Aqua Tofana
The poison Aqua Tofana is known by a wide variety of names. So in Germany as "Aqua Toffana", "Acqua Toffana" or "Aqua Tufania". In Italy it was also called "Acqua di Napoli" or "Acqua di Palermo". The French know it under the name "eau de Brinvillier " or "eau admirable". Liselotte von der Pfalz jokingly called it “poudre de succession” (“powder for the successor to the throne”) after a poison that was already known in the 16th century.
Composition and effect
It is a strong poison, consisting of arsenic , antimony and lead oxide , possibly the mixture also contained belladonna . The exact preparation of the poison is no longer known today. Since it was odorless, colorless and tasteless, the water-like poison could easily be added to food and drinks. The mixture is considered particularly insidious because it only begins to work months after ingestion. Five to six drops of the poison are said to have guaranteed deadly effects. With a correspondingly higher dosage, the time of death could be brought about earlier. Several hundred people - including popes - fell victim to the poison, which was considered unidentifiable.
history
The poison is said to have been named after an Italian poisoner. However, there are disputes about the exact person. On the one hand, Giuliana Toffana is named as the namesake of the poison. This is said to have been executed in July 1659 for poisoning and the resulting killing of over 600 people together with her daughter and three assistants in Rome. How reliable this claim is is questionable.
A more common variant is that of the invention of the poison towards the end of the 17th century (around 1690) by the notorious Neapolitan poisoner Countess Teofania di Adamo . This is said to have been hung in Naples either in 1709 or 1719. It is also alleged that Giuliana Toffana was her daughter. It is generally known that the poison was sold openly as a kind of cosmetic or "holy water" in bottles with an image of St. Nicholas of Bari . It is said to have found widespread use, especially among women who, trapped in an unhappy marriage, wanted to separate from their spouse through the poison.
As part of the persecution of the Illuminati Order , it was alleged to have maliciously murdered with the poison. The recipe found, which was considered to be evidence of this, is ineffective and, according to Anton von Massenhausen, was only kept by him for the sake of curiosity (according to the recipe, the poison could have been distilled from the fat of a previously specially fed pig).
A few months before his death, while working on his Requiem , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was convinced that he had been poisoned by Aqua Tofana. Vincent Novello and Mary Novello report this after conversations with Constanze Mozart in diary entries on July 15 and 17, 1829, respectively. Real proof of this claim has not yet been made.
literature
- A Mozart Pilgrimage: being the Travel Diaris of Vincent and Mary Novello in the year 1829, transcribed and compiled by Nerina Medici di Marignano, edited by Rosemary Hughes, London, Novello, 1955.
- Anil Aggrawal , An Italian woman of the 17th century, Toffana, in: Science Reporter (Jan) 1997.
- Lewin , Louis, The Poisons in World History Repro. Reprint of the Berlin edition (3rd edition) from 1920, Hildesheim, Gerstenberg, 1984, ISBN 3806720134