3 comments

  • jjmarr 1 hour ago
    My family has spent centuries marrying into an alternative claimant to the Grand Duke of Tuscany who did not inherit through Ferdinando I. We were planning to use this as an excuse to invade Italy and put the scion of our own dynasty on the throne and establish ourselves as royalty in the annals of history.

    Unfortunately, this + the unification of Italy may have irredeemably foiled our plan.

    Not sure what to do now, should I find a wife with a better claim?

    • CoastalCoder 1 hour ago
      Not sure, but I would 100% buy a copy of your family cookbook.

      Just imagine the titles you could use.

    • satiric 51 minutes ago
      Nah, ditch the wife. Become a cardinal in the Catholic church, then get elected pope. From there it should be fairly trivial to re-establish the Papal States to their largest extent.
    • unsungNovelty 1 hour ago
      > Not sure what to do now, should I find a wife with a better claim?

      Naah. You start an AI company!

      • Terr_ 53 minutes ago
        The signature Hapsburg hallucinations, developed through generations of self-distillation.
    • twothreeone 59 minutes ago
      Just fund your own group of grave diggers with PhDs and an attached museum.
    • Apocryphon 1 hour ago
      You could marry your claim to an ideological framework upholding the Divine Right of Kings and traditionalist conservatism, causing it to live for centuries longer in the form of monarchy enthusiast cranks.
  • bell-cot 2 hours ago
    tl;dr; - Scientists did DNA testing on the remains of the Grand Duke and his wife, and found malaria. The rival theory is poisoning by the relative who was next in line for the Ducal throne. HOWEVER, this test result solves nothing:

    > But is there any guarantee that Francesco was not also poisoned?

    > “Perhaps not,” Ochoa said, “but the genetic evidence presented in our study decreases the margin for speculation.”

    > Gisella Caccone, a senior research scientist also at Yale and a study coauthor, agrees. “We can say that they had malaria, we cannot say that they were not poisoned as well,” Caccone said in an email.

    • shermantanktop 2 hours ago
      Maybe they were poisoned, had malaria, were stabbed, and also suffocated and drowned, all at the same time?

      "solves" is a silly thing to ask for in matters of probability. I think this test result adds data which shifts probabilities, and that's the best we'll get.

      • themgt 2 hours ago
        Maybe they were poisoned, had malaria, were stabbed, and also suffocated and drowned, all at the same time?

        Just now learning Grigori Rasputin died of malaria.

  • asdfman123 1 hour ago
    Nice work science, but 400 years is a long time to hold onto old grudges. I go by what the "Good Book" says and "forgive and forget."

    (sorry guys channeling my ken m)