A gourd emblazoned with heroes …
More than 200 years ago, France's King Louis XVI was killed with wife, Marie Antoinette by guillotine and legend holds that someone placed a handkerchief in the king's blood and stored the handkerchief in a gourd.
Scientists confirmed a squash emblazoned with images of the French Revolution contains the dried blood of the executed king.
Scientists matched the blood DNA with DNA from a detached and mummified head alleged to be a direct ancestor of King Louis XVI, the 16th-century French King Henry IV. The new analysis published in the December 30 journal, Forensic Science International, confirmed the identity of both French royals. The new analysis confirms that the two men "are separated by seven generations and they are paternally related."
Two French Kings
King Henry IV was born in 1553 and became king in 1589 when a crazed monk killed his predecessor, Henry III. Henry, a Protestant converted to Catholicism to ascend the throne.
Through his fair and peaceful reign, he had the reputation of "Good King Henry"
but in 1610 was assassinated by a fanatical Catholic, his body was embalmed and laid to rest in northern Paris, remaining there until the French Revolution when looters desecrated the graves of monarchs. In the chaos King Henry's head was lobbed off.
Stored privately until 2010, researchers used facial reconstruction to suggest it once belonged to good King Henry. However DNA taken from tissues was too contaminated for analysis.
A wealthy Italian family, owners of the gourd with blood of the unpopular King Louis XVI although the handkerchief had presumably disintegrated.
Louis XVI was born in 1754 and died in 1793 in the rising tide of revolution that swept him and Marie Antoinette from power and to the guillotine. At his execution, legend said witnesses had dipped their handkerchiefs in the monarch's blood.
Text on the gourd recounts the gruesome story: "On January 21, Maximilien Bourdaloue dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his decapitation."
Blood relatives
Genetic material in the blood was analyzed and found to be from a blue-eyed European male. Without DNA it cannot definitively be proved the blood of the last French king however a forensic scientist who had studied the embalmed head sent DNA from inside to the research team.
The new DNA was less damaged and scientists retrived the Y, or male chromosome, often used to identify male lineages. In comparing the Y chromosome in both samples, the team concluded that both men were 250 times more likely to be genetically related. Both samples had genetic variants characteristic of the Bourbon region of France and those variants are very rare in Europe today.
Given the history of the samples, new findings confirm that the dried blood belongs to King Louis XVI and also verifies the embalmed head once belonged to King Henry IV.
With confirmation that the blood was of Louis XVI, researchers plan to reconstruct the entire genome of the deposed French monarch and could be the first historical genome ever retrieved.
No comments:
Post a Comment