October 6, 2021 • 45 mins
He’s connected with everything from petty crime to mysticism to claims of nearly eternal life to one of the most famous deceptions in all of history. Cagliostro's life is veiled in the mythology he created for himself, but what remains when you peel back the mythos?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracey V. Wilson. So dray Z,
I think the name Caliostro kind of automatically comes with
(00:21):
all kinds of just instant connotations and imagery when you
say it. Um. He is connected to everything from petty
crime to mysticism, to claims of nearly eternal life to
one of the most famous crimes in all of history.
And one of my favorite things in researching this was
actually the way that Britannica defines Caliostro, and that's what
(00:43):
the subheader of Italian charlatan um. I love those sort
of qualifiers, like one of the other episodes that we're
recording today, which you know, who knows what order these
are actually going to come up in. But when I
was looking for artwork, there are lots of people with
the same name, and so some of them had the
qualifier in parentheses murderer. And here's the thing, if you
(01:06):
look at any number of different sources, you'll get a
different qualifier like that, because everybody has a different point
of view about him. So I wanted to approach his
story in a way that kind of pears down some
of the gauze, much of which he hung himself, uh,
and just looks at his biography. But even so so
it gets quite long, despite the fact that there's a
(01:27):
lot of his biography we don't know, and it still
feels like I left so much out. This is a
person who is very busy and involved with a lot
of people. So if you have a faive Kaliostro story
and it did not make it in, I am sorry.
There's just so much. A lot of it is very
fun and fantastical. That just means there's more fun stuff
(01:47):
for you to read out in the world. I also
do want to make sure that we give a heads
up here that this episode contains discussion of sexual coercion
and sex trafficking. And with that warning out of the way,
the story of this man who became really a legend.
I mean, there are people who know his name who
don't really know who he was. But he started with
a pretty meager beginning, so let's jump right in there. Yeah,
(02:09):
he was born Giuseppe Balsamo on June's second, seventeen forty
three and Palermo Sicily. Sometimes you'll see other dates in
early June cited depending on the source, and a note
on that name. He's written about as both Giuseppa and
as the Anglicized version of that name, which is Joseph,
(02:30):
and all of that was before he took the name
that became way more famous. So for the first part
of his life, before he takes on that assumed name,
we're going to go with Giuseppa, and then once he
starts calling himself Cagliostro, will will transition over to that name.
And while he eventually came to be known as a
count sort of, we'll talk about that. His family in
(02:53):
Palermo was extremely poor. His father was Peter Balsamo and
his mother was Felicia Braconniere. Peter Balsamo was a merchant,
but he also was not around for much of his
son's life. He died when Giuseppa was still just a baby,
and then his mother's uncle's Antonio and Matteo Braconniere, took
care of him and kind of were in charge of
(03:15):
raising him. He was enrolled in seminary school in Palermo.
That didn't work out fabulously. He kept running away, So
we should note that the earliest years of his life,
including the place of his birth, those were shrouded in
mystery even during his own lifetime because he deliberately shrouded
all of that. He published an account of his life
(03:36):
in which he said that he wasn't sure where he
had been born. This led to rumors and beliefs among
his followers that he was really the child of a royal,
or a mystic or some other important figure. And it
wasn't until he got into legal trouble later on in
his life there was a concerted effort to track down
and document the particulars of his story. I mean, this
(03:59):
is not unusual for folks who you know, came from
meager beginnings but then became notorious later on. Yeah, although
his um his possible beginnings that get introduced to get
wilder and wilder as you go. But according to a
biography that was originally written in sevente after his brief
(04:20):
time in seminary school, he was sent next at the
age of thirteen, to live in a monastic community and
Calton under the care of a monk there, and it's
here where the young Balsamo is said to have first
been exposed to lessons in chemistry and medicine through the apothecary.
There that was a man that's usually referenced as Father Albert,
(04:41):
and working alongside Father Albert just sap I learned about
things like mercury and sulfur, and how to manipulate salts,
and about various mystical and religious texts that referenced alchemy.
According to the same biography, though quote, he did not
continue long in this asylum. During his stay, however, he
exhibited so many new symptoms of a vicious character that
(05:05):
the religious were often under the necessity of chastising him.
Some of his recorded infractions were things like telling his
own stories instead of reading from the text when he
was asked to read aloud for the community during meals.
He would substitute names when he did read from the text,
using the names of well known sex workers instead of
(05:27):
the names that were actually there on the page. Soon
he left the community and was back in Palermo. Yeah,
sometimes those substitutions were putting those names in in lieu
of saints names when he was doing like biblical study reading.
So you could see where this would be a problem.
Not a popular move among the monks. No, after his time,
(05:49):
you know, having been in a religious setting with few temptations,
it seems like he went in completely the opposite direction
as a team. Once he got back to his hometown,
he got in fights, he stole money, even from his uncles.
You'll see some records to say he mugged one of
his uncles. He started drawing, and he was apparently pretty
good at that, but uh he used that skill instead
(06:12):
of making art to forge theater tickets and then entire documents.
As his skills got better and better, and over time,
young Giuseppe became well known to the authorities because he
just loved to stir up trouble and get into altercations.
Often he would get into altercations with the men who
came to arrest him. He's also said to have helped
(06:33):
other arrested men escape authorities. And he ran a scheme
where he feigned to be running love notes back and
forth between two young people, and he would then add
requests for money or gifts from the young lady involved
in her letters to the young man, who is sometimes
reported as a cousin of Giuseppe's, and then uh he
(06:54):
would pocket any extra goods that he was given to
take to her by her paramore. So he was just
kind of running this nice little scheme of like what
will someone in love give me as a gift intended
for his actual beloved. This is but a sampling, though,
of his rap sheet of petty crimes. And he eventually
became the leader of a street gang that routinely just
(07:16):
robbed people, and rumors went around town that he had
stabbed a man. Sometimes that is reported as he stabbed
a priest to death, but everyone was too afraid of
him to really question the situation. Even though he was
arrested a lot, he was released pretty soon afterward. All
the time, there was rarely enough evidence to keep him
(07:36):
locked up, or one of his relatives would intervene and
pay whatever fine or bail was involved. But then he
fleeced a silversmith of sixties silver pieces, and that man
was Vincenzo Morano. While Samo had told Morano that he
knew of a treasure that had been buried at Mount Pellegrino,
(07:56):
he had come to know this information, he said, you
an ancient document, And already as a teenager, Jusippa had
a reputation for having a connection to other worldly things
and possibly even for sorcery. He made amulets. Uh. He
also claimed to have visions, often through dreams, and he
not only told Vincenzo Morano that he had seen impressive
(08:19):
treasures buried at Mount Pellegrino in his dream about it,
but that he had also seen a treasure demon guarding it,
and that only he knew how to defeat it. But
he also needed money to buy supplies to do the
magic that would enable them to get the treasure from
that demon protector, and those supplies were going to cost
(08:41):
sixty silver pieces. As a note, if you look up
the same story or if you've heard it before, it's
sometimes relayed with Morano being a goldsmith and the cost
of supplies at sixty gold pieces. I saw so much
of both that I just went with the one I
saw more of. So when Morano and Giseppa Balsamo went
(09:03):
to get this treasure, Balsamo had a gang of his
friends waiting. They were dressed as demons, and they attacked
and beat the silver smith. When the assault was over
and Morano was able to get up, all of them,
including Balsamo, had vanished. So initially the silver smith was
worried for his young guide, and then he heard that
Balsamo had left town, he realized he had been swindled. Yeah,
(09:28):
at that point, Balsamo was not going back because he
knew that the silversmith, who was not a small or
gentle man necessarily was really going to have his hide.
So after leaving Cecily, Giuseppe began a life of travel.
As far as we know, there's actually little to no documentation,
(09:50):
so we only have his word for it, or in
some cases there are additional um accounts and on occasion
some some actual written record, but relying initially on the
money that he had made through his deception of Morano,
he reported visiting Greece, Persia, Egypt, and Arabia, as well
as other locations. And that's also when he told people
(10:12):
that he really studied deeply the world of alchemy. His
first stop was in Messina, and that makes a lot
of sense because Palermo is on the western half of
the island of Sicily, and then Messina is over on
the far eastern tip of the island, right where Sicily
and the boot of Italy almost kiss, so to get
off the island would have been best to go that way.
(10:35):
This was also a large port, so from Messina he
could get almost anywhere that he might think of. And
in Messina, Giuseppe said that he met a man named Altotas,
who was either Greek or Spanish, he wasn't certain, and
who he claimed to be a chemist or an alchemist. Altotas,
according to kelly Ostro, also had several ancient Arabic manuscripts
(10:57):
with him, and he knew a lot of magic that
kelly Stro was very eager to learn from him. Of course,
he wasn't going with Caliostro yet. Uh. There is the
possibility that this character of Altotas was actually a priest
that Giuseppe was already traveling with, who was named Father Atansio.
Because when Giuseppe fled Palermo, two of his cohorts in
(11:17):
that theft of Vincenzo Morano's money fled with him. One
of those was a priest and one was a valet.
And in his descriptions of his relationship with Alttas, he
claimed that he studied botany, physics, various foreign languages, and
quote all the wonders of Egypt. Uh. That is all
according to that late eighteenth century biography we referenced earlier
(11:40):
from Messina, Giuseppa and Altota sailed together to Alexandria, Egypt,
and the two of them started performing what sounds like
street magic. They did what was called operations in chemistry,
and they made money doing it quite a bit by
Calioster's account, but their travels during this time are still
pretty hard to track. It was pretty common for Sicilians
(12:03):
to visit Egypt at this point. We don't know if
he actually went there at all, but we do have
fixed information on where Giuseppe was in seventeen sixty five,
and we're going to talk about that and more of
his adventures after a quick sponsor break. We mentioned before
(12:28):
the break that we don't know for certain that Giuseppe
Bosama went to all of the places that he claimed,
but we do know that he was on the island
of Malta starting in seventeen sixty five. Alttas that alchemist
that he claimed to be traveling with uh He said
that he died shortly after they arrived there, and he
was specifically in the city of Medina working for the
(12:50):
Knights Hospital or you'll see that as the Order of
Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. This
was a military and clerical order that combined both combat
and medical hair and by the time Giuseppe started working
in a service job for the organization, the primary focus
was on serving as sort of a way point for
travelers to Jerusalem, offering care and food and lodging his
(13:12):
need in This was a very wealthy charity by the
time that Giuseppe landed on Malta, and it also had
an alchemy lab, and that seems to have kept him
happy for at least a little while. He mixed medicines
using some of the skills he had acquired in his
religious schooling days, and he also searched for the Philosopher's stone.
(13:33):
He was not the only one. They're doing this, He
was helping other workers of alchemy do the same thing.
And he actually worked there for two years and was
well liked enough to have glowing recommendation letters when he
chose to move on in seventeen sixty seven. When he left,
it was to go to Italy. He passed through a
few cities before making his way to Rome and hunting
(13:55):
for work there, showing his recommendation letters to as many
high ranking church official as he could until he found
somebody who needed his skills, and that man was Cardinal Orsini.
But this job wasn't particularly thrilling, It just involves some
light secretarial work. So ga Seppa picked up a side
hustle as well, selling fake potions to tourists claiming that
(14:18):
they were from Egypt. He also made money selling drawings,
which were first printed on copper plates and then inked
by hand. And it seems that while he was in room,
Balsamo had started to shift his identity to suit various situations.
So sometimes he would appear to be tied to the
Catholic Church, like in full robes, and other times he
(14:41):
represented himself as like a secular man, just like a merchant.
And he also fell back into a pattern of getting
in trouble with the law. He was held in jail
for several days, for example, after getting into a fight
with a waiter. But the more important thing that happened
to him in Rome was that he met a girl
named Lorenz Feliciani, and we say girl pretty pointedly here.
(15:03):
She was only fourteen when they met, and Giuseppa was
twenty five. She's described as a blonde, blue eyed beauty,
and Giuseppa was completely smitten with her to be clear,
though this age difference was recognized as significance. Lorenzo's parents
were initially very reluctance to approved the two of them
(15:24):
marrying because their daughter was so young, but because Giuseppa
was so well connected, two men high up in the
church and so well respected, despite the fact that he
still seemed to have some connections to his friends from
his petty crime days back in Palermo. The felicianis ultimately
caved on this whole matter, and initially Giuseppa and Lorenzo
(15:46):
lived with her family, but that caused all kinds of tension.
The conservative and very devout flies didn't like the way
Giseppa behaved, including influencing their daughter to be less pious.
Giuseppe fel like his new in laws cramped his style
and we're just too judgmental, and eventually there was a
huge fight that ended with the newlyweds moving out. Let's
(16:08):
put the two of them in a tight spot financially,
and Gaseppa once again fell back on illegal methods of
making a living. He became friends with a man named
Agliata who claimed to be a Prussian marquis and a colonel,
among other things, and he taught him how to advance
his forgery skills. Agliata had forged his own military commission papers.
(16:33):
He was not a colonel at all, but his document
forgeries were good enough that nobody questioned them, and he
trained Gieseppa to do the same. Balsamo had also learned
how to forge bank documents from Agliata, basically enable him
to finance his life through scammed money whenever he wanted
and just write your own money, no problem. It turned out, though,
(16:54):
that sharing all of these tricks of the trade on
the part of Agliata was not merely some magnanium kindness
to an up and comer. Agliata found Lorenza beautiful and desirable,
and he made it clear to Giuseppa that he would
like to have sex with his wife. It is not
clear whether Giuseppa Balsamo had always intended to use Lorenza
(17:16):
and what amounts to sex trafficking, but it does seem
that way. Before this, before his friendship with Agliata, he
had certainly encouraged her to dress more provocatively, and then,
by his own description, had taught her to be more
alluring to men. This is one of the issues that
her family really had with him. It even shifted her identity,
(17:39):
having her go by the name Sara Fina rather than Lorenza.
And so when Agliata made this overture to Giuseppe, Balsama
was not scandalized by it in the least. He seemed
to see it as a commercial transaction, and he coerced
Lorenza to acquiesce. Please remember she was still a young teenager,
she had still grown up in a very religious family,
(18:01):
and while he wasn't scandalized, she was very, very concerned
about her immortal soul and the moral consequences of adultery.
According to that eighteenth century account of things, Balsamo told
his wife quote that adultery is no crime in a
woman who commits it on account of her interests, and
not simply through affection to another man. For a while,
(18:24):
the Balsamo's continued to travel with Agliata, although two outward
appearances it probably seemed like Sarafina was Agliata's wife. They
were traveling together as a couple, and Gieseppa and some
of his friends were traveling in a separate carriage, and
the course of this arrangement, Gieseppa profited because both he
(18:44):
and Sarafina were receiving money and gifts from Agliata. This
entire group profited as well because Giuseppa and Agliata teamed up.
They were forging various letters to scam wealthy families out
of money along the way. But while they were in Bergamo,
the group and their illicit business came to the attention
(19:05):
of the authorities. It is possible that they were betrayed
from within the group. Historian Ian Mcalman writes this incident
as though one of Giuseppa's other traveling companions turned his
friend in out of jealousy, but regardless of how the
police learned about them. Sarafina or Lorenza and Giuseppa were arrested.
Agliotta escaped, taking all of their money with him. The
(19:29):
worst and most incriminating documents that they had on them
were stuffed down Lorenzo's bodice. She was able to destroy
them before they could be used against her husband. The
two ended up banished from Bergamo, but Giuseppa believed that
he would have been killed if those papers had been seized.
After this incident, Giuseppa and his wife took on the
guise of religious pilgrims so they could go to the
(19:51):
cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. This is the
very a location of saints. And then later in his
life Caliostro would claim that he had truly wished to
atone for his life in undertaking this journey, but even
if that were true, he veered off course pretty quickly.
They did travel to Spain, but along the way, Jeseppa
(20:12):
leaned on all of his old tricks to bring in money,
including once again coercing his wife into sex work. When
they reached Barcelona, which was about five hundred sixty miles
away from their original target destination, their money ran out. Lorenza,
again at her husband's urging, gave a false confession to
(20:33):
a priest. They're saying that they were from high ranking
families of Rome, but had been cast out because they
had married without their family's consent, and so they were
left penniless, and this was of course a scheme to
get the church to give the money, and it worked,
although this led to another deception, as the minister wished
to see their marriage certificate, which they did not have,
(20:55):
and so they went to a magistrate for help procuring
that document that registrate was very interested in Lorenza, and
the cycle of using her beauty to gain financial favor
from other men began again. The Balsamo's moved from one
perilous deception to another, this way with Geseppa duping people
in one place as long as he could until he
(21:16):
was found out or things got complicated. In some cases
these men would fall in love with his wife and
he would be like, this has gone too far, we
have to leave. So then he would pick up and
run and start to cycle all over again somewhere else.
We know that he was in London in seventeen seventies six,
and at that point he had adopted the title of
counts and the name of Kliostro. That name was actually
(21:39):
said to have come from another member of the family,
an aunt, who had married a Kliostro, and he built
his wife as the Countess Serafina Felicianikliostro told people that
he was a miracle worker and that he had curative powers.
He was especially fond of a red powder that he
used as a prop and he called it materia prima
(22:02):
in alchemical terms, prima materia, which he was obviously referencing
is the material from which all other substances are created,
including the Philosopher's stone. It is the essence of the ether,
and Caliostro said that he could use it to turn
base metals into gold. He also carried with him a
liquid that he called Egyptian wine, and he claimed that
(22:23):
it could extend a person's life. While Caliostro was in London,
he became a Freemason. There's a significant aspect of Caliostro's
entry into freemasonry that's worth considering. Being a Freemason was
expressly forbidden in the Catholic Church starting in seventeen thirty eight,
and Caliostro had grown up in deeply Catholic Sicily, so
(22:45):
although he had pretty clearly been very morally flexible up
to this point, this is a move that would have
very clearly communicated his disregard for the Church. But it
also became pretty obvious pretty quickly that he did really
view freemasonry with any reverence either. While he was in England,
he claimed that he had come into the possession of
(23:07):
a book by a man named Koston sometimes see other
names that are similar to that, which he would later
say was a sacred manuscript of Lost Knowledge that inspired
the Egyptian Right. The Egyptian Right was essentially a revision
of existing Freemasonry, spearheaded by this foulk count who wanted
to start his own branch of the Order. We will
(23:28):
talk more about that effort after we take a quick
break to hear from our sponsors. Magic historian and magician
Henry Ridgley Evans wrote an article in three titled Caliostro,
(23:50):
a Study in Charlatanism, in which he describes the count's
alteration of Freemasonry. Quote as Grand Master of the Egyptian Right,
he leapt once into fame. His swindling operations were now
conducted on a gigantic scale. He had the entree into
the best society. According to him, Freemasonry was founded by
(24:11):
Enoch and Elias. It was open to both sexes. Its
present form, especially with regard to the exclusion of women,
is a corruption. The true form was preserved only by
the Grand Kafta or high priest of the egypt. Up
until Cagliostro's claims about the order's origins, Freemasonry was believed
(24:32):
by most of its members, who have been rooted in
the Stonemason's Guilds of the Middle Ages. The exact origins
aren't really documented, but the oldest known written reference to
the order is from and that uncertainty about the earliest
days of the organization left the door wide open for
Count Alessandro de Cagliostro to basically write his own version
(24:55):
of the story and sell it as the truth. When
he started his own lodges, the fees that initiates paid
into those lodges kept him with a steady income, and
his version of Freemasonry, of course, incorporated his own prior interests.
He promised initiates into his right that he would help
them obtain quote physical and moral regeneration, and he included,
(25:18):
of course, alchemy in the mix. He also started incorporating
seances into the meetings, usually led by a young girl
or boy is the medium, with the understanding that their
innocence would make them more able to communicate with other realms.
No longer hustling on the streets or scheming deceptions around
entrapping men with his wife's beauty, Kliostro started weaving the
(25:41):
stories that could make his true biography really difficult to unravel.
For years. For example, he told people that he was
ancient and that he had been alive and present during
biblical events, including the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. His stories
were unbelievable, but people did believe them, and he gained
a very devoted following. He continued to embellish far beyond that,
(26:06):
and his dedicated followers started to dream up their own
additions to the story, which he did not ever deny.
As his legend grew, there were whispers that he could
time travel, that he was a spy, and even that
he was a demigod. For the next nearly two decades,
he made his living trading on this new reputation and
(26:27):
started touring Europe and beyond, visiting Masonic lodges and forming
new ones, including an all women lodge in Holland. In
most places he was received with a lot of interests
in honor, but it's worth noting that one standout who
was not taken in with him was Katherine the Second
of Russia. When he visited St. Petersburg, Catherine the Great
(26:49):
declared him to be a charlatan and ordered him out
of the country. During kalliostro seances, he would do the
types of things that we've discussed on the show before
in our episod Oodes on Madame Blovotsky and more recently
Charles Colchester, things like producing papers with names of the
people present already written on them. Sometimes they were sealed
when he received them. He would have perhaps been arrested
(27:12):
for jugglery had he been in the US eighty years later.
And I did see a couple of older write ups
about him that called him a juggler, which I loved.
In a couple of instances, though, those young girls that
he used as the clairvoyance in his seances kind of
panicked and confessed that the whole thing was staged after
the fact. And then in one instance, when he appeared
before a group of Polish nobles dressed as the ancient
(27:34):
Egyptian high priest that he claimed had given him the
true knowledge of freemasonry, he was soon recognized as himself,
and he extinguished the rooms candles in a panic, only
to appear as good old Kliostro when they were re lit,
claiming no knowledge of the situation that had just played out.
And Strasbourg. Kliostro had met and become friends with Cardinal
(27:56):
de Rohan so much so that he was invited to
live with the cardinal. One of the nobles who visited
the cardinal's palace during this time wrote of this situation quote,
no one can ever form the faintest idea of the
fervor with which everybody pursued Cagliostro. He was surrounded, besieged,
(28:17):
everyone trying to win a glance or a word. A
dozen ladies of rank and two actresses had followed him
in order to continue their treatment. If I had not
seen it, I should never have imagined that a prince
of the Roman Church, a man in other respects intelligent
and honorable, could so far let himself be imposed upon
(28:38):
as to renounce his dignity, his free will, at the
bidding of a sharper. Yes, so while a lot of
people believed in him, there were always people who were
like shady. By the time Caliostro moved on from Strasbourg,
he had a veritable parade to see him out, and
he next moved on to Leon, France, where he set
up new Masonic lodges again and according to his rules,
(29:01):
and he told the heads of other lodges that if
they wished to visit him, they had to burn all
of their old traditional Masonic materials. When he moved on
to Paris, in his reputation had preceded him, and he
was received as though he were a marvel beyond all marbles.
He stayed in a hotel that the Cardinal de Rohan
had secured, and there were rumors that he was creating
(29:24):
gold and diamonds there. Late into the night, of course,
Cagliostro stoked these fires of interest and mystery. He claimed
that he held the secret of universal medicine, meaning that
he had the knowledge and skill to cure just about anything,
and through which he intended to convey bodily health to
all of his followers. He was also offering spiritual health
(29:48):
through his Egyptian right, and wealth through his alchemical use
of the Philosopher's Stone. He was said to have hosted
a Sayance dinner in which six guests each asked for
a spirit to join them at the table. Caliostro used
his magic to produce all of the requested deceased attendees.
Those included the Duc de Choisoe Voltaire d'Alembert, de de Roux,
(30:12):
the Abbe de Voisenon, and Montesquiume Unfortunately, when these ghost
guests spoke, only gibberish came out. But the story of
this astonishing and spectacular event spread like wildfire through Parisian society.
This actually irritated the Queen Marie Antoinette, because she believed
that Caliostro was a charlatan. And though many of the
(30:35):
ladies of the court wished to have a series of
lectures from Caliostro because they did not think he was
a charlatan. Uh they had set this up and then
they blabbed, and once word got out, that series of
lectures came to an abrupt end. But Paris loved Caliostro,
and soon there were trinkets and souvenirs available that featured
his face on them. He had a lot of wealthy
(30:57):
followers who were willing to attend his answ is. One
such event was described in the autobiography of the Count
de bouge Neeux quote as a sorcerer. He had a
cabalistic apparatus on the table with a black cloth on
which were embroidered in red the mysterious signs of the
highest degree of the Rosicrucians. There stood the emblems little
(31:20):
Egyptian figures old vials filled with lustral waters in a
crucifix very like though not the same as the Christians cross.
And there too Cagliostro placed a glass globe filled with
clarified water. Before the globe he used to place a
kneeling sear, that is to say, a young woman who
(31:40):
by supernatural powers, should behold the scenes which are believed
to take place in the water within the magic globe.
The sear became convulsed. She ground her teeth and exhibited
every sign of nervous excitement. At last she saw and
began to speak what was taking place that a moment.
Hundreds of miles from Paris, in Vienna, or St. Petersburg
(32:04):
in Austria, or Pekin. It would be hard to believe
that such scenes could have taken place in France at
the end of the eighteenth century, yet they aroused great
interest among people of importance in the court and the town.
And Caliostro is one of the many people who have
come up on the show who are part of the
(32:24):
affair of the Diamond Necklace. And in Caliostro's case, it
was because he was close friends with the Cardinal de Rohan.
Here's the brief version of that whole situation in case
you need a refresher. The jeweler Boehmer Embassage had created
an extravagant necklace for King Louis to purchase for his mistress,
Madame Duberry, but Louis the fifteenth died before that transaction
(32:47):
was completed. The jeweler then tried to sell this necklace
to the next monarch, Louis and his queen, Marie Antoinette,
but they were not interested. The Countess de la Motte
decided to cocta scheme to get the necklace for herself,
and she suggested to the Cardinal de Rohan, who was
on the ounce with Marie Antoinette, that he could help
(33:09):
facilitate this purchase of the necklace for the queen. All
of this hinged on a lie that she told that
Marie Antoinette actually wanted this necklace but could not afford
it or be linked to its purchase during the time
when the country's money needed to be elsewhere. De la
Motte forged letters from the queen to Rohan and arranged
(33:32):
a meeting late at night in the Versailles gardens with
a stand in who claimed to be the Queen. The
Cardinal agreed to the plan based on all of this
and signed a contract with Boehmer and Bassage for the
purchase as a representative of Marie Antoinette. But then when
he was unable to secure the funds, the jewelers went
(33:53):
to the monarchs for the money that obviously uncovered the
whole scheme. The necklace had already been handed over to
the Countess de la Motte, who had broken it apart
and sold it, so because of his involvement, Cardinal de
Rohan was arrested after Countess de LaMotte implicated him, and
that meant that Caliostro was also on the hook. The
(34:15):
countess had told the authorities that Kliostro had been the
one to break up the necklace and to tell her
to sell the diamonds in London. Kliostro wrote his account
of his arrest quote, on the twenty of August, a Commissarie,
an exempt and eight policemen entered my home. The pillage
began in my presence. They compelled me to open my secretary. Elixirs,
(34:38):
bombs and precious liquors all became the prey of the
officers who came to arrest me. I begged the Commissari
to permit me to use my carriage. He refused. The
agent took me by the collar. He had pistols, the
stocks of which appeared from the pockets of his coat.
They hustled me into the street, and scandalous LYE dragged
(34:59):
me along the boulevard all the way to the Rue
Notre Dame du Nazareth. There a carriage appeared, which I
was permitted to enter to take the road to the
best deal. He and his wife Lorenzo, were both taken
into custody on August seventy five, and he stayed in
prison awaiting a hearing until January of seventy six. As
(35:21):
all the legal maschinations played out, Lorenza was found to
have had no involvement in this and was freed. The
cardinal was also revealed to have been foolish but an
innocent dupe, but Caliostro was still regarded with suspicion. There
was testimony that he had known of this deception, that
he wanted to break up the necklace so that he
(35:43):
might multiply the number of diamonds through alchemy and thereby
increase his wealth. But Caliostro had actually gotten to Paris
the day after the Cardinal had entered into this contract
with the jewelers. Because of that timing, and because he
was obviously an extremely confident man, Caliostro was pretty relaxed
(36:03):
on the witness stand. When he was asked who he was,
he simply replied, I am an illustrious traveler that made
all present laugh, according to witness accounts, and of course
he was let go. He was finally released on June one,
so you might think that he would want to put
this whole ugly business behind him. But Caliostro, after returning
(36:26):
to his home and reuniting with his wife dramatically and
in front of a huge gathering of friends and curious onlookers,
he immediately started legal proceedings against the governor of the
Bastille and the commissioner of Police. He wanted them to
answer for the seizure of his personal property. But before
those charges could get off the ground, King Louis the
(36:48):
sixteenth banished the alchemist from France entirely. There was an
offer for him to return to continue his legal case,
but klio Star thought it was a trap and refused.
He did, however, write a pamphlet predicting that the best
deal would fall and he published that from the safety
of London. Yeah, that was actually the first of a
(37:09):
few where he was basically just publishing pamphlets and sending
them over to France that were kind of a little
bit you know, barbed and clearly vendetta driven. Uh, London
did not quite offer Caliostro the same level of embrace
that he had enjoyed in France. He did certainly have
(37:30):
supporters there, but he also found that many english people
were a little more suspicious of his supernatural claims by
this point, and the Freemasons of London wanted nothing to
do with him or his Egyptian right. When he attended
a banquet at the Lodge of Antiquity in the city,
one of its members put on a performance that was
clearly meant to be a send up of Caliostro and
(37:51):
his magic, and the faux count left the hall among
jeers of ridicule from the members. So this performance consisted
of a song which was acted out and according to
notation published with an engraving that depicted the scene. The
song lyrics included these lines, this self dubbed counts. Some
few years since became a brother Mason, and in a
(38:13):
borrowed name for names like simple, numerous he bears and
proteus like in fifty forms, appears, I boast of balsam
every ill, to cure my pills and powders, all disease, remove,
renew your vigor and your health improve. This cutting part
the arch impostor acts, and thus the weak incredulous attracts.
(38:36):
But now his history is rendered clear, the errant, hypocrite
and quack appear. May all true mason's his plain tail
attend and satire's lash to fraud shall put an end
pretty great, probably not for Caliostro. But to make matters worse,
(38:57):
the high style in which he lived his life had
really put him into deep debt. He also, you know,
his health was not what it once had been, and
soon he ran from London to avoid debtors prison, And
he really hoped that he would regain his footing both
in finances and reputation elsewhere in Europe. But all of
these scandals that he had been embroiled in were starting
(39:19):
to catch up with him. He was forbidden, specifically from
practicing any of his alchemy or rights in Russia Spain,
Germany and Austria, and he was still banished from France.
He tried to establish a lodge in Italy, which was
very brazen giving the papal stance on freemasonry. That plan
did not pan out, and then he petitioned France to
(39:41):
let him return, But before anything came of that petition,
his life was abruptly interrupted. On December nine, Cagliostro was
arrested and imprisoned in the San Angelo, Italy. The Holy
Inquisition had seized his personal effects, particularly his documents regarding
Egyptian masonry, and in a turn that's often called a betrayal,
(40:05):
his wife Lorenza was the primary witness against him. She
revealed that his work in alchemy and the supernatural was
all trickery, and while he was discredited in that regard
from any sort of magic that would go against the
Church doctrine, he had used his tricks to deceive and steal.
I don't know if I can call that a betrayal.
(40:27):
I was going to talk about that, and behind the
scenes we can sure do that. Um yeah uh. And
there was no walking back the fact that he was
a freemason. He did attempt to claim that he was
trying to reform the order through its Egyptian roots in
order to come back to the doctrines of the Catholic Church.
It's kind of a desperate move, it sounds like. But
(40:48):
after that entire explanation was met with doubt. Understandably, he
tried once again to assert his connections to all manner
of underworld secrets, some of which he said could damage
the Church. He talked to the inquisitors for hours, constantly
trying to angle and shift the conversation to kind of
explain his way out of it and get things to
(41:10):
come around to his benefit. This was a fruitless effort, though.
He was found guilty of heresy, sorcery, and freemasonry and
sentenced to death. That sentence was commuted to life in
prison by Pope Pious the sixth His Egyptian manuscript was
deemed blasphemous and burned when Caliostro was imprisoned in the
(41:32):
Fortress of San Leo, which is a castle in Urbino, Italy.
He died there in August, as historian Henry Ridgley Evans
wrote about him in the early twentieth century quote and
so ended the career of Cagliostro one of the most
romantic of history. His condemnation as a sorcerer and freemason
(41:53):
has invested him with the halo of a religious martyr,
of which perhaps no one was less deserving. It is incidentally,
through the inquisition investigation that most of Kliostro's biographical details
were finally discovered, and the many embellishments that he had
created were stripped from this story. For the first time publicly,
(42:15):
in eighteen ten, the home in which Kaliostro had lived
was opened for the first time since he locked it
up for the last time. In all of the effects
within furniture and the allegedly magical items were auctioned off
by the French government. In the eighteen forties, Alexandra Duma,
who we've covered on a show before, wrote a two
(42:35):
volume fictionalized version of Kliostro's life titled Balsamo the Magician
or The Memoirs of a Physician. These are part of
a larger series of works by Duma, which were known
as the Marie Antoinette Romances, and they cover the period
of time in which she was Queen. Today, the perception
of Kliostro is kind of all over the map, fueled
(42:57):
by the inconsistencies and lack of evidence the true details
of his life, as well as the various mystical claims
that he made. While Geta described him as a Charlatan
and many people agree with that characterization, there are still
people who believe that he was truly a spiritual visionary
intend on merging the ideas of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism
(43:19):
all under one greater religious philosophy, whether or not he
ever believed his own hype or he was just always
fleecing the easily lad, It's one of those things that
will probably remain a history mystery forever. Do you have
some listener mail to take us out? Okay, this is
a fairly short email. It is from our listener, Didra,
who writes High Holly and Tracy. Catching up with recent podcasts,
(43:42):
and something occurred to me while listening to the Mildred
Fish Harnack episode. What exactly has meant when you say
someone joined the Nazi Party? My party affiliation was simply
a check of a box when I signed up to vote,
But this oft used phrase seems to imply more. She says,
please forgive me for asking you to do this work.
But the thought of searching for the phrase join the
Nazi Party online, I don't really want to see those
(44:04):
search results. Uh. And she also attached a picture of
her very pretty rescue kitty taken the day that we
brought her home as a reward for doing this. I
don't actually have to look this one up, and did
come up in my research. UM. For Mildred at least
and her husband, they had to basically sign a note
of intent that said like I am of you know,
(44:25):
my own free will, joining the Nazi Party, etcetera. That note,
I think Mildred's. I can't remember if it's Mildred's or
her husband's that have come out UM as part of
the documentation over the years to have existed. So it
was that it's more than just checking a box. It's
like you had to make the effort to write your
intent and sign your name to it. Which is why
(44:46):
UM people thought it was so damning. It wasn't as
simple as just saying like, yep, I'm part of that, UM,
that's all. It was easy peasy. But I do appreciate
cat pictures just the same, and her cat is one
of my favorite flavors. And I think Tracy's too all black.
Ya I love them. Uh so thanks. I hope that
cleared that up. I know that was a quick one,
(45:07):
but this was kind of a longish episode, so uh.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com.
You can also find us anywhere on social media as
Missed in History And if you haven't subscribed and you
feel like it's time that sounds grand, you can do
that on the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you
(45:32):
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracey V. Wilson. So dray Z,
I think the name Caliostro kind of automatically comes with
(00:21):
all kinds of just instant connotations and imagery when you
say it. Um. He is connected to everything from petty
crime to mysticism, to claims of nearly eternal life to
one of the most famous crimes in all of history.
And one of my favorite things in researching this was
actually the way that Britannica defines Caliostro, and that's what
(00:43):
the subheader of Italian charlatan um. I love those sort
of qualifiers, like one of the other episodes that we're
recording today, which you know, who knows what order these
are actually going to come up in. But when I
was looking for artwork, there are lots of people with
the same name, and so some of them had the
qualifier in parentheses murderer. And here's the thing, if you
(01:06):
look at any number of different sources, you'll get a
different qualifier like that, because everybody has a different point
of view about him. So I wanted to approach his
story in a way that kind of pears down some
of the gauze, much of which he hung himself, uh,
and just looks at his biography. But even so so
it gets quite long, despite the fact that there's a
(01:27):
lot of his biography we don't know, and it still
feels like I left so much out. This is a
person who is very busy and involved with a lot
of people. So if you have a faive Kaliostro story
and it did not make it in, I am sorry.
There's just so much. A lot of it is very
fun and fantastical. That just means there's more fun stuff
(01:47):
for you to read out in the world. I also
do want to make sure that we give a heads
up here that this episode contains discussion of sexual coercion
and sex trafficking. And with that warning out of the way,
the story of this man who became really a legend.
I mean, there are people who know his name who
don't really know who he was. But he started with
a pretty meager beginning, so let's jump right in there. Yeah,
(02:09):
he was born Giuseppe Balsamo on June's second, seventeen forty
three and Palermo Sicily. Sometimes you'll see other dates in
early June cited depending on the source, and a note
on that name. He's written about as both Giuseppa and
as the Anglicized version of that name, which is Joseph,
(02:30):
and all of that was before he took the name
that became way more famous. So for the first part
of his life, before he takes on that assumed name,
we're going to go with Giuseppa, and then once he
starts calling himself Cagliostro, will will transition over to that name.
And while he eventually came to be known as a
count sort of, we'll talk about that. His family in
(02:53):
Palermo was extremely poor. His father was Peter Balsamo and
his mother was Felicia Braconniere. Peter Balsamo was a merchant,
but he also was not around for much of his
son's life. He died when Giuseppa was still just a baby,
and then his mother's uncle's Antonio and Matteo Braconniere, took
care of him and kind of were in charge of
(03:15):
raising him. He was enrolled in seminary school in Palermo.
That didn't work out fabulously. He kept running away, So
we should note that the earliest years of his life,
including the place of his birth, those were shrouded in
mystery even during his own lifetime because he deliberately shrouded
all of that. He published an account of his life
(03:36):
in which he said that he wasn't sure where he
had been born. This led to rumors and beliefs among
his followers that he was really the child of a royal,
or a mystic or some other important figure. And it
wasn't until he got into legal trouble later on in
his life there was a concerted effort to track down
and document the particulars of his story. I mean, this
(03:59):
is not unusual for folks who you know, came from
meager beginnings but then became notorious later on. Yeah, although
his um his possible beginnings that get introduced to get
wilder and wilder as you go. But according to a
biography that was originally written in sevente after his brief
(04:20):
time in seminary school, he was sent next at the
age of thirteen, to live in a monastic community and
Calton under the care of a monk there, and it's
here where the young Balsamo is said to have first
been exposed to lessons in chemistry and medicine through the apothecary.
There that was a man that's usually referenced as Father Albert,
(04:41):
and working alongside Father Albert just sap I learned about
things like mercury and sulfur, and how to manipulate salts,
and about various mystical and religious texts that referenced alchemy.
According to the same biography, though quote, he did not
continue long in this asylum. During his stay, however, he
exhibited so many new symptoms of a vicious character that
(05:05):
the religious were often under the necessity of chastising him.
Some of his recorded infractions were things like telling his
own stories instead of reading from the text when he
was asked to read aloud for the community during meals.
He would substitute names when he did read from the text,
using the names of well known sex workers instead of
(05:27):
the names that were actually there on the page. Soon
he left the community and was back in Palermo. Yeah,
sometimes those substitutions were putting those names in in lieu
of saints names when he was doing like biblical study reading.
So you could see where this would be a problem.
Not a popular move among the monks. No, after his time,
(05:49):
you know, having been in a religious setting with few temptations,
it seems like he went in completely the opposite direction
as a team. Once he got back to his hometown,
he got in fights, he stole money, even from his uncles.
You'll see some records to say he mugged one of
his uncles. He started drawing, and he was apparently pretty
good at that, but uh he used that skill instead
(06:12):
of making art to forge theater tickets and then entire documents.
As his skills got better and better, and over time,
young Giuseppe became well known to the authorities because he
just loved to stir up trouble and get into altercations.
Often he would get into altercations with the men who
came to arrest him. He's also said to have helped
(06:33):
other arrested men escape authorities. And he ran a scheme
where he feigned to be running love notes back and
forth between two young people, and he would then add
requests for money or gifts from the young lady involved
in her letters to the young man, who is sometimes
reported as a cousin of Giuseppe's, and then uh he
(06:54):
would pocket any extra goods that he was given to
take to her by her paramore. So he was just
kind of running this nice little scheme of like what
will someone in love give me as a gift intended
for his actual beloved. This is but a sampling, though,
of his rap sheet of petty crimes. And he eventually
became the leader of a street gang that routinely just
(07:16):
robbed people, and rumors went around town that he had
stabbed a man. Sometimes that is reported as he stabbed
a priest to death, but everyone was too afraid of
him to really question the situation. Even though he was
arrested a lot, he was released pretty soon afterward. All
the time, there was rarely enough evidence to keep him
(07:36):
locked up, or one of his relatives would intervene and
pay whatever fine or bail was involved. But then he
fleeced a silversmith of sixties silver pieces, and that man
was Vincenzo Morano. While Samo had told Morano that he
knew of a treasure that had been buried at Mount Pellegrino,
(07:56):
he had come to know this information, he said, you
an ancient document, And already as a teenager, Jusippa had
a reputation for having a connection to other worldly things
and possibly even for sorcery. He made amulets. Uh. He
also claimed to have visions, often through dreams, and he
not only told Vincenzo Morano that he had seen impressive
(08:19):
treasures buried at Mount Pellegrino in his dream about it,
but that he had also seen a treasure demon guarding it,
and that only he knew how to defeat it. But
he also needed money to buy supplies to do the
magic that would enable them to get the treasure from
that demon protector, and those supplies were going to cost
(08:41):
sixty silver pieces. As a note, if you look up
the same story or if you've heard it before, it's
sometimes relayed with Morano being a goldsmith and the cost
of supplies at sixty gold pieces. I saw so much
of both that I just went with the one I
saw more of. So when Morano and Giseppa Balsamo went
(09:03):
to get this treasure, Balsamo had a gang of his
friends waiting. They were dressed as demons, and they attacked
and beat the silver smith. When the assault was over
and Morano was able to get up, all of them,
including Balsamo, had vanished. So initially the silver smith was
worried for his young guide, and then he heard that
Balsamo had left town, he realized he had been swindled. Yeah,
(09:28):
at that point, Balsamo was not going back because he
knew that the silversmith, who was not a small or
gentle man necessarily was really going to have his hide.
So after leaving Cecily, Giuseppe began a life of travel.
As far as we know, there's actually little to no documentation,
(09:50):
so we only have his word for it, or in
some cases there are additional um accounts and on occasion
some some actual written record, but relying initially on the
money that he had made through his deception of Morano,
he reported visiting Greece, Persia, Egypt, and Arabia, as well
as other locations. And that's also when he told people
(10:12):
that he really studied deeply the world of alchemy. His
first stop was in Messina, and that makes a lot
of sense because Palermo is on the western half of
the island of Sicily, and then Messina is over on
the far eastern tip of the island, right where Sicily
and the boot of Italy almost kiss, so to get
off the island would have been best to go that way.
(10:35):
This was also a large port, so from Messina he
could get almost anywhere that he might think of. And
in Messina, Giuseppe said that he met a man named Altotas,
who was either Greek or Spanish, he wasn't certain, and
who he claimed to be a chemist or an alchemist. Altotas,
according to kelly Ostro, also had several ancient Arabic manuscripts
(10:57):
with him, and he knew a lot of magic that
kelly Stro was very eager to learn from him. Of course,
he wasn't going with Caliostro yet. Uh. There is the
possibility that this character of Altotas was actually a priest
that Giuseppe was already traveling with, who was named Father Atansio.
Because when Giuseppe fled Palermo, two of his cohorts in
(11:17):
that theft of Vincenzo Morano's money fled with him. One
of those was a priest and one was a valet.
And in his descriptions of his relationship with Alttas, he
claimed that he studied botany, physics, various foreign languages, and
quote all the wonders of Egypt. Uh. That is all
according to that late eighteenth century biography we referenced earlier
(11:40):
from Messina, Giuseppa and Altota sailed together to Alexandria, Egypt,
and the two of them started performing what sounds like
street magic. They did what was called operations in chemistry,
and they made money doing it quite a bit by
Calioster's account, but their travels during this time are still
pretty hard to track. It was pretty common for Sicilians
(12:03):
to visit Egypt at this point. We don't know if
he actually went there at all, but we do have
fixed information on where Giuseppe was in seventeen sixty five,
and we're going to talk about that and more of
his adventures after a quick sponsor break. We mentioned before
(12:28):
the break that we don't know for certain that Giuseppe
Bosama went to all of the places that he claimed,
but we do know that he was on the island
of Malta starting in seventeen sixty five. Alttas that alchemist
that he claimed to be traveling with uh He said
that he died shortly after they arrived there, and he
was specifically in the city of Medina working for the
(12:50):
Knights Hospital or you'll see that as the Order of
Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. This
was a military and clerical order that combined both combat
and medical hair and by the time Giuseppe started working
in a service job for the organization, the primary focus
was on serving as sort of a way point for
travelers to Jerusalem, offering care and food and lodging his
(13:12):
need in This was a very wealthy charity by the
time that Giuseppe landed on Malta, and it also had
an alchemy lab, and that seems to have kept him
happy for at least a little while. He mixed medicines
using some of the skills he had acquired in his
religious schooling days, and he also searched for the Philosopher's stone.
(13:33):
He was not the only one. They're doing this, He
was helping other workers of alchemy do the same thing.
And he actually worked there for two years and was
well liked enough to have glowing recommendation letters when he
chose to move on in seventeen sixty seven. When he left,
it was to go to Italy. He passed through a
few cities before making his way to Rome and hunting
(13:55):
for work there, showing his recommendation letters to as many
high ranking church official as he could until he found
somebody who needed his skills, and that man was Cardinal Orsini.
But this job wasn't particularly thrilling, It just involves some
light secretarial work. So ga Seppa picked up a side
hustle as well, selling fake potions to tourists claiming that
(14:18):
they were from Egypt. He also made money selling drawings,
which were first printed on copper plates and then inked
by hand. And it seems that while he was in room,
Balsamo had started to shift his identity to suit various situations.
So sometimes he would appear to be tied to the
Catholic Church, like in full robes, and other times he
(14:41):
represented himself as like a secular man, just like a merchant.
And he also fell back into a pattern of getting
in trouble with the law. He was held in jail
for several days, for example, after getting into a fight
with a waiter. But the more important thing that happened
to him in Rome was that he met a girl
named Lorenz Feliciani, and we say girl pretty pointedly here.
(15:03):
She was only fourteen when they met, and Giuseppa was
twenty five. She's described as a blonde, blue eyed beauty,
and Giuseppa was completely smitten with her to be clear,
though this age difference was recognized as significance. Lorenzo's parents
were initially very reluctance to approved the two of them
(15:24):
marrying because their daughter was so young, but because Giuseppa
was so well connected, two men high up in the
church and so well respected, despite the fact that he
still seemed to have some connections to his friends from
his petty crime days back in Palermo. The felicianis ultimately
caved on this whole matter, and initially Giuseppa and Lorenzo
(15:46):
lived with her family, but that caused all kinds of tension.
The conservative and very devout flies didn't like the way
Giseppa behaved, including influencing their daughter to be less pious.
Giuseppe fel like his new in laws cramped his style
and we're just too judgmental, and eventually there was a
huge fight that ended with the newlyweds moving out. Let's
(16:08):
put the two of them in a tight spot financially,
and Gaseppa once again fell back on illegal methods of
making a living. He became friends with a man named
Agliata who claimed to be a Prussian marquis and a colonel,
among other things, and he taught him how to advance
his forgery skills. Agliata had forged his own military commission papers.
(16:33):
He was not a colonel at all, but his document
forgeries were good enough that nobody questioned them, and he
trained Gieseppa to do the same. Balsamo had also learned
how to forge bank documents from Agliata, basically enable him
to finance his life through scammed money whenever he wanted
and just write your own money, no problem. It turned out, though,
(16:54):
that sharing all of these tricks of the trade on
the part of Agliata was not merely some magnanium kindness
to an up and comer. Agliata found Lorenza beautiful and desirable,
and he made it clear to Giuseppa that he would
like to have sex with his wife. It is not
clear whether Giuseppa Balsamo had always intended to use Lorenza
(17:16):
and what amounts to sex trafficking, but it does seem
that way. Before this, before his friendship with Agliata, he
had certainly encouraged her to dress more provocatively, and then,
by his own description, had taught her to be more
alluring to men. This is one of the issues that
her family really had with him. It even shifted her identity,
(17:39):
having her go by the name Sara Fina rather than Lorenza.
And so when Agliata made this overture to Giuseppe, Balsama
was not scandalized by it in the least. He seemed
to see it as a commercial transaction, and he coerced
Lorenza to acquiesce. Please remember she was still a young teenager,
she had still grown up in a very religious family,
(18:01):
and while he wasn't scandalized, she was very, very concerned
about her immortal soul and the moral consequences of adultery.
According to that eighteenth century account of things, Balsamo told
his wife quote that adultery is no crime in a
woman who commits it on account of her interests, and
not simply through affection to another man. For a while,
(18:24):
the Balsamo's continued to travel with Agliata, although two outward
appearances it probably seemed like Sarafina was Agliata's wife. They
were traveling together as a couple, and Gieseppa and some
of his friends were traveling in a separate carriage, and
the course of this arrangement, Gieseppa profited because both he
(18:44):
and Sarafina were receiving money and gifts from Agliata. This
entire group profited as well because Giuseppa and Agliata teamed up.
They were forging various letters to scam wealthy families out
of money along the way. But while they were in Bergamo,
the group and their illicit business came to the attention
(19:05):
of the authorities. It is possible that they were betrayed
from within the group. Historian Ian Mcalman writes this incident
as though one of Giuseppa's other traveling companions turned his
friend in out of jealousy, but regardless of how the
police learned about them. Sarafina or Lorenza and Giuseppa were arrested.
Agliotta escaped, taking all of their money with him. The
(19:29):
worst and most incriminating documents that they had on them
were stuffed down Lorenzo's bodice. She was able to destroy
them before they could be used against her husband. The
two ended up banished from Bergamo, but Giuseppa believed that
he would have been killed if those papers had been seized.
After this incident, Giuseppa and his wife took on the
guise of religious pilgrims so they could go to the
(19:51):
cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. This is the
very a location of saints. And then later in his
life Caliostro would claim that he had truly wished to
atone for his life in undertaking this journey, but even
if that were true, he veered off course pretty quickly.
They did travel to Spain, but along the way, Jeseppa
(20:12):
leaned on all of his old tricks to bring in money,
including once again coercing his wife into sex work. When
they reached Barcelona, which was about five hundred sixty miles
away from their original target destination, their money ran out. Lorenza,
again at her husband's urging, gave a false confession to
(20:33):
a priest. They're saying that they were from high ranking
families of Rome, but had been cast out because they
had married without their family's consent, and so they were
left penniless, and this was of course a scheme to
get the church to give the money, and it worked,
although this led to another deception, as the minister wished
to see their marriage certificate, which they did not have,
(20:55):
and so they went to a magistrate for help procuring
that document that registrate was very interested in Lorenza, and
the cycle of using her beauty to gain financial favor
from other men began again. The Balsamo's moved from one
perilous deception to another, this way with Geseppa duping people
in one place as long as he could until he
(21:16):
was found out or things got complicated. In some cases
these men would fall in love with his wife and
he would be like, this has gone too far, we
have to leave. So then he would pick up and
run and start to cycle all over again somewhere else.
We know that he was in London in seventeen seventies six,
and at that point he had adopted the title of
counts and the name of Kliostro. That name was actually
(21:39):
said to have come from another member of the family,
an aunt, who had married a Kliostro, and he built
his wife as the Countess Serafina Felicianikliostro told people that
he was a miracle worker and that he had curative powers.
He was especially fond of a red powder that he
used as a prop and he called it materia prima
(22:02):
in alchemical terms, prima materia, which he was obviously referencing
is the material from which all other substances are created,
including the Philosopher's stone. It is the essence of the ether,
and Caliostro said that he could use it to turn
base metals into gold. He also carried with him a
liquid that he called Egyptian wine, and he claimed that
(22:23):
it could extend a person's life. While Caliostro was in London,
he became a Freemason. There's a significant aspect of Caliostro's
entry into freemasonry that's worth considering. Being a Freemason was
expressly forbidden in the Catholic Church starting in seventeen thirty eight,
and Caliostro had grown up in deeply Catholic Sicily, so
(22:45):
although he had pretty clearly been very morally flexible up
to this point, this is a move that would have
very clearly communicated his disregard for the Church. But it
also became pretty obvious pretty quickly that he did really
view freemasonry with any reverence either. While he was in England,
he claimed that he had come into the possession of
(23:07):
a book by a man named Koston sometimes see other
names that are similar to that, which he would later
say was a sacred manuscript of Lost Knowledge that inspired
the Egyptian Right. The Egyptian Right was essentially a revision
of existing Freemasonry, spearheaded by this foulk count who wanted
to start his own branch of the Order. We will
(23:28):
talk more about that effort after we take a quick
break to hear from our sponsors. Magic historian and magician
Henry Ridgley Evans wrote an article in three titled Caliostro,
(23:50):
a Study in Charlatanism, in which he describes the count's
alteration of Freemasonry. Quote as Grand Master of the Egyptian Right,
he leapt once into fame. His swindling operations were now
conducted on a gigantic scale. He had the entree into
the best society. According to him, Freemasonry was founded by
(24:11):
Enoch and Elias. It was open to both sexes. Its
present form, especially with regard to the exclusion of women,
is a corruption. The true form was preserved only by
the Grand Kafta or high priest of the egypt. Up
until Cagliostro's claims about the order's origins, Freemasonry was believed
(24:32):
by most of its members, who have been rooted in
the Stonemason's Guilds of the Middle Ages. The exact origins
aren't really documented, but the oldest known written reference to
the order is from and that uncertainty about the earliest
days of the organization left the door wide open for
Count Alessandro de Cagliostro to basically write his own version
(24:55):
of the story and sell it as the truth. When
he started his own lodges, the fees that initiates paid
into those lodges kept him with a steady income, and
his version of Freemasonry, of course, incorporated his own prior interests.
He promised initiates into his right that he would help
them obtain quote physical and moral regeneration, and he included,
(25:18):
of course, alchemy in the mix. He also started incorporating
seances into the meetings, usually led by a young girl
or boy is the medium, with the understanding that their
innocence would make them more able to communicate with other realms.
No longer hustling on the streets or scheming deceptions around
entrapping men with his wife's beauty, Kliostro started weaving the
(25:41):
stories that could make his true biography really difficult to unravel.
For years. For example, he told people that he was
ancient and that he had been alive and present during
biblical events, including the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. His stories
were unbelievable, but people did believe them, and he gained
a very devoted following. He continued to embellish far beyond that,
(26:06):
and his dedicated followers started to dream up their own
additions to the story, which he did not ever deny.
As his legend grew, there were whispers that he could
time travel, that he was a spy, and even that
he was a demigod. For the next nearly two decades,
he made his living trading on this new reputation and
(26:27):
started touring Europe and beyond, visiting Masonic lodges and forming
new ones, including an all women lodge in Holland. In
most places he was received with a lot of interests
in honor, but it's worth noting that one standout who
was not taken in with him was Katherine the Second
of Russia. When he visited St. Petersburg, Catherine the Great
(26:49):
declared him to be a charlatan and ordered him out
of the country. During kalliostro seances, he would do the
types of things that we've discussed on the show before
in our episod Oodes on Madame Blovotsky and more recently
Charles Colchester, things like producing papers with names of the
people present already written on them. Sometimes they were sealed
when he received them. He would have perhaps been arrested
(27:12):
for jugglery had he been in the US eighty years later.
And I did see a couple of older write ups
about him that called him a juggler, which I loved.
In a couple of instances, though, those young girls that
he used as the clairvoyance in his seances kind of
panicked and confessed that the whole thing was staged after
the fact. And then in one instance, when he appeared
before a group of Polish nobles dressed as the ancient
(27:34):
Egyptian high priest that he claimed had given him the
true knowledge of freemasonry, he was soon recognized as himself,
and he extinguished the rooms candles in a panic, only
to appear as good old Kliostro when they were re lit,
claiming no knowledge of the situation that had just played out.
And Strasbourg. Kliostro had met and become friends with Cardinal
(27:56):
de Rohan so much so that he was invited to
live with the cardinal. One of the nobles who visited
the cardinal's palace during this time wrote of this situation quote,
no one can ever form the faintest idea of the
fervor with which everybody pursued Cagliostro. He was surrounded, besieged,
(28:17):
everyone trying to win a glance or a word. A
dozen ladies of rank and two actresses had followed him
in order to continue their treatment. If I had not
seen it, I should never have imagined that a prince
of the Roman Church, a man in other respects intelligent
and honorable, could so far let himself be imposed upon
(28:38):
as to renounce his dignity, his free will, at the
bidding of a sharper. Yes, so while a lot of
people believed in him, there were always people who were
like shady. By the time Caliostro moved on from Strasbourg,
he had a veritable parade to see him out, and
he next moved on to Leon, France, where he set
up new Masonic lodges again and according to his rules,
(29:01):
and he told the heads of other lodges that if
they wished to visit him, they had to burn all
of their old traditional Masonic materials. When he moved on
to Paris, in his reputation had preceded him, and he
was received as though he were a marvel beyond all marbles.
He stayed in a hotel that the Cardinal de Rohan
had secured, and there were rumors that he was creating
(29:24):
gold and diamonds there. Late into the night, of course,
Cagliostro stoked these fires of interest and mystery. He claimed
that he held the secret of universal medicine, meaning that
he had the knowledge and skill to cure just about anything,
and through which he intended to convey bodily health to
all of his followers. He was also offering spiritual health
(29:48):
through his Egyptian right, and wealth through his alchemical use
of the Philosopher's Stone. He was said to have hosted
a Sayance dinner in which six guests each asked for
a spirit to join them at the table. Caliostro used
his magic to produce all of the requested deceased attendees.
Those included the Duc de Choisoe Voltaire d'Alembert, de de Roux,
(30:12):
the Abbe de Voisenon, and Montesquiume Unfortunately, when these ghost
guests spoke, only gibberish came out. But the story of
this astonishing and spectacular event spread like wildfire through Parisian society.
This actually irritated the Queen Marie Antoinette, because she believed
that Caliostro was a charlatan. And though many of the
(30:35):
ladies of the court wished to have a series of
lectures from Caliostro because they did not think he was
a charlatan. Uh they had set this up and then
they blabbed, and once word got out, that series of
lectures came to an abrupt end. But Paris loved Caliostro,
and soon there were trinkets and souvenirs available that featured
his face on them. He had a lot of wealthy
(30:57):
followers who were willing to attend his answ is. One
such event was described in the autobiography of the Count
de bouge Neeux quote as a sorcerer. He had a
cabalistic apparatus on the table with a black cloth on
which were embroidered in red the mysterious signs of the
highest degree of the Rosicrucians. There stood the emblems little
(31:20):
Egyptian figures old vials filled with lustral waters in a
crucifix very like though not the same as the Christians cross.
And there too Cagliostro placed a glass globe filled with
clarified water. Before the globe he used to place a
kneeling sear, that is to say, a young woman who
(31:40):
by supernatural powers, should behold the scenes which are believed
to take place in the water within the magic globe.
The sear became convulsed. She ground her teeth and exhibited
every sign of nervous excitement. At last she saw and
began to speak what was taking place that a moment.
Hundreds of miles from Paris, in Vienna, or St. Petersburg
(32:04):
in Austria, or Pekin. It would be hard to believe
that such scenes could have taken place in France at
the end of the eighteenth century, yet they aroused great
interest among people of importance in the court and the town.
And Caliostro is one of the many people who have
come up on the show who are part of the
(32:24):
affair of the Diamond Necklace. And in Caliostro's case, it
was because he was close friends with the Cardinal de Rohan.
Here's the brief version of that whole situation in case
you need a refresher. The jeweler Boehmer Embassage had created
an extravagant necklace for King Louis to purchase for his mistress,
Madame Duberry, but Louis the fifteenth died before that transaction
(32:47):
was completed. The jeweler then tried to sell this necklace
to the next monarch, Louis and his queen, Marie Antoinette,
but they were not interested. The Countess de la Motte
decided to cocta scheme to get the necklace for herself,
and she suggested to the Cardinal de Rohan, who was
on the ounce with Marie Antoinette, that he could help
(33:09):
facilitate this purchase of the necklace for the queen. All
of this hinged on a lie that she told that
Marie Antoinette actually wanted this necklace but could not afford
it or be linked to its purchase during the time
when the country's money needed to be elsewhere. De la
Motte forged letters from the queen to Rohan and arranged
(33:32):
a meeting late at night in the Versailles gardens with
a stand in who claimed to be the Queen. The
Cardinal agreed to the plan based on all of this
and signed a contract with Boehmer and Bassage for the
purchase as a representative of Marie Antoinette. But then when
he was unable to secure the funds, the jewelers went
(33:53):
to the monarchs for the money that obviously uncovered the
whole scheme. The necklace had already been handed over to
the Countess de la Motte, who had broken it apart
and sold it, so because of his involvement, Cardinal de
Rohan was arrested after Countess de LaMotte implicated him, and
that meant that Caliostro was also on the hook. The
(34:15):
countess had told the authorities that Kliostro had been the
one to break up the necklace and to tell her
to sell the diamonds in London. Kliostro wrote his account
of his arrest quote, on the twenty of August, a Commissarie,
an exempt and eight policemen entered my home. The pillage
began in my presence. They compelled me to open my secretary. Elixirs,
(34:38):
bombs and precious liquors all became the prey of the
officers who came to arrest me. I begged the Commissari
to permit me to use my carriage. He refused. The
agent took me by the collar. He had pistols, the
stocks of which appeared from the pockets of his coat.
They hustled me into the street, and scandalous LYE dragged
(34:59):
me along the boulevard all the way to the Rue
Notre Dame du Nazareth. There a carriage appeared, which I
was permitted to enter to take the road to the
best deal. He and his wife Lorenzo, were both taken
into custody on August seventy five, and he stayed in
prison awaiting a hearing until January of seventy six. As
(35:21):
all the legal maschinations played out, Lorenza was found to
have had no involvement in this and was freed. The
cardinal was also revealed to have been foolish but an
innocent dupe, but Caliostro was still regarded with suspicion. There
was testimony that he had known of this deception, that
he wanted to break up the necklace so that he
(35:43):
might multiply the number of diamonds through alchemy and thereby
increase his wealth. But Caliostro had actually gotten to Paris
the day after the Cardinal had entered into this contract
with the jewelers. Because of that timing, and because he
was obviously an extremely confident man, Caliostro was pretty relaxed
(36:03):
on the witness stand. When he was asked who he was,
he simply replied, I am an illustrious traveler that made
all present laugh, according to witness accounts, and of course
he was let go. He was finally released on June one,
so you might think that he would want to put
this whole ugly business behind him. But Caliostro, after returning
(36:26):
to his home and reuniting with his wife dramatically and
in front of a huge gathering of friends and curious onlookers,
he immediately started legal proceedings against the governor of the
Bastille and the commissioner of Police. He wanted them to
answer for the seizure of his personal property. But before
those charges could get off the ground, King Louis the
(36:48):
sixteenth banished the alchemist from France entirely. There was an
offer for him to return to continue his legal case,
but klio Star thought it was a trap and refused.
He did, however, write a pamphlet predicting that the best
deal would fall and he published that from the safety
of London. Yeah, that was actually the first of a
(37:09):
few where he was basically just publishing pamphlets and sending
them over to France that were kind of a little
bit you know, barbed and clearly vendetta driven. Uh, London
did not quite offer Caliostro the same level of embrace
that he had enjoyed in France. He did certainly have
(37:30):
supporters there, but he also found that many english people
were a little more suspicious of his supernatural claims by
this point, and the Freemasons of London wanted nothing to
do with him or his Egyptian right. When he attended
a banquet at the Lodge of Antiquity in the city,
one of its members put on a performance that was
clearly meant to be a send up of Caliostro and
(37:51):
his magic, and the faux count left the hall among
jeers of ridicule from the members. So this performance consisted
of a song which was acted out and according to
notation published with an engraving that depicted the scene. The
song lyrics included these lines, this self dubbed counts. Some
few years since became a brother Mason, and in a
(38:13):
borrowed name for names like simple, numerous he bears and
proteus like in fifty forms, appears, I boast of balsam
every ill, to cure my pills and powders, all disease, remove,
renew your vigor and your health improve. This cutting part
the arch impostor acts, and thus the weak incredulous attracts.
(38:36):
But now his history is rendered clear, the errant, hypocrite
and quack appear. May all true mason's his plain tail
attend and satire's lash to fraud shall put an end
pretty great, probably not for Caliostro. But to make matters worse,
(38:57):
the high style in which he lived his life had
really put him into deep debt. He also, you know,
his health was not what it once had been, and
soon he ran from London to avoid debtors prison, And
he really hoped that he would regain his footing both
in finances and reputation elsewhere in Europe. But all of
these scandals that he had been embroiled in were starting
(39:19):
to catch up with him. He was forbidden, specifically from
practicing any of his alchemy or rights in Russia Spain,
Germany and Austria, and he was still banished from France.
He tried to establish a lodge in Italy, which was
very brazen giving the papal stance on freemasonry. That plan
did not pan out, and then he petitioned France to
(39:41):
let him return, But before anything came of that petition,
his life was abruptly interrupted. On December nine, Cagliostro was
arrested and imprisoned in the San Angelo, Italy. The Holy
Inquisition had seized his personal effects, particularly his documents regarding
Egyptian masonry, and in a turn that's often called a betrayal,
(40:05):
his wife Lorenza was the primary witness against him. She
revealed that his work in alchemy and the supernatural was
all trickery, and while he was discredited in that regard
from any sort of magic that would go against the
Church doctrine, he had used his tricks to deceive and steal.
I don't know if I can call that a betrayal.
(40:27):
I was going to talk about that, and behind the
scenes we can sure do that. Um yeah uh. And
there was no walking back the fact that he was
a freemason. He did attempt to claim that he was
trying to reform the order through its Egyptian roots in
order to come back to the doctrines of the Catholic Church.
It's kind of a desperate move, it sounds like. But
(40:48):
after that entire explanation was met with doubt. Understandably, he
tried once again to assert his connections to all manner
of underworld secrets, some of which he said could damage
the Church. He talked to the inquisitors for hours, constantly
trying to angle and shift the conversation to kind of
explain his way out of it and get things to
(41:10):
come around to his benefit. This was a fruitless effort, though.
He was found guilty of heresy, sorcery, and freemasonry and
sentenced to death. That sentence was commuted to life in
prison by Pope Pious the sixth His Egyptian manuscript was
deemed blasphemous and burned when Caliostro was imprisoned in the
(41:32):
Fortress of San Leo, which is a castle in Urbino, Italy.
He died there in August, as historian Henry Ridgley Evans
wrote about him in the early twentieth century quote and
so ended the career of Cagliostro one of the most
romantic of history. His condemnation as a sorcerer and freemason
(41:53):
has invested him with the halo of a religious martyr,
of which perhaps no one was less deserving. It is incidentally,
through the inquisition investigation that most of Kliostro's biographical details
were finally discovered, and the many embellishments that he had
created were stripped from this story. For the first time publicly,
(42:15):
in eighteen ten, the home in which Kaliostro had lived
was opened for the first time since he locked it
up for the last time. In all of the effects
within furniture and the allegedly magical items were auctioned off
by the French government. In the eighteen forties, Alexandra Duma,
who we've covered on a show before, wrote a two
(42:35):
volume fictionalized version of Kliostro's life titled Balsamo the Magician
or The Memoirs of a Physician. These are part of
a larger series of works by Duma, which were known
as the Marie Antoinette Romances, and they cover the period
of time in which she was Queen. Today, the perception
of Kliostro is kind of all over the map, fueled
(42:57):
by the inconsistencies and lack of evidence the true details
of his life, as well as the various mystical claims
that he made. While Geta described him as a Charlatan
and many people agree with that characterization, there are still
people who believe that he was truly a spiritual visionary
intend on merging the ideas of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism
(43:19):
all under one greater religious philosophy, whether or not he
ever believed his own hype or he was just always
fleecing the easily lad, It's one of those things that
will probably remain a history mystery forever. Do you have
some listener mail to take us out? Okay, this is
a fairly short email. It is from our listener, Didra,
who writes High Holly and Tracy. Catching up with recent podcasts,
(43:42):
and something occurred to me while listening to the Mildred
Fish Harnack episode. What exactly has meant when you say
someone joined the Nazi Party? My party affiliation was simply
a check of a box when I signed up to vote,
But this oft used phrase seems to imply more. She says,
please forgive me for asking you to do this work.
But the thought of searching for the phrase join the
Nazi Party online, I don't really want to see those
(44:04):
search results. Uh. And she also attached a picture of
her very pretty rescue kitty taken the day that we
brought her home as a reward for doing this. I
don't actually have to look this one up, and did
come up in my research. UM. For Mildred at least
and her husband, they had to basically sign a note
of intent that said like I am of you know,
(44:25):
my own free will, joining the Nazi Party, etcetera. That note,
I think Mildred's. I can't remember if it's Mildred's or
her husband's that have come out UM as part of
the documentation over the years to have existed. So it
was that it's more than just checking a box. It's
like you had to make the effort to write your
intent and sign your name to it. Which is why
(44:46):
UM people thought it was so damning. It wasn't as
simple as just saying like, yep, I'm part of that, UM,
that's all. It was easy peasy. But I do appreciate
cat pictures just the same, and her cat is one
of my favorite flavors. And I think Tracy's too all black.
Ya I love them. Uh so thanks. I hope that
cleared that up. I know that was a quick one,
(45:07):
but this was kind of a longish episode, so uh.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com.
You can also find us anywhere on social media as
Missed in History And if you haven't subscribed and you
feel like it's time that sounds grand, you can do
that on the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you
(45:32):
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com