symptoms coincided with those of chronic arsenic poisoning in his book, Who killed Napoleon? Forshufvud obtained a lock of hair that had been cut from Napoleon’s head after his death and asked the British Atomic Energy Establishment to analyze it. The results of the study showed that the hairs contained an amount of arsenic ten times above normal. The arsenic also showed irregular distribution along the length of hair, with peaks and troughs along the strands, suggesting the victim went through a pattern of arsenic intake (in line with the periods of wellbeing described in the valet’s journal).

Arsenic poisoning resurfaced in 1995, when the Chemistry and Toxicology Unit of the FBI examined a sample of the emperor’s hair for arsenic analysis at the request of Ben Weider, founder of the International Napoleonic Society, who provided two hairs belonging to Napoleon. According to the FBI, the levels of arsenic reported were 33.3 parts per million (ppm) and 16.3 ppm (vs a normal human level of 0.08ppm) and were levels consistent with arsenic poisoning.

Similar conclusions were reached in June 2001, by Pascal Kintz of the Strasbourg Forensic Institute in France who analyzed hair samples that had been taken from Napoleon while he was still alive (in 1805, 1814 and 1821). The analysis showed abnormally high levels of arsenic, and Kintz concluded that the emperor may have been poisoned.

Wallpaper toxic fumes

A study by Jones and Lendingham (JonesDE, Ledingham KW. Arsenic in Napoleon’s wallpaper, Nature, 1982, 299:626-7) suggests that Napoleon may have been accidentally poisoned by copper arsenides present in his wallpaper. This was painted in Scheele’s green (or Paris green, as the compound was used in Paris sewers to kill rats) which was a mixture of copper arsenides. Moreover, some moulds may have been present and may have volatized arsenic fumes. Measurements of a wallpaper sample taken from Napoleon’s room in St Helen show arsenic in substantial concentration. The paper argues that death by poisonous wallpaper was well documented as early as the 1890s.

In May 2004, Lin, Alber and Henkelmann examined several strands of hair, two pieces cut the day after his death in 1821 and two pieces cut in Elba in 1814. They used instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) and the results showed that the hairs did have an elevated concentration of arsenic, as well as 18 other elements. This suggests that exposure to arsenic may have started as early as 1814 (see, Elemental contents in Napoleon’s hair cut before and after his death: did Napoleon die of arsenic poisoning?).

Heart failure?

A team of forensic pathologists led by Steven Karch, of the Medical Examiner Medical Examiner Department in San Francisco believe that it could have been the treatments administered to the emperor that actually killed him, not arsenic poisoning. In their paper, Channeling the Emperor: what really killed Napoleon? (J R Soc Med. 2004 August; 97(8): 397–399), they suggest that the immediate cause of Napoleon’s death could have been a rare form of ventricular tachycardia (torsade de pointes) brought about by hypokalemia (low concentration of potassium in the blood). They have observed that treatment in patients with promyelocytic leukemia using arsenic trioxide have occasionally resulted in ventricular tachycardia and sudden death.

The valet’s and phisician’s journals show that because Napoleon suffered from nausea, he had been administered tartar emetic regularly. This is an antimony potassium tartrate and could have eventually led to low potassium levels in the blood, according to Dr. Karch’s team. On the day before Napoleon’s death, he was administered a very high dose of calomel (mercury chloride), which was not absorbed by the gastrointestinal tract as suggested by the fact that the journals report significant bouts of diarrhea. This in turn may have caused dehydration and a sudden drop in potassium levels, bringing about the torsade de pointes and sudden death. They argue therefore that Napoleon’s death was caused by “medical disadventure” and not directly by arsenic poisoning.

Stomach cancer

Finally, in a more recent case study presented to Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology & Hepatology in 2007, Robert Genta (professor of pathology and internal medicine at UT Southwestern) and other researchers presented their evaluation of Napoleon’s available clinical history and original autopsy and compared this with clinicopathologic data from 135 gastric cancer patients. They concluded that Napoleon is likely to have suffered from chronic gastritis and that this in turn may have led to the development of an ulcer which later became cancer. Therefore, according to this study, Napoleon died of gastrointestinal bleeding caused by very advanced gastric cancer (see, Napoleon Bonaparte’s gastric cancer: a clinicopathologic approach to staging, pathogenesis, and etiology, Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology & Hepatology (2007) 4, 52-57).

The jury is therefore still out on whether Napoleon was murdered, whether his physicians over-administered arsenic or whether he died of cancer. All arguments so far have been presented very convincingly. Whatever the truth, we agree with Robert Genta: whether Napoleon succeeded in escaping St Helena (as he had done in 1814 when he fled Elba), his existing ulcer would have prevented him from ever becoming a threat to European peace as he would not have lasted much longer past 1821.

Posted in DNA, DNA Testing, Historic mysteries, Murder, mysteries, Poisoning | No Comments »

Ninth Legion Hispana: Myth and reality

Aug 14th, 2011 by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett

Rosemary Sutcliff‘s novel, The Eagle of the Ninth, argued that the Roman Ninth Legion (Legio VIIII Hispana) in Britain was annihilated by local Caledonian tribes. But did 5,000 Roman soldiers really go missing, or is this pure fiction?

Last epigraphic evidence

There is epigraphic evidence that the Legio VIIII Hispana was stationed in Northern England before 60AD (see R.P. Wright, Tile Stamps of the Ninth Legion found in Britain, Britannia, Vol. 9 (1978), p.379-382), but there is no historical evidence of when the Legion reached Britain. Historians assume that the Ninth was used in the Roman invasion of Britain in 43AD, although this is not confirmed by Tacitus’ Annals (missing books). Of the four legions that took part in the invasion, only the Eleventh and the Twentieth are documented in literal and epigraphic evidence.

In Legions and veterans: Roman army papers 1971-2000, Lawrence Kieppe mentions the only evidence we have is a fragmentary slab (now in Turin, Italy) of an unnamed senator who accompanied emperor Claudius to Britain and who stayed with a legion whose numeral began with V, the crucial part missing because the tablet is broken. Kieppe argues that no other legion with a numeral between V and X can be confidently shown to have participated and that VIIII would seem reasonable. He also argues that Flavius Vespasianus, the future emperor, was legate at II Augusta in the invasion army in 43AD. The Flavian family was later associated with the Ninth and one could assume that Flavius’ brother, Flavius Sabinus could have held a similar post with the Ninth.

Forum of Ancient coins, ANT AVG III VIR R P C

Legio VIIII Hispana was originally raised by Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, proconsul of Rome in Iberia (Hispania), which he subdued in 71BC. Evidence shows that Julius Caesar later commanded the legion in Gaul in 58BC, and the legion was subsequently returned to Hispania after the Gallic wars and disbanded after Caesar’s African campaign in 46BC. The Ninth was recalled by Octavian after Caesar’s death to fight Sextus Pompeius in Sicily and later Mark Anthony at Actium (31BC). In 60AD, the Ninth was the first legion to reach a revolt in Eastern England led by queen Boudicca. According to evidence, the legion lost 2,000 men in the revolt. This helps historians place the Ninth in Eastern England, which is in line with its later postings at Lincoln and York. However, a list of legions compiled under Marcus Aurelius (161-180AD) does not mention the Ninth, which disappears from historical annals.

Keppie believes that the legion left Britain either in preparation for the Dacian Wars (101-106AD) or in the build up for the campaign against the Parthians in Mesopotamia (114-117AD). The last fragment of Legio VIIII tiling is found in York, 108AD. Legio VI Victrix was moved to York in 122 and there is no trace of the Ninth left. In 1964, Prof. J.E. Bogaers produced evidence of two discoveries that suggest the Ninth may have been stationed at Nijmegen (Holland) around the time Victrix moved to York. He quotes part of a tegula found in 1959 with the inscription LEG VIIII and some abbreviation of Hispana, found on the legionary site at Nijmegen. He also quotes the rim of a mortarium originally found in 1938 at Groesbeek, 4.5km from Nijmegen, stamped L and reversed G VIIII HIS.

Keppie also quotes evidence from a diploma found in 1972, reporting a Roman consul named Q Numisius Junior in 161AD. This consul could have been Q Camurius Numisius Junior, a known tribune of the VIIII legion according to a separate inscription without a date. Assuming this was the same consul, the diploma proves the Ninth was still in existence in 161AD and had not been annihilated by the Picts in Britain.

Posted in Ancient Rome, Historic mysteries, mysteries | No Comments »

U-530: The mystery U-boat of Patagonia

Apr 3rd, 2011 by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett

German U-boat U-530 surrendered mysteriously on July 10 1945

On July 10, 1945, two months after the end of WWII, German submarine U-530 surrendered to the Argentinian forces at Mar del Plata, south of Buenos Aires. Oberleutnant Otto Wermuth, the ship’s captain, did not explain why the crew on board carried no identification and could not account for the ship’s log, which was missing.

On July 17, 1945, Reuters reported that according to Argentinian newspaper, Critica, the Argentine police was searching the coast for any person that may have disembarked from the U-530. Critica argued that there were doubts as to whether Otto Wermuth was the ship’s real captain and introduced the possibility that the real crew, together with high-ranking Nazis may have been off-loaded before the ship’s surrender on July 10. On July 23, 1945, the Time wrote that an Argentine journalist reported Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun may have disembarked off the lower coast of Argentina from U-530. Could Hitler and Eva Braun have escaped Berlin days before their alleged suicide on April 30, 1945?

This possibility was first introduced by Stalin at Potsdam on July 17, 1945 and was compound by the fact that the Soviets, who occupied Berlin in May 1945, had difficulties in locating the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. In Argentina, the Navy Intelligence service had been investigating mysterious German U-boat landings since April 1945. In a report filed by navy investigator, Niceforo Alarcon, a copy of which can be retrieved from the Coordinacion Federal under the number CF-OP-2315, landings had been taking place since 1943, with Navy Lt Rudolf Freude and Eva Duarte (Eva Peron) as principal activists. The U-boats landed at a secluded spot near the village of San Clemente del Tuyu. According to author Ladislav Farago, the U-boats unloaded gold and counterfeit currency, part of Martin Bormann’s plan to fund the future survival of the Third Reich.

However, the events of Hitler’s last days in the bunker under the Chancellery are well documented by eye witness accounts. The NKVD (Soviet Secret Services) issued a preliminary report in 1946, in which it confirmed that Hitler and Eva Braun’s bodies had been dug up from a spot in the garden outside the Chancellery, where the SS had tried to bury them after setting fire to them. The NKVD funded a further investigation which produced the Operation Myth dossier, presented to Stalin in 1949. This dossier was only released in its entirety in 2005. It is based on thorough interrogations of Hitler’s assistant, Heinz Linge, and his military adjutant, Otto Günsche. The dossier confirms that Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide on the afternoon of April 30, 1945; Hitler by cyanide capsule and a shot to the temple and Eva Braun by cyanide capsule. These accounts were later corroborated by Hitler’s secretary’s own account, Traudl Junge, who had personally typed the Fuhrer’s last will. Ms. Junge stated that she heard the shot on April 30, whilst Otto Gunsche confirms that he tried to set fire to the bodies in the garden outside the bunker. Aside from these eye witness accounts, there is little evidence left of Hitler’s death. The bodies dug by the Soviets in 1945 had been recognized as those of Hitler and Eva Braun by Hitler’s dentist who claimed that the dental remains of one of the skulls matched his memory of the Fuhrer’s teeth. However, the remains had be reburied and re-dug several times until they were finally destroyed in 1970. All that remained of them is the fragment of a skull (cranial vault) and pieces of the couch bearing the remains of Hitler’s blood.

Skull fragment believed to be Hitler's

Dr. Nick Bellantoni, state archeologist at the University of Connecticut was allowed access to the evidence at the Russian State archives in 2008. He was able to extract DNA samples from the skull and from the blood stains he collected from the couch fibers. Dr. Bellantoni’s first analysis suggested that the cranial vault exhibited characteristics that do not match those of a fifty-six year old male. Later, the DNA analysis proved that the skull belonged to a woman: it was not, therefore, Adolf Hitler’s as the Soviets had claimed since 1970. The blood was that of a male, but the results were inconclusive since none of Hitler’s surviving relatives accepted to take part in the test.

Some argue that Hitler may have escaped aboard Hanna Reitchs‘ plane that left Berlin on the night of April 29, although she denied that until her death. There is evidence in FBI filings that the Bureau had been looking for Hitler in Spain, where it believed he had fled to, based on some eye witness accounts and medical files stating that Hitler had been taking large quantities of dope as prescription for tremours that he suffered from.

Whilst physical evidence is inconclusive, eye witness accounts are accurate and all corroborate the view that Hitler did commit suicide on April 30. Escaping would not have been a choice to a man who had seen the collapse of his empire. The fact that the bodies have not been found matches Hitler’s last wish not to allow the Soviets the satisfaction of parading his remains in public, like the Italians had done with the body of Benito Mussolini in Milan. There is therefore very little chance that the Fuhrer survived the war.

Posted in DNA, DNA Testing, False identity, Germany, Historic mysteries, mysteries, Russia, WWII | 2 Comments »

Anastasia & Anna Anderson: How DNA solved the mystery identity

Mar 19th, 2011 by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett

Anastasia as a child

Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova was born in June 1901, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna. She was the youngest of four sisters and was elder to a brother, Alexei Nicholaevich. In February 1917, following the outbreak of the Russian revolution, the Tsar abdicated and the imperial family was put under house arrest in Tsarskoye Selo, outside St. Petersburg. Later on that same year, the family was moved to Tobolsk in Siberia. Once the Bolsheviks gained power, the Romanovs were moved to Yekaterinburg in Central Russia, where they lived for 78 days at Ipatiev House.

The murder at Ipatiev House

Room where the family was executed

The Whites, a faction opposed to the Bolsheviks, was advancing on Yekaterinburg and the Bolsheviks feared they would release the Romanovs. As a result, in the early morning of July 17, 1918, the imperial family was executed by firing squad in the cellar of Ipatiev House and their bodies disposed of (as confirmed by a note written by the executioner, Yakov Mikhaylovich Yurovsky, to his Bolshevik superiors). Once the Whites took over the city, the family had disappeared. White Army investigators concluded the Romanovs had been murdered, but they never found the bodies.

Anna Anderson

Anastasia’s possible survival

The 1920s were characterized by a series of reports about Anastasia’s survival, which gave rise to one of the most controversial mysteries of the 20^th century. Although there were up to ten different women claiming to be the missing Anastasia, Anna Anderson was by far the most notorious. She surfaced in the spring of 1922, claiming to be the Duchess who had escaped the shooting and was smuggled out the grave by a sympathetic guard. In 1927, the Tsarina’s brother, Ernst Ludwig, the Granduke of Hesse, undertook a private investigation and concluded that Anderson was a Polish factory worker called Franziska Schanzkowska, with a history of mental illness (she had been hospitalized during WWI when the factory she was working on was hit by a bomb and she had lost consciousness).

In 1928, Anderson moved to the United States, where she received support from Gleb Botkin, son of Dr. Eugene Botkin, the physician who was killed with the Romanovs at Yekaterinburg. Botkin set up a company to oversee legal attempts to retrieve any of the Tsar’s estates outside of Russia for Anderson. As a result, in October 1928, twelve of the surviving relatives of Nicholas II signed a declaration denouncing Anderson as an impostor. Litigation continued through WWII and proceedings were only closed in 1969, when the German courts (Anderson was a citizen of Berlin originally) ruled the case was inconclusive as Anderson had not provided enough evidence to support her claim.

Romanovs remains found in mass grave

The bodies are found: DNA Testing proves their identity

In the late 1970s Russian geologist Alexander Avdonin, located the mass grave containing the remains of five out of the seven members of the imperial family and four of their servants. However, he only revealed the location of the grave after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1991, the bodies were exhumed and subjected to forensic investigation, including DNA testing. Dr. Peter Gill (Forensic Science Service) and Russian geneticist, Dr. Pavel Ivanov, undertook nuclear DNA testing of five SRT markers and confirmed the sex of the skeletons as well as a familial relationship among five of the eight skeletons found. They also ran DNA testing of HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, whose maternal grandmother was the Tsarina’s sister, and found a familial relationship between four of the skeletons and Prince Philip, confirming that at least four of the bodies found were those of the Tsarina and of three of her daughters. The Duke of Fife and Princess Xenia Cheremeteff Sfiri were used to successfully reassociate the remains of the Tsar (both are maternal relatives). Despite these findings, skeptics argued that the absence of Alexei’s body and of that of one of his sisters proved that the mass grave was not that of the imperial family.

Anna Anderson was not Anastasia Romanov

In 2007, amateur archeologists found some bone remains in the proximity of the first mass grave. An official archeological excavation followed under Dr. Sergei Pogorelov, Deputy Director of the Sverdlovsk Region’s Archaeological Institute, which recovered 44 bone fragments. Russian and US anthropologists studied the remains and concluded that they belonged to at least two people, one of whom was a female, based on sciatiatic bone dimensions. Three silver amalgam fillings found on the crowns of two molars recovered from the grave suggested that at least one person was of an aristocratic status.

In late 2007, independent DNA testing was conducted on the remains of the second grave. According to Michael Coble, Loreille OM, Wadhams MJ, Edson SM, Maynard K, et al, the DNA analysis of all three genetic systems confirms that the samples tested from the second grave are one female and one male child of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra, solving the mystery of the missing Romanov children, who had never unfortunately escaped execution.

Boris Yeltin pays his respect at the Tsar's funeral

In 2007, DNA testing was also conducted on sample tissue of Anna Anderson’s intestine which had been removed during her operation in 1979, and which had been stored at Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. The results were negative: Anna Anderson’s DNA did not match either that of Prince Philip or any of the samples found in Russia, proving that Anna Anderson was not Anastasia Romanov. The sample did match DNA provided by Karl Maucher, a grandson of Franziska Schanzkowska’s sister, confirming that Karl Maucher and Anna Anderson were related and suggesting that Anderson was, after all, Franziska Schanzkowska.

The final DNA report on the Romanov remains can be found at: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0004838

This post is dedicated to Enzo Manfredi Consolo.

Tags: Anastasia, Anna Anderson, DNA, False identity, Mysteries, Nicholas II, Romanovs, Russia, Russian Revolution, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg

Posted in Anastasia Romanov, DNA Testing, False identity, Historic mysteries, mysteries, Russia | No Comments »

Sir Isaac Newton: The last of the magicians

Jan 1st, 2011 by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett

I never knew that Isaac Newton was an alchemist until I read The Secret Fire by Martin Langfield. I was skeptical at first: I couldn’t really picture a scientist as an alchemist, because I didn’t really know what alchemy was.

Throughout his life, Newton applied just as much effort to alchemy as to mathematics, theology

Newton's notes, Manuscript 3973, Cambridge University

and philosophy. However, because of skepticism towards alchemy, Newton’s non-scientific papers have been neglected by most of his eighteenth and nineteenth-century biographers. But these papers resurfaced in 1936, when the Viscount of Limington, who had inherited them, put them up for auction at Sotheby’s. The non-scientific manuscripts provide insight into Newton’s view on alchemy, theology, chemistry and philosophy. Einstein mentioned that these manuscripts provide a glimpse of Newton’s geistige Werkstatt, his “spiritual workshop” (letter of Albert Einstein to Abraham Yahuda dated September 1940, in E. Manuel The Religion of Isaac Newton).

The auction took place on July 13 and 14 1936 at Sotheby’s on New Bond Street in London.

John Maynard Keynes

There were 121 lots, comprising manuscripts with more than three million words in total, the majority of which were in Newton’s own hand. According to P.E. Spargo (The Investigation of Difficult Things, Essays on Newton and the history of exact sciences, Cambridge University Press 1992), John Maynard Keynes, a fellow of Kings College, Cambridge University, attended the auction and purchased thirty nine lots.

The contents of these manuscripts deeply affected Keynes’ view of Newton and in his address to the Royal Society in 1946, he stated “In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age scientists […] I do not see him in this light […] Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians […].” If one of the most important economists of our time felt this way about Newton, I was prepared to give alchemy another try…

As Mary Sworder asks in her introduction to Fulcanelli’s Le Mystere des Cathedrales, if

Bas relief relief depicting alchemy on the great porch of Notre Dame in Paris

alchemy isn’t gold making, what is it? She describes it as a “total science of energy transformation.” The Oxford Dictionary states that alchemy is the medieval forerunner of modern chemistry, based on the supposed transformation of matter.

Manuscript MM/6/5highlights Newton’s views on energy transformation. Marked as Lot 22, this manuscript had been purchased at auction in 1936 by the booksellers Francis Edwards and had disappeared until 2004, when Royal Society’s archivist, Ross MacFarlane, found it in the Society’s library. As John T. Young points out in Isaac Newton’s alchemical notes in the Royal Society (Notes Rec. R. Soc. January 22, 2006 60:25-34), Manuscript MM/6/5 shows Newton’s view of a ‘vegetative’ operation in nature whereby animals, plants and minerals grow and mutate. Newton believed that this was the process set in motion by God to generate the initial chaos of Genesis. In other words, through alchemy, Newton was trying to tap the same energy that set the universe in motion.

Newton wrote these papers in the 1690’s (B.J.T. Dobbs argues that Newton’s study of alchemy began in 1668). In other words, he was concerned with how nature’s forces of gravity and the cosmos are related to one another (and he did so just fifty years after Galileo broke the news about the earth being round!). Three hundred years later, Stephen W. Hawking (who,

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

coincidentally, occupies the Lucasian chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, just as Newton did) examines the beginning of the universe, with knowledge of electromagnetic fields and nuclear energy (which Newton did not have) in A Brief History of Time. Ironically, Prof. Hawking writes: “However, if we do discover a complete theory [for the creation of the universe], it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.”

Image of the Macro and Microcosm taken from the Alchemy website

If alchemy is the study of energy transformation, I guess one could argue that it has made a significant contribution to modern science. Newton’s study of alchemy confirms its fascination even for the modern thinker and Stephen Hawking’s theory about the unity of matter suggests that even thousands of years since the beginning of alchemy, man is still looking for the source of creation.

Tags: Alchemy, Chaos, Fulcanelli, Genesis, Isaac Newton, Mystery of Medieval Cathedrals, Philosophy, Royal Society, Spiritual, Stephen Hawking, Theology, Transmutation, Universe

Posted in Alchemy, Historic mysteries, mysteries, Philosophy, Spiritual, Theology | 1 Comment »

Art theft: The mystery and the numbers behind it

Nov 14th, 2010 by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett

Eighty one minutes. This was the time it took two thieves posing as policemen on the night of March 18, 1990 to walk into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and steal thirteen works of art, including Rembrandt’s (1633), A Lady and Gentleman in Black (1633), and a Self-Portrait (1634); Vermeer’s The Concert (1658–1660); Edouard Manet’s Chez Tortoni (1878–1880).

Twenty years and eight months. The time that has passed since the theft, without any sign of any of the paintings.

Five million dollars. The reward offered by the Museum for any information on the theft.

One. The number of FBI agents appointed to the case.

Unforunately, art theft is not a mystery. It’s a reality. As Professor Stefano Manacorda of the Università di Napoli once stated, art theft is a problem of epidemic proportions (International Conference on Organised Crime in Art and Antiquities, Courmayeur, December 2008). According to Interpol, art theft is a market worth between $2-6 bn per year. Statistics are difficult to collate, because not all countries provide reliable and up-to-date data. Art and antiquities theft is fourth in transnational crime, after drugs, money laundering and illegal arms trading. Works of art are often used as collateral for criminal deals around the world.

The Art Loss Registry in Courmayeur (the world’s largest private database of lost and stolen art, antiques and collectables) estimates that approximately 52% of art and antiquities are stolen from private homes and organisations; 10% from galleries and 8% from Churches. These statistics do not account for any pilfering that occurs at archeological digs all over the world, nor does it include any item that was subject to pilfering during the Second World War.

Despite the romanticism associated with art theft in popular culture, art theft is seldom about the love of art or the cleverness of the crime. As Robert K. Wittmanand John Shiffman argue in their book Priceless: How I went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, “The art in art crime isn’t the theft, it’s in the sell.” It’s important for thieves to have a buyer ready for stolen pieces, as these can often be difficult to dispose of and might only fetch up to 10% of their open-market value, according to Wittman. For example, Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, which was stolen in broad daylight on August 22, 2004 from the Munch Museum in Oslo, was recovered by under cover Norwegian police, who bought the painting from the thieves two years later for only $75,000. The painting is worth $100 million, according to a source on the New York Times.

There is a perfect correlation between the increase in art values and the ramp in art theft. The Art Loss Registry states that between its inception in 1976 and 1990, when the Isabella Gardner heist occurred, they had accumulated more than 20,000 manual cards: 20,000 entries of stolen/missing art works. This is in largely in line with the exorbitant rise in art prices witnessed in the late 1980s. For example, in 1987 the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu acquired Van Gogh’s Irises(painted in 1889, a few months before he committed suicide) from the Australian industrialist Alan Bond at a Sotheby’s auction for $54 mn (New York Times). To put this in context, the painting had been bought in 1947 by John Whitney Payson for $80,000. Three years later, Christies auctioned another Van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1889) for $82 mn. In 2006, David Geffen sold Kooning’s Woman III (1953) painting for $138 mn.

Resources:

Interpol’s website: http://www.interpol.int/Public/WorkOfArt/Default.asp

UNESCO: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=EN&pg=home

FBI Art Theft Squad: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/vc_majorthefts/arttheft/

ICOM: http://icom.museum/

Robert Wittman: http://www.robertwittmaninc.com/company_overview.html

Tags: art auctions, art crime, Art Theft, FBI Art Theft Squad, illicit art trade, Interpol, UNESCO

Posted in Historic mysteries, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Templars as a new social order

Oct 25th, 2010 by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett

The Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici(Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon), or the Order of the Temple was the very first Christian religious-military order created after the First Crusade (in ca.1119). These knights, first led by Hugh de Payns and Godefroy de Saint Omer, dedicated themselves to a life of chastity, poverty and obedience, to defend pilgrims on the way to the Holy Land.

The idea of a warrior-monk was revolutionary for the time and it still raises questions of morality today. I partly touched on this in my article on March 17, 2010, where I looked at how the Church was instrumental in reconciling the violent act of war with the need to maintain peace and be charitable to others. With this in mind, the rise of the Order can only be understood in the context of the Crusades and the Papal reformist movement that set these in motion.

The seeds of the warrior-monk were already present in the idea of the miles Christi (soldier of Christ) put forward by Church reformers in the late eleventh century, anxious to inspire greater morality in the warrior classes. As Professor Georges Duby argues in The Three Orders, Feudal Society imagined, the idea of the miles Christi was forged to canalize the warlike impulses of a noble class in Europe that was no longer subject to effective royal and judicial restraint, particularly with the inset of Salic Law.

C. Morris agrees with this view and suggests that the Truce of God movements and the Crusades were aimed at reducing the damage caused by the nobles on Christian society and channel their bellicosity towards greater causes. But this is not just a modern interpretation of these movements’ intent. Guibert de Nogent, the twelfth-century Benedictine historian, argues in his Dei Gesta per Francos that God instituted the Holy War so that the Ordo Equestris (the nobles) might find a new way of salvation.

Does this suggest acceptance of the fact that the noble’s instinct for warfare could not be abolished? Very possible. Duby shows that the Latin word miles in France was associated with members of the warrior class as early as the eighth century (Lineage, Nobility and Knighthood). The Templars referred to themselves as Christi milesin their Latin code of conduct and Demurger argues that the Latin word militia was used in the vernacular to denote a knight serving in the cavalry, which was essentially the key weapon of the medieval army.

In a tri-partite society, based on the nobility, the church and the working classes, the new order of warrior-monks was a novelty. Note that when Hugh de Payns travelled to Europe to get formal backing for the Order, he finds the support of Bernard de Clairvaux (a key driver of the Cistercian order), who referred to the Templars as a new military order: nova militia. Bernard writes: “A new kind of chivalry, one ignorant of the ways of the ages, which fights a double fight equally and tirelessly, both against flesh and blood and against the spiritual forces of iniquity in the heavens.” In the same way as Pope Urban II’s words at Clermont in 1095 achieved a sacralisation of war, so Bernard’s words represent a further attempt by the Church to gain the control of secular life. Because the new order represented a way for lay men to join monastic life whilst still fighting, the Church has created a new social order.

Unfortunately, we come back to the struggle for power that Dante attacked in the Divine Comedy, between the Papacy and the Empire, which characterized a thousand years of European history. In 1129, the Church may have won a battle against the Empire by legitimizing the Order of the Temple at the Council of Troyes. But less than three hundred years later, king Philip IV of France won his battle against the Papacy: not just by kidnapping the Pope and forcing him to sit in Avignon, but by dismantling the Order of the Temple altogether.

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The Freemasons and the United States

Oct 3rd, 2010 by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett

Today, Barb Schlichting is kindly contributing a post to History’s mysteries. Barb is the author of the First Lady Mysteries series which is represented by the Blue Ridge Agency. Barb also writes a very interesting blog, First Lady mystery/fiction chitchat where she mixes fiction and history, beginning with the very First Woman, Dolley Madison. In this post, she examines the presence of Freemasonry at the time of the US Declaration of Independence.

The Freemasons and the United States

Only a few of our founding fathers were members of Freemasonry, unlike what most of us think. Of the fifty-six signatures on the Declaration of Independence, only nine can be confirmed Freemasons. It’s also untrue that our country was founded on Christianity. Many of our founding fathers either believed in ‘Theism’, which is belief in a higher being or else ‘Deism’, which emphasizes morality and denies the interference of the Creator with the laws of nature.
The nine signers who were Freemasons were: George Walton, John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, Richard Stockton, William Whipple, Joseph Hewes, William Hooper, Benjamin Franklin, and William Ellery.
The most influential speakers at the Continental Congress were Ben Franklin and Robert Livingston and Robert Sherman. Both men are believed to have been Freemasons, but it’s not confirmed. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were not. John Hancock was president of the congress, and George Washington was very influential. The army was entirely in Freemason hands.
Edmund Randolph, a member of a Wiliamsburg lodge was Washington’s aide-de-camp, and later became Attorney-General and Grand Master of Virginia’s Grand Lodge. He was the first Attorney General of the United States.
The five dominant souls behind the Constitution were Washington, Franklin, Randolph, Jefferson and John Adams. The first three were active Freemasons. Adams wasn’t a known Freemason, but he supported them one-hundred percent. When John Adams became president, he appointed Freemason, John Marshall, as first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
The Bible, which Washington was sworn in on, was from a Masonic Lodge. Most of his general’s were Freemasons as well as his commanders. The Grand Lodge of Maryland laid the cornerstone of the Capital Building.

Tags: Benjamin Franklin, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Deism, Founding Fathers, Freemasons, George Washington, Masonic Lodge, Theism, Thomas Jefferson

Posted in Historic mysteries, mysteries | 5 Comments »

Did the Templars visit Nova Scotia?

Sep 18th, 2010 by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett

Since 1795, Oak Island in Nova Scotia has been the set of an aggressive treasure hunt with more than US$10 million in capital sunk into it. Treasure seekers, engineers and archaeologists have nicknamed it “the Money Pit.”

The Money Pit on Oak Island, Nova Scotia

The hunt began in the summer of 1795, when Daniel McGinnis went to the island with two friends looking for pirate treasures. They believed that pirates often buried their stolen loot in remote places, only to return to them during safer times, with the use of treasure maps. Captain William Kidd was rumoured to have visited Nova Scotia before his trial and evidence that he had buried a treasure on Gardiner’s Island (which was found and used against him court) only encouraged young treasure hunters to roam the coast of Nova Scotia (where modern-day Canadian coast guards estimate there are approximately 10,000 under-water ship wrecks).

According to the legend, Daniel McGinnis actually found what looked like a man-made clearing on the island together with a ship’s tackle hanging from a nearby tree. The three boys set out to dig by a depression in the ground until they found a layer of flagstones. Once they removed this layer, it became apparent that they had found a man-made shaft. They continued digging and at around ten feet below ground level, they found some logs embedded on the side of the shaft. A second layer was found at twenty feet.

The shaft was too deep for the boys, and excavations only resumed six years later when a physician from Onslow, Dr. Simeon Lynds became interested in the shaft. Dr. Lynds created a syndicate to raise the necessary capital for the project. Two companies were formed: the Onslow Company in 1804-05, and the Truro Company in 1849.

A secret cypher was found inside the money pit

Workers found more wooden platforms at ten-feet intervals and at ninety feet, a flagstone was found with an inscription written in cipher. Unfortunately, the tablet itself has disappeared, but its cipher was copied and it remains. Consensus believed that the symbols translate as: “forty feet below two million pounds are buried.”

After ninety-three feet, the workers realized that water was seeping through and that for every bucket of earth they removed, they had to lift two buckets of water. Overnight, the shaft was completely flooded. The team dug a parallel shaft, fourteen feet away from the pit and drove a later tunnel into it. Water entered the side tunnel and flooded the new shaft. The excavation was abandoned.

In 1849 the Truro Company resumed excavations, but abandoned the project when water seeped through at 86 feet in depth. The following summer, the Company drilled an auxiliary shaft to one hundred and nine feet, ten feet away from the Money Pit. From the bottom of this, at 110 feet, they dug a lateral tunnel into the pit but water burst through and flooded the new shaft once again. Astonishingly, none of the workers noticed that the water was salty: in other words, it was not seeping through from a nearby water level, but was being channeled into the pit from the coast.

When workers realized that sea water was flooding the pit, it was assumed that it was coming from the nearby Simon’s Cove, through man-made tunnels and shafts. Some geologists argue that the shafts could be natural: Oak Island is composed of till overlaying anhydrite bedrock and limestone. Anhydrite is soluble, especially in salt water. It is possible that the drilling around the money pit may have caused water to seep through the anhydrite creating tunnels that enlarge progressively.

A pirate cove?

Excavation in the 1930s returned some mining tools identified as those used by Cornish miners. The importance of this find was the fact that many British pirates had often sailed from the coast of Cornwall, where it was easy for them to hide treasures among the Cornish sheltered creeks and hidden anchorages. It is possible, of course, that pirates built the pit. “Mahonne” is a French word that describes the low-lying boats used by Mediterranean pirates in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Mahone Bay might have been named after the presence of such pirates along its coasts.

There is a theory that Oak Island could have been used by pirates as a treasure bank. Similar shafts have been found in Haiti where heart shaped stones similar to the ones found by the Money Pit have also been found.

However, historian Mendel Peterson, ex-chairman of the Department of Armed Forces History at the Smythsonian museum believes that the engineering of the money pit is too sophisticated to have been built by pirates. But if not pirates, who built the money pit?

Henry Sinclair

Frederick J. Pohl (Atlantic Crossings Before Columbus) believes that the knights Templar may have had something to do with Oak Island. His theory may appear slightly far-fetched at first, but the evidence does suggest there could be an element of truth to it.

In line with William Thompson’s History of Orkney, Pohl claims that Henry Sinclair took a voyage to Nova Scotia in 1398. Sinclair was the Lord of Roslin, Earl of Orkney and distant descendant of Hugh de Payen, the first Master of the Knights Templar. His father, William of St Clair, built the famous Rosslyn chapel. Direct transatlantic voyages such as the one undertaken by Columbus in 1492 may not have been possible in the twelfth and thirteenth century. However, there are several references to transatlantic voyages in medieval literature. The Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis tells of the voyage taken by the Irish monk, Saint Brendan and eighteen other monks from Ireland through to the Shetland Islands eventually reaching Iceland, where the story describes volcanoes and whales (which would not have been known to a fifth-century monk such as Brendan, unless he did of course visit Iceland). In The Brendan Voyage: A Leather Boat Tracks the Discovery of America by the Irish Sailor Saints, Tim Severin argues that it is possible to make the crossing from Iceland to North America in a leather-clad boat such as the one described in the Navigatio. He calculates that the crossing would have taken approximately two full days in open sea.

According to legend, Henry Sinclair undertook the voyage with the help of two Venetian navigators, Nicolò and Antonio Zeno. The voyage is well documented in letters that Nicolò sent home to Venice. These letters and a map were first published by one of their descendants in 1558, but historians have discarded these letters as a hoax. According to Venetian court documents, Nicolò was undergoing trial for embezzlement at the time that the letters claim he was in Scotland with the Sinclairs. Whether a hoax or not, the Zeno Narrative provided a very detailed map of Newfoundland, even too detailed for a hoax generated in 1558. Some argue that the Zeno map simply reproduced a much older map that the Sinclairs had brought back with them from Jerusalem.

Irrespective of whether Henry Sinclair did take the voyage or not, there are plenty of artifacts that prove that medieval travelers did land on the coasts on Northern America. Among the 500 Passamaquoddy petroglyphs found in Machia’s Point (Maine), archaeologists have found the picture of a cross next to a boat. Some argue that the picture stood for the arrival of the French missionaries in the 1600s, however, Andrew Sinclair argues that the picture is further proof his ancestors had landed in North America.

Finally, the carving of a knight in medieval armor was found on a glacial boulder in the town of Westford in Massachusetts. In 1954, Frank Glynn, an amateur archaeologist, forwarded a rubbing of the stone on paper to Professor Lethbridge of Cambridge University. The Professor research the figure’s coat of arms in Scotland and Wales and concluded that the buckle on the coat of arms could be original of the outer isaldns of Scotland and, after consulting early Oarkney buckles and medals, the Professor concluded that the buckle depicted in the Wastford stone could have been the arms of some maternal relation to the Sinclairs.

Secret scrolls buried beneath the Temple of Solomon

Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas argue that before the Temple of Jerusalem was burnt by the Romans in 70AD, some secret scrolls had been buried underneath it. The Knights Templar had found some scrolls beneath the ruins of the Temple, hundreds of years later that claimed Phoenicians had travelled to an unknown continent by following a star called “La Merika.” They conclude that the Templars must have followed the same route to come to America. I would take this with a pinch of salt, since Knight and Lomas actually claim that the image on the Turin Shroud is not Jesus, but Jacques de Molay, the last Master of the Temple.

We may never know whether Oak Island will finally reveal its secret treasure. Carbon dating suggests that the wood found within the shaft dates back to the 16^th century. This would fit the pirate theory, but would exclude the theory that the shaft was actually dug by Henry Sinclair’s men at the end of the fourteenth century.

Whatever the answer, it remains clear that the shores of Nova Scotia have known European travelers well before Columbus landed in San Salvador. The Micmac word for Nova Scotia was Acadie, which explorers referred to erroneously as “Arcadia.” By coincidence, the famous painting by Nicolas Poussin et in Arcadia ego which has been associated to the secret of Rennes le Chateaux, could have referred to America and to the fact that the Templar treasure is in fact in the New World.

Tags: America, Arcadia, Crusades, Freemasonry, Freemasons, Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, medieval history, Nova Scotia, Oak Island, Scotland, templars, Treasure

Posted in hitoric mysteries, Jacques de Molay, medieval history, mysteries, templars, Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

et in Arcadia ego

Jul 28th, 2010 by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett

The first time I came across this sentence in Latin, I thought the verb was missing… Little did I know that Latin makes an exception for epitaphs like this one: the verb is not required, especially if we’re emphasizing the subject, “ego”. Therefore, et in Arcadia ego translates into “I am in Arcadia”.

A lot has been written about this epitaph over the past four hundred years. Art historians ascribe it to Virgil; investigative journalists believe it holds a secret code. The phrase first appeared in a 1618 painting by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Guercino) portraying two Arcadian shepherds staring at a skull which is resting on a broken column. On the side of the column, Guercino wrote: et in Arcadia ego.

The Greek and Roman Arcadia

Arcadia was a mountainous region of Greece populated by herdsmen and shepherds. Their music inspired Greek poets who saw in these shepherds the ideal man, untouched by the outside world (much like Rousseau’s beau sauvage). The setting was “bucolic” from the Greek bukolos – herdsman. In the third century BC, Theocritus created a new form of poetry based on imaginary exchanges between shepherds known as idylls. In the first century BC, Virgil wrote ten poems known as the Eclogues, which were set in Arcadia. Incidentally, it was the Eclogues that made Virgil’s reputation in the Middle Ages. Eusebius of Caesarea interpreted Virgil’s description of the birth of a child as the start of a Golden Age in the fourth Eclogue as a prophecy about the birth of Christ.

Arcadia in XVI century art

The pastoral theme became very popular in the seventeenth century. Guercino’s painting introduces the theme of mortality to the perfect world of Arcadia. The skull stares at the shepherds and the inscription beneath it (supposing they can read it) reminds them that everything in nature has to contend with death.

Poussin’s Les bergers d’Arcadie

In 1647, Nicolas Poussin used the same epitaph in his painting Les bergers d’Arcadie. Four shepherds gather round a tomb on which is inscribed et in Arcadia ego. Erwin Panofsky has written at length on the meaning of this sentence and he concludes that the correct translation is “I too was born in Arcadia.”

Rennes-le-Château

Rennes-le-Château is a small village in South West France. In 1781, the last of the Negres d’Albes, the family who owned the castle in the village, bequeath a secret to her confessor, Abbé Antoine Bigou, and handed him some documents. Disturbed by what he had learnt, the Abbé hid the documents in the cavity of a pillar in the Church of St. Magdalene in the village. He also had a large stone slab placed on the Negres d’Albes’ tomb with several inscriptions, among which featured et in Arcadia ego.

In 1891, the Abbé in Rennes, Berenger Saunière, discovered the hidden documents while doing restoration work in the church of St. Magdalene. Saunière brought the documents to Paris so that they could be examined by an expert paleographer. According to Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln (The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) Saunière visited the Louvre to see Poussin’s Les bergers d’Arcadie. They also suggest that the inscription et in Arcadia ego could be a code. For example, the anagram I tego arcane dei reads: “In it I hold the secrets of god.” Was Poussin suggesting that the Grail is somewhere in France?

Templar Treasure

I had forgotten about Baigent and Leigh’s far-fetched theories, when I came across an interesting fact. In 1524, Giovanni Verrazano sailed to Nova Scotia. In his maps, he called this region Arcadia. As Steven Sora points out, the French name for Nova Scotia is L’Acadie, which was taken from the native Indian word for “fertile land.” It is possible that Templar ships that sailed from France on the eve of the Templar extermination by Philip IV may have reached the new world years before Columbus did. Medieval hagiography has numerous accounts of voyages made by Scottish monks to evangelise new worlds. It is therefore very possible that the Templars may have got to Nova Scotia.

If so, could the Arcadia mentioned in Poussin’s painting be the American Acadie?

Tags: Arcadia, Cathars, Grail, Guercino, History, Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Poussin, Rennes-le-chateau, templars, Virgil