"Inheritance Powder"
Today's history starts in the Roman Republic with Lucius Cornelius Sulla and finds it's way the the Paris of Louis XIV. The coins that inspired this romp across time are from the court of Ivan the Terrible and his successors.
Before we get to these coins we will start with a little Roman history.
Sulla 82 BC
Lucius Cornelius Sulla took Rome with an army and posted the proscriptions, price lists on citizens' lives. The next year, as dictator, he rebuilt the criminal courts. One statute, the lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis, the Cornelian law on dagger-men and poisoners, set up a standing jury court that treated blade and drug as one crime of killing. The poison clause survives because Cicero read it aloud in 66 BC while defending Aulus Cluentius.
The law applied to whoever "has made it, or sold it, or bought it, or had it in his possession, or administered it"
- Cicero, Pro Cluentio 148
It is venenum malum, a harmful drug; the adjective an important qualifier as venenum alone named any substance that changes what it touches.
I will skip Sulla's enemy Mithridates of Pontun - his story is told here: Mithridates VI.
A Professional Poisoner
In October of AD 54, Claudius died after a dish of mushrooms. Tacitus names the specialist his wife Agrippina engaged: "A person skilled in such matters was selected, Locusta by name, who had lately been condemned for poisoning, and had long been retained as one of the tools of despotism" - Annals 12.66.
Locusta's prosecution for poisoning did not end her career; it marketed her services. Within months Agrippina's son Nero set her on his stepbrother Britannicus. The first attempt didn't have the desired effect. She was more successful the second time when his hot wine was cooled with poisoned water (Tacitus Annals 13.16).
Suetonius records her fee: impunity, country estates, and pupils sent to her for training (Nero 33). Galba executed her in 69 (Cassius Dio 64.3).
Aqua Tofana
A seventeenth-century shop in Italy sold Aqua Tofana, Tofana's water: an arsenic solution, colorless and nearly tasteless in the accounts, dosed over weeks so that the death resembled a stomach illness. Later accounts say it was sold in vials labeled as manna of St Nicholas of Bari, a devotional oil no husband would question. The name is Giulia Tofana's, a widow said to have brought the trade from Palermo to Rome, where she died quietly in 1651. Tradition credits her with more than six hundred dead men, most at the request of their wives. The trial record, reconstructed by Craig Monson, reveals that her stepdaughter Gironima Spana expanded the business until a Roman tribunal implicated more than forty women, and on 5 July 1659 Spana and four associates were hanged in the Campo de' Fiori.
Poison in the Russian Court
In 16th century Russia, Elena Glinskaya, widow of Grand Prince Vasili III, governed as regent for her son Ivan, three years old at his father's death in 1533. Her government's lasting act was the coin reform of 1535, which replaced clipped and counterfeit money with one standard: the wire money shown in today's notes.
Mints at Moscow, Novgorod and Pskov cut drawn silver wire into measured lengths, flattened the pieces, and struck them between dies larger than the blank; each silver oval carries part of the design. The kopeck, 0.68 g, shows a rider with the spear (kopyo) that named the coin; the denga, its half at 0.34 g, a rider with a saber. The reverse names the ruler in Cyrillic: from 1547, Tsar and Grand Prince Ivan of All Rus; later, Tsar and Grand Prince Boris Fedorovich of All Rus. The ruble and its half, the poltina, were units of account, 100 and 50 kopecks; Russia first struck a ruble coin in 1654, on imported thaler flans (Spassky). during the time of Ivan or Boris a ruble was a handful: 100 kopeks or 200 denga.
Elena died suddenly on 4 April 1538. Ivan was seven. In Tatyana Panova's study of the Kremlin necropolis, organic matter from Elena's skull held mercury near 15 mg per kilogram, roughly 300 times modern background, read by the investigators as one large dose of mercury salts, that is, as murder (Panova et al. 2020).
Anastasia Romanovna, Ivan's first wife, died in 1560 after a long illness. Her preserved braid carries mercury at 47 mg per kilogram and arsenic at 24 times background, a pattern the same team reads as gradual poisoning (Panova et al. 2020).
The Cycle of Fear
The cycle of fear is the self-reinforcing process by which fear changes behavior in ways that generate still more fear. Fear creates suspicion; suspicion destroys trust; the loss of trust produces secrecy and repression; secrecy and repression, in turn, create more fear (and defensive poisoning that feed the cycle). Historians tie Ivan's hardening after 1560 to the poisoning of Anastasia.
Not every death by metal was an intentional poisoning. Court women whitened their faces with ceruse, white lead, and painted red over it, with mercury in the jars besides; the English envoy Giles Fletcher noted in 1591 that the women painted to repair what climate and stove heat had done to their skin (Of the Russe Common Wealth). Lead and mercury pass through skin into hair and bone, so the necropolis holds women poisoned by enemies and women poisoned by their own dressing tables; in some graves the chemistry cannot tell the two apart.
Ivan died in March 1584. His son Fyodor, devout and by contemporary report simple, reigned while Boris Godunov, his brother-in-law, governed; Boris took the throne when Fyodor died childless in 1598. In April 1605 he rose from table bleeding from the nose and ears and died within hours. Poison was rumored at once; a stroke is the likelier reading. That poison was the court's first thought tells us something about the court.
Paris of Louis XIV
Our story ends in Paris. On 17 July 1676 Marie Madeleine, marquise de Brinvilliers, was beheaded and burned for poisoning her father and two brothers over the family estate, with arsenic from her lover, the officer Sainte-Croix. The police chief La Reynie dug further and found an industry: the fortune-tellers of Paris sold love powders at the front of the shop and arsenic at the back. Catherine Monvoisin, called La Voisin, the most prosperous, burned on 22 February 1680.
The tribunal Louis XIV convened, the chambre ardente or burning chamber, sat from 1679 to 1682, heard 442 accused, and sent 36 to execution; a royal edict of 1682 then placed the sale of arsenic under regulation (Mollenauer). Parisians already had a name for the product. Arsenic, patient and colorless in wine, was the poudre de succession, "inheritance powder". Across seventeen centuries from Sulla's law to the king's edict, poisoning played a role in politics.
References
Cassius Dio. Roman History. Translated by Earnest Cary. 9 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914–1927.
Cicero. Pro Cluentio. In The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, translated by C. D. Yonge. London: Bell, 1856.
Fletcher, Giles. Of the Russe Common Wealth. London, 1591. Text Creation Partnership transcription.
Justinian. The Digest, Book 50. Edited by Theodor Mommsen and Paul Krueger. Latin text at The Roman Law Library, Université Grenoble Alpes.
Mollenauer, Lynn Wood. Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV's France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.
Monson, Craig A. The Black Widows of the Eternal City: The True Story of Rome's Most Infamous Poisoners. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020.
Panova, T. D., A. Yu. Dmitriev, O. E. Chepurchenko, V. S. Smirnova, Yu. G. Filina, and S. O. Dmitrieva. "Events of Russian History of the Late Middle Ages in the Light of Neutron Activation Analysis Data." Archeologia e Calcolatori 31, no. 2 (2020): 281–90.
Spassky, I. G. The Russian Monetary System: A Historico-Numismatic Survey. Amsterdam: Jacques Schulman, 1967.
Suetonius. "Nero." In Lives of the Caesars, translated by J. C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.
Tacitus. Annals of Tacitus. Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb. London: Macmillan, 1876.
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