August 4, 2010 • 16 mins
Centuries after the fall of their line, the Medici remain one of history's most powerful -- and notorious -- families. In this episode, Sarah and Katie trace the unfortunate and mysterious deaths of Medici family members.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and we finished
our Medici series a while back that we're still getting
mail about it, about this illustrious, scheming clan of bankers
(00:24):
and statesmen. You all really really love the Medici and
Helen and Mississippi sent us a note saying you might
be interested to hear that new Italian research published in
the American Journal of Medicine shows there were at least
two fewer violent deaths in the Medici family than previously thought.
Wait tell me more so. It's pretty awesome already, but
it gets better because the more we looked into those
(00:47):
two particular deaths, that of Grand Duke Francesco, the first
de Medici, and his wife, the Grand Duchess, the weirder
it all got. And despite dying more than four hundred
years ago, the couple was the subject of another recent
scientific paper, this one published in the British Medical Journal,
which also explored their cause of death, but came up
(01:08):
with a different answer. So we'll talk more about those
medical studies later, but first, because suspicious deaths are so
often preceded by controversial lives. Our story will start in
Venice with a beautiful young girl named Bianca. Bianca Capello
was born in fifty eight to a noble Venetian family.
(01:30):
She makes the first bold move of her life when
she elopes with Florentine Pietro Buonaventuri, and they have a
daughter together, Virginia. But she's not in Florence for long
before she becomes the mistress of Francesco the First, and
he is the son and heir of Cosimo the First,
which makes him heir to the Grand Dukedom of Tuscany.
(01:51):
But since Francesco doesn't want to do anything to mess
with his chances of becoming Grand Duke, he and Bianca
keep things on the downlow and he'll at least her
husband mysteriously dies in fiftie mysterious death number one. Keep
Jack of these guys. So really, people do not want
Francesco to be with Bianca though everyone is against it,
(02:13):
his family, his people, the Habsburg Emperor, and you might
be wondering, well, what does he have to do with it?
He actually should have some major sway since he's Francesco
is a good grand duke and should be a good
servant to the Emperor. It reminds me of Lola Montez,
how everyone was so and did not like the mistress,
but Francesco doesn't seem to care about anyone else's opinions.
(02:37):
He does marry Joanna of Austria and becomes grand Duke
in fifteen seventy four, but he sticks with Bianca. And
just to give you a little background on Francesco, He's
got this really, really weird family, but he's a pretty
smart guy. He's not terribly interested in politics, unlike most
medici we know, and he'd much prefer to be working
(02:59):
on out me or patronizing the arts. But in case
you think that they're very unpopular, relationship is the only
sketchy thing going on in this family, and it's not
at all. It's pretty tame, actually, because in fifteen seventy six,
Francesco's brother Pietro murders his wife the same year that
Francesco's sister is murdered by her husband. So, like we said,
(03:22):
this family is crazy, and who knows, maybe after a
few violent murders in his immediate family, Francesco is facing
his own mortality. He needs a male heir, and so
far his wife Joanna has only had girls. And we
have a little note we'd like to make here about
this being a choose your own ending podcast. Yeah, there's
(03:46):
so many different sources that say so many different things
about these people. It's really strange. It's kind of like exactly,
and I'll try to make it clear when there's a
lot of controversy, but this is actually one place. The
number of chill and that Francesco and Joanna have together,
as well as those children's sexes. For example, the excellent
Medici archive, which I would advise any of you big
(04:08):
Medici fans to check out for cool letters and such
written by the family. The Medici archive has them having
six girls, followed by one boy. Well, the American Medical
Journal article that we mentioned his seven sons, which seems
kind of unlikely since it would make the rest of
the story rather pointless. One offspring we should definitely all
(04:29):
make note of, though, is Murrie de Medici, who is
Joanna and Francesco's daughter, and she closed out our earlier
super series. She's kind of why these people are still
famous because she's pretty famous. But back to our story,
It's fifteen seventy six and Francesco needs a son, so
he makes an offer. His mistress can't refuse. Give him
(04:51):
a son, and when his sickly wife finally dies, he'll
marry her and make her Grand Duchess. And according to
Eleanor Herman very wonderful book Sex with Kings, the story
proceeds in a rather romantic comedy like fashion from there.
So Bianca knows that she won't get pregnant, or at
(05:12):
least she doesn't want to risk waiting, so she gets
an accomplice to pick out three impoverished, single pregnant women.
She houses and feeds them through their pregnancies, telling Francesco
she's pregnant, she's patting her clothes and for all you
arrested Development fans out there, we're thinking Maggie Lizar. Two
of the women end up having girls. We have to
(05:33):
imagine Bianco would be really getting a little nervous here,
but the third fortunately has a boy, which is quickly
whisked off to the palace where Bianca goes into labor. Yeah,
so they sneak the baby into the bed with the
Dramatically in labor, Bianca she was apparently very good at
faking it, and suddenly, look, Francesco, you have a male heir. Hooray,
(05:57):
And the proud parents name their baby in tone eo
and no one's really the wiser. But in a turn
that had to have shaken Bianca, who has gone to
all this trouble and probably considerable expense housing these women.
Not long after Antonio is born, Joanna finally has a son, Felippo.
But Joanna dies pretty soon after that, and Francesco at
(06:19):
last marries his mistress only two months after his wife dies.
Not a classy move. No in the secret ceremony, he
makes it public. A year later, he crowns her at
the Palazzo Vecchio. And the people didn't like this couple
when it was just a grand duke and his mistress.
They really really don't like that Bianca is now grand
Duchess and this may be the best part her position secure.
(06:42):
Bianca eventually fesses up to Francesco about this baby swap,
calling it a fun joke she's played on him. She's
like him, happy, not trying to deceive him or anything.
But isn't it hilarious ha ha? How we got this baby?
But surprisingly there isn't that big of a deal made
of it. He already has a son, But then his
(07:03):
son with Joanna dies and Francesco legitimizes his son with
Bianca on October nineteenth fifty three and starts paving the
way for him to become his heir. And again, the
seriously sounds like a romantic quick romantic comedy, So it's
not going to be a romantic comedy for the rest
of the story. Sorry, folks, it's time to get back
(07:25):
to the controver drama is a trauma. Ultimately, obviously Francesco's
real heir, who is his brother. Cardinal Ferdinando is not
so thrilled about this development, and he's not a fan
of Bianca. Pretty much no one is, and he doesn't
want this mistress's son taking his place. So when Ferdinando
(07:45):
visits the couple at the Medici villa at Poggio, the
couple falls ill only a few weeks later, and people
are kind of suspicious after all the Medici and then
the medicine, and they don't really like each other. Eleven
days later, Francesco and Bianca are both dead and Ferdinando
is the new grand Duke, not his young nephew Antonio.
(08:09):
But we have to go back to that amazing baby
swap story. There's another theory about that. Most sources agree
that Antonio was probably swapped as an infant and bore
no relation to either parents, so it's not terribly surprising
that he wasn't able to succeed his father's throne as
a boy. He's a commoner's bastard. But biographer Philipo Luti
(08:33):
challenges that story. He suggests that it was Ferdinando who
concocted the tail as a way to secure his own
hold on the throne. So he lied to little Antonio
and said that he was swapped as a baby, and
he wasn't the real heir, but perhaps he was, so
Lutie's theory goes like this, Worried that he had been supplanted,
(08:55):
his air Cardinal Fernando poisons Bianca. Immediately after Frencho goes death,
and he takes the grand ducal throne and persuades his
boy nephew that he's not really a medicie at all,
and to play NICs. He gives the child major properties,
convinces them to join the Knights of Malta, which, interestingly enough,
is a group where members are unable to form legal marriages,
(09:18):
so you would you wouldn't have to worry about him
having some descendants of his own. So this sounds pretty plausible,
I think. But on the other hand, so does the
story of the mistress who would try to pass off
a baby as her own to secure her position and
become Grand Duchess. And just to give you a little
more on Antonio's life, after fighting the Turks and Hungary,
(09:40):
he goes on to play medici patron in Florence, supporting
Galileo and eventually alienating himself from the court. So that's
the end of the story for our basket baby. But
we need to go back to Ferdinando, Francesco, and Bianca
and the medical controversy that surrounds their death. So Francesco
and Bianca die within hours of each other in October seven.
(10:04):
They have this agonizing illness that stretches on for days.
They undergo immediate autopsies, and the official cause of death
listed at the time it is malaria. So it's not
long before whisperings of poison start at court, especially considering
how much everyone knows Ferdinando dislikes Bianca and wants the
(10:25):
throne for himself. So this is an old theory, the
poison theory, and it's and then investigated in a lot
of different ways over the years. In two thousand six,
scientists at the University of Florence and the University of
Pavia published a paper for the British Medical Journal. It
said that malaria was not in fact the cause of
(10:45):
death and brought back this idea that the couple died
of acute arsenic poisoning. Their paper starts with some observational evidence.
Cardinal Ferdinando acted strangely while the couple was ill. He
dominated their medical care. He played down his brother's illness,
spinning it as the result of poor eating habits and
Bianca's as grief. He tried to isolate the couple and
(11:09):
ordered immediate autopsies, which was normal for someone in Francesco's position,
but not for Bianca. And they then move on to
the historical records of the illness and the autopsies and
the symptoms recorded by doctors sound a lot like arsenic poisoning.
They don't sound like malarial fever. According to the British
Medical Journal. The autopsies also look a lot like arsenic poisoning,
(11:32):
and they make note of Francesco's exhamation, which happened centuries
after his death. Is noted at the time how well
preserved his body was. Arsenic can desiccate the body before
and after death, setting it up for almost a state
of momification. And another thing of note, the most popular
poison in the medici era is white arsenic. I love
(11:54):
that this is even mentioned in a medical journal paper.
It's kind of great. But finally, after studying bone, hair,
and tissue samples from Francesco and tissue samples believed to
be from Bianca, Bianca didn't get a very well marked grave,
the Steady found evidence of acute arsenic poisoning in the
samples and concentrations in the soft tissue were really high,
(12:17):
while concentration in the bone and hair were low. And
that's probably because if they did dive arsenic poisoning, it
happened really quickly, not enough time for the arsenic to
set into their bones and grow out through their hair.
But in June, another scholarly paper came out, the one
published in the American Journal of Medicine that we mentioned earlier,
(12:39):
that was sent to us by Helen and For this study,
the scientists wanted to see if the rumors of poison
and the earlier b MJ study were off and find
out if the real cause of death was the one
made by court physicians malaria, which was a disease prevalent
in central Italy until World War Two. They obtained a
cancelous bone from one of Francesco's vertebra because they didn't
(13:02):
get any from Bianca. As negative controls, they use samples
from Francesco's family members, Calls the First, who died of pneumonia,
and Joan of Austria who died in childbirth. Their other
negative controls were from medieval bones outside of malarial regions
um parts of Germany and France. And they found the
presence of malaria in Francesco's samples and none in the others.
(13:25):
And they're pretty confident about their conclusion. They say quote
that with the use of modern methods, we provide robust
evidence that Francesco the First had false a param malaria
at the time of his death. Are immunologic results confirm
the archival sources that describe the onset, course and fatal
outcome of the disease. Our findings also absolved Fernando the
(13:49):
First from the shameful allegation of being the murderer of
his brother and sister in law. So, like we said,
this is a choose your own ending podcast. I think
it's so fascinating that too respected medical journals have put
out food. I know, I wonder if it is a
feud Americans versus the Brits. Just that so many people
(14:10):
are actually doing studies on these people who died hundreds
of years ago. It's fascinating. So choose your own ending, indeed,
and let us know what you think. And that brings
us to some really fantastic listener mail. So this edition
of Listener Meal involves presents, making it a super exciting
(14:31):
edition of Listener Meal indeed. And this is CC in
Australia and she sent us these amazing cand knit animals.
They're so cool. Katie got a narwhale and I got
an awful lot, and she wrote I instructed them both
to be on their best behavior and not fight on
the journey from Australia to you. They I think they
(14:52):
did all right. You would not want to fight with
my narwhale. That tusk is pretty intense. My awful lot
has closed eyes, and I was thinking c C probably
left these clothes though, that he wouldn't get injured on
the way. And we named them after things that have
come up in our recent podcast. My narwhale is named
Zara from our episode on the Crusades, and my awful
(15:15):
is named Antonio after today's basket baby Medici because he
showed up on my desk the same day this podcast
was initiated, So a big, big thank you to c C.
And we'll put up a picture of our lovely little
animals on our Facebook and also on our Twitter at
Miston History, you should follow us, and if you search
(15:37):
our home page at ww dot how stuff works dot com,
you can find my article on mar walls, although Sarah
hasn't gotten to write one about ocelts not yet. And
if you're not a crafty type of person, but you're
a wonderful letter writer instead, you can send us an
email at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(15:58):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out this stuff you missed in History class blog on
the how stuff Works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and we finished
our Medici series a while back that we're still getting
mail about it, about this illustrious, scheming clan of bankers
(00:24):
and statesmen. You all really really love the Medici and
Helen and Mississippi sent us a note saying you might
be interested to hear that new Italian research published in
the American Journal of Medicine shows there were at least
two fewer violent deaths in the Medici family than previously thought.
Wait tell me more so. It's pretty awesome already, but
it gets better because the more we looked into those
(00:47):
two particular deaths, that of Grand Duke Francesco, the first
de Medici, and his wife, the Grand Duchess, the weirder
it all got. And despite dying more than four hundred
years ago, the couple was the subject of another recent
scientific paper, this one published in the British Medical Journal,
which also explored their cause of death, but came up
(01:08):
with a different answer. So we'll talk more about those
medical studies later, but first, because suspicious deaths are so
often preceded by controversial lives. Our story will start in
Venice with a beautiful young girl named Bianca. Bianca Capello
was born in fifty eight to a noble Venetian family.
(01:30):
She makes the first bold move of her life when
she elopes with Florentine Pietro Buonaventuri, and they have a
daughter together, Virginia. But she's not in Florence for long
before she becomes the mistress of Francesco the First, and
he is the son and heir of Cosimo the First,
which makes him heir to the Grand Dukedom of Tuscany.
(01:51):
But since Francesco doesn't want to do anything to mess
with his chances of becoming Grand Duke, he and Bianca
keep things on the downlow and he'll at least her
husband mysteriously dies in fiftie mysterious death number one. Keep
Jack of these guys. So really, people do not want
Francesco to be with Bianca though everyone is against it,
(02:13):
his family, his people, the Habsburg Emperor, and you might
be wondering, well, what does he have to do with it?
He actually should have some major sway since he's Francesco
is a good grand duke and should be a good
servant to the Emperor. It reminds me of Lola Montez,
how everyone was so and did not like the mistress,
but Francesco doesn't seem to care about anyone else's opinions.
(02:37):
He does marry Joanna of Austria and becomes grand Duke
in fifteen seventy four, but he sticks with Bianca. And
just to give you a little background on Francesco, He's
got this really, really weird family, but he's a pretty
smart guy. He's not terribly interested in politics, unlike most
medici we know, and he'd much prefer to be working
(02:59):
on out me or patronizing the arts. But in case
you think that they're very unpopular, relationship is the only
sketchy thing going on in this family, and it's not
at all. It's pretty tame, actually, because in fifteen seventy six,
Francesco's brother Pietro murders his wife the same year that
Francesco's sister is murdered by her husband. So, like we said,
(03:22):
this family is crazy, and who knows, maybe after a
few violent murders in his immediate family, Francesco is facing
his own mortality. He needs a male heir, and so
far his wife Joanna has only had girls. And we
have a little note we'd like to make here about
this being a choose your own ending podcast. Yeah, there's
(03:46):
so many different sources that say so many different things
about these people. It's really strange. It's kind of like exactly,
and I'll try to make it clear when there's a
lot of controversy, but this is actually one place. The
number of chill and that Francesco and Joanna have together,
as well as those children's sexes. For example, the excellent
Medici archive, which I would advise any of you big
(04:08):
Medici fans to check out for cool letters and such
written by the family. The Medici archive has them having
six girls, followed by one boy. Well, the American Medical
Journal article that we mentioned his seven sons, which seems
kind of unlikely since it would make the rest of
the story rather pointless. One offspring we should definitely all
(04:29):
make note of, though, is Murrie de Medici, who is
Joanna and Francesco's daughter, and she closed out our earlier
super series. She's kind of why these people are still
famous because she's pretty famous. But back to our story,
It's fifteen seventy six and Francesco needs a son, so
he makes an offer. His mistress can't refuse. Give him
(04:51):
a son, and when his sickly wife finally dies, he'll
marry her and make her Grand Duchess. And according to
Eleanor Herman very wonderful book Sex with Kings, the story
proceeds in a rather romantic comedy like fashion from there.
So Bianca knows that she won't get pregnant, or at
(05:12):
least she doesn't want to risk waiting, so she gets
an accomplice to pick out three impoverished, single pregnant women.
She houses and feeds them through their pregnancies, telling Francesco
she's pregnant, she's patting her clothes and for all you
arrested Development fans out there, we're thinking Maggie Lizar. Two
of the women end up having girls. We have to
(05:33):
imagine Bianco would be really getting a little nervous here,
but the third fortunately has a boy, which is quickly
whisked off to the palace where Bianca goes into labor. Yeah,
so they sneak the baby into the bed with the
Dramatically in labor, Bianca she was apparently very good at
faking it, and suddenly, look, Francesco, you have a male heir. Hooray,
(05:57):
And the proud parents name their baby in tone eo
and no one's really the wiser. But in a turn
that had to have shaken Bianca, who has gone to
all this trouble and probably considerable expense housing these women.
Not long after Antonio is born, Joanna finally has a son, Felippo.
But Joanna dies pretty soon after that, and Francesco at
(06:19):
last marries his mistress only two months after his wife dies.
Not a classy move. No in the secret ceremony, he
makes it public. A year later, he crowns her at
the Palazzo Vecchio. And the people didn't like this couple
when it was just a grand duke and his mistress.
They really really don't like that Bianca is now grand
Duchess and this may be the best part her position secure.
(06:42):
Bianca eventually fesses up to Francesco about this baby swap,
calling it a fun joke she's played on him. She's
like him, happy, not trying to deceive him or anything.
But isn't it hilarious ha ha? How we got this baby?
But surprisingly there isn't that big of a deal made
of it. He already has a son, But then his
(07:03):
son with Joanna dies and Francesco legitimizes his son with
Bianca on October nineteenth fifty three and starts paving the
way for him to become his heir. And again, the
seriously sounds like a romantic quick romantic comedy, So it's
not going to be a romantic comedy for the rest
of the story. Sorry, folks, it's time to get back
(07:25):
to the controver drama is a trauma. Ultimately, obviously Francesco's
real heir, who is his brother. Cardinal Ferdinando is not
so thrilled about this development, and he's not a fan
of Bianca. Pretty much no one is, and he doesn't
want this mistress's son taking his place. So when Ferdinando
(07:45):
visits the couple at the Medici villa at Poggio, the
couple falls ill only a few weeks later, and people
are kind of suspicious after all the Medici and then
the medicine, and they don't really like each other. Eleven
days later, Francesco and Bianca are both dead and Ferdinando
is the new grand Duke, not his young nephew Antonio.
(08:09):
But we have to go back to that amazing baby
swap story. There's another theory about that. Most sources agree
that Antonio was probably swapped as an infant and bore
no relation to either parents, so it's not terribly surprising
that he wasn't able to succeed his father's throne as
a boy. He's a commoner's bastard. But biographer Philipo Luti
(08:33):
challenges that story. He suggests that it was Ferdinando who
concocted the tail as a way to secure his own
hold on the throne. So he lied to little Antonio
and said that he was swapped as a baby, and
he wasn't the real heir, but perhaps he was, so
Lutie's theory goes like this, Worried that he had been supplanted,
(08:55):
his air Cardinal Fernando poisons Bianca. Immediately after Frencho goes death,
and he takes the grand ducal throne and persuades his
boy nephew that he's not really a medicie at all,
and to play NICs. He gives the child major properties,
convinces them to join the Knights of Malta, which, interestingly enough,
is a group where members are unable to form legal marriages,
(09:18):
so you would you wouldn't have to worry about him
having some descendants of his own. So this sounds pretty plausible,
I think. But on the other hand, so does the
story of the mistress who would try to pass off
a baby as her own to secure her position and
become Grand Duchess. And just to give you a little
more on Antonio's life, after fighting the Turks and Hungary,
(09:40):
he goes on to play medici patron in Florence, supporting
Galileo and eventually alienating himself from the court. So that's
the end of the story for our basket baby. But
we need to go back to Ferdinando, Francesco, and Bianca
and the medical controversy that surrounds their death. So Francesco
and Bianca die within hours of each other in October seven.
(10:04):
They have this agonizing illness that stretches on for days.
They undergo immediate autopsies, and the official cause of death
listed at the time it is malaria. So it's not
long before whisperings of poison start at court, especially considering
how much everyone knows Ferdinando dislikes Bianca and wants the
(10:25):
throne for himself. So this is an old theory, the
poison theory, and it's and then investigated in a lot
of different ways over the years. In two thousand six,
scientists at the University of Florence and the University of
Pavia published a paper for the British Medical Journal. It
said that malaria was not in fact the cause of
(10:45):
death and brought back this idea that the couple died
of acute arsenic poisoning. Their paper starts with some observational evidence.
Cardinal Ferdinando acted strangely while the couple was ill. He
dominated their medical care. He played down his brother's illness,
spinning it as the result of poor eating habits and
Bianca's as grief. He tried to isolate the couple and
(11:09):
ordered immediate autopsies, which was normal for someone in Francesco's position,
but not for Bianca. And they then move on to
the historical records of the illness and the autopsies and
the symptoms recorded by doctors sound a lot like arsenic poisoning.
They don't sound like malarial fever. According to the British
Medical Journal. The autopsies also look a lot like arsenic poisoning,
(11:32):
and they make note of Francesco's exhamation, which happened centuries
after his death. Is noted at the time how well
preserved his body was. Arsenic can desiccate the body before
and after death, setting it up for almost a state
of momification. And another thing of note, the most popular
poison in the medici era is white arsenic. I love
(11:54):
that this is even mentioned in a medical journal paper.
It's kind of great. But finally, after studying bone, hair,
and tissue samples from Francesco and tissue samples believed to
be from Bianca, Bianca didn't get a very well marked grave,
the Steady found evidence of acute arsenic poisoning in the
samples and concentrations in the soft tissue were really high,
(12:17):
while concentration in the bone and hair were low. And
that's probably because if they did dive arsenic poisoning, it
happened really quickly, not enough time for the arsenic to
set into their bones and grow out through their hair.
But in June, another scholarly paper came out, the one
published in the American Journal of Medicine that we mentioned earlier,
(12:39):
that was sent to us by Helen and For this study,
the scientists wanted to see if the rumors of poison
and the earlier b MJ study were off and find
out if the real cause of death was the one
made by court physicians malaria, which was a disease prevalent
in central Italy until World War Two. They obtained a
cancelous bone from one of Francesco's vertebra because they didn't
(13:02):
get any from Bianca. As negative controls, they use samples
from Francesco's family members, Calls the First, who died of pneumonia,
and Joan of Austria who died in childbirth. Their other
negative controls were from medieval bones outside of malarial regions
um parts of Germany and France. And they found the
presence of malaria in Francesco's samples and none in the others.
(13:25):
And they're pretty confident about their conclusion. They say quote
that with the use of modern methods, we provide robust
evidence that Francesco the First had false a param malaria
at the time of his death. Are immunologic results confirm
the archival sources that describe the onset, course and fatal
outcome of the disease. Our findings also absolved Fernando the
(13:49):
First from the shameful allegation of being the murderer of
his brother and sister in law. So, like we said,
this is a choose your own ending podcast. I think
it's so fascinating that too respected medical journals have put
out food. I know, I wonder if it is a
feud Americans versus the Brits. Just that so many people
(14:10):
are actually doing studies on these people who died hundreds
of years ago. It's fascinating. So choose your own ending, indeed,
and let us know what you think. And that brings
us to some really fantastic listener mail. So this edition
of Listener Meal involves presents, making it a super exciting
(14:31):
edition of Listener Meal indeed. And this is CC in
Australia and she sent us these amazing cand knit animals.
They're so cool. Katie got a narwhale and I got
an awful lot, and she wrote I instructed them both
to be on their best behavior and not fight on
the journey from Australia to you. They I think they
(14:52):
did all right. You would not want to fight with
my narwhale. That tusk is pretty intense. My awful lot
has closed eyes, and I was thinking c C probably
left these clothes though, that he wouldn't get injured on
the way. And we named them after things that have
come up in our recent podcast. My narwhale is named
Zara from our episode on the Crusades, and my awful
(15:15):
is named Antonio after today's basket baby Medici because he
showed up on my desk the same day this podcast
was initiated, So a big, big thank you to c C.
And we'll put up a picture of our lovely little
animals on our Facebook and also on our Twitter at
Miston History, you should follow us, and if you search
(15:37):
our home page at ww dot how stuff works dot com,
you can find my article on mar walls, although Sarah
hasn't gotten to write one about ocelts not yet. And
if you're not a crafty type of person, but you're
a wonderful letter writer instead, you can send us an
email at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(15:58):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out this stuff you missed in History class blog on
the how stuff Works dot com home page
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