Lucrezia Borgia was born on April 18, 1480, in the hill town of Subiaco, outside Rome, into one of the most controversial families of Renaissance Italy. Her father, Rodrigo Borgia, a Spaniard from near Valencia, had risen rapidly through the Roman Catholic Church under the patronage of his uncle, who became Pope Callixtus III in 1455. By the late 1450s, Rodrigo was a cardinal, a powerful position in the Papal States that controlled much of central Italy. But Rodrigo was no ordinary churchman.
He kept many mistresses and fathered several children, behavior not uncommon among church figures of that era, yet openly criticized by reformers. With his principal mistress, Vannozza dei Cattanei, Rodrigo had four children, and Lucrezia formed a particularly close bond with her elder brother Cesare, a relationship that would later fuel dark rumors. Lucrezia received a humanist education focused on classical Greek and Roman writers, training under Milan’s Adriana Orsini. She became fluent in Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, and Latin.
She grew up during a turbulent period in Italian history. Though the peninsula was the center of European civilization, with cities like Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan attracting the finest artists, it was politically fragmented into more than two dozen city-states, among them the maritime republics of Genoa and Venice, the duchies of Milan, Ferrara, and Urbino, Florence under the guise of a republic but actually ruled by the Medici family, and the Papal States. From 1494, Spain and France began a series of wars for dominance over the peninsula. For Lucrezia, all this mattered because her father arranged several marriages to strengthen the Borgia position in this complex political landscape.
When she was only ten, Rodrigo promised her to a lord of Valencia, but that betrothal and other marriage arrangements collapsed as his political fortunes changed. In August 1492, he won the contest to become the next Pope, taking the name Alexander VI. Now he could negotiate far more advantageous marriage alliances through Lucrezia. On June 12, 1493, she married Giovanni Sforza, a member of the powerful family ruling the Duchy of Milan and other northern Italian states.
The marriage lasted only until 1497. By then, the Pope had decided the Sforza alliance was no longer the best option. Sforza, under pressure, signed a document stating he had been unable to consummate the marriage due to impotence, grounds enough for annulment. In response, the humiliated Giovanni Sforza reportedly spread rumors that Lucrezia was having incestuous relations with her brother and father.
Around the same time, rumors circulated that she was pregnant by Pedro Calderón, her father’s chamberlain. Lucrezia withdrew from public view, and within weeks Calderón was found dead in the Tiber River, murdered for removing an embarrassment to the Borgia family. Her second husband, Alfonso of Aragon, a cousin of the Spanish royal family, suffered a similar bloody fate. The marriage in 1498 was part of her father’s decision to temporarily support the Spanish in the Italian Wars, but it lasted only until Borgia diplomacy shifted again.
The couple, who were close in age and reportedly deeply in love, had a son named Rodrigo after the Pope. In 1500, the Borgias decided to support France, and Alfonso was found dead in Rome. Lucrezia may or may not have been involved in his murder, which was likely ordered by Cesare as a political necessity tied to the papal alliance with France. Lucrezia’s third and final marriage, two years later, proved the most important and the most lasting.
Her new husband was Alfonso d’Este, son and heir of Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara, a significant northern Italian city-state. The wedding was celebrated in early 1502, and the couple had several children. Their paternity was sometimes disputed, as Lucrezia had a number of love affairs in the 1500s and 1510s, including a prolonged relationship with Francesco Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, and another with Pietro Bembo, the Renaissance composer and literary theorist credited with formalizing the Tuscan dialect that became standard Italian. Throughout her life, Lucrezia was the center of scandalous gossip and myth.
Rumors of illegitimate children by lovers, accusations of incest with Cesare, and her reputation as a femme fatale who could poison men with ease all followed her. One notorious story, the Banquet of Chestnuts, described a lavish and debauched celebration in Rome on October 30, 1501, involving Lucrezia, Cesare, the Pope, nobles, and prostitutes. The description appeared only once, in the account of papal master of ceremonies Johann Burchard, and is now widely believed to have been fabricated to damage the Borgia reputation. In reality, Lucrezia may not have been a femme fatale, and her love life may have been no more scandalous than that of any noblewoman of the late Renaissance.
She was undoubtedly attractive, but her stain came from her family’s activities. Her father kept multiple mistresses and encouraged Cesare to carve out his own state in central Italy using Church resources. Cesare was one of the most notorious lords of the Renaissance, a major influence on Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote The Prince partly from observing him. Lucrezia spent her adult life at the Este court in Ferrara, where her husband became Duke in 1505.
She had at least eight children, possibly up to ten depending on disputed paternity, and suffered several difficult pregnancies and miscarriages. After her father’s death in August 1503, Cesare’s position weakened, and he lost control of much of central Italy. Eventually arrested by King Ferdinand of Aragon, he escaped after eighteen months in prison, started a rebellion in northern Spain, and died in March 1507. Lucrezia’s troubled obstetric history finally killed her.
On June 14, 1519, she gave birth to a daughter named Isabella. The birth was another difficult one, and she never fully recovered. She grew ill, seemed to improve, then deteriorated, and died on June 24 at the age of 39. She was buried in the Church of Corpus Domini in Ferrara, the last major figure of the turbulent Borgia family.
After her death, she became one of the most discussed women of early modern Italy, appearing in countless books, films, television series, and other works that often emphasized the rumors that surrounded her life. Centuries later, another woman became notorious for poisoning, though under very different circumstances. Giulia Tofana, likely Sicilian, was born in the 1590s or early 1600s and lived in Palermo. Little is known of her early life.
She is often believed to be the daughter of Tofania d’Adamo, who was executed in Palermo on July 12, 1633, for poisoning people with a mixture called Acqua Tofana. The relationship between the two women is unclear, but Giulia clearly knew and worked with Tofania and her principal accomplice, Francesca la Sarda. After Tofania’s execution, Giulia fled Palermo with a group of women and settled in Rome, where they began distributing their own version of the poison. Acqua Tofana was likely composed mainly of arsenic, antimony, and lead, sometimes combined with corrosive sublimate, or mercuric chloride.
In sufficient doses, it caused death within about three days. The first symptoms were a burning in the throat, followed by nausea, vomiting, intense thirst, and diarrhea. Arsenic was tasteless and nearly impossible to detect in the 17th century. In an age of limited medical knowledge, people frequently died suddenly from unexplained illnesses, so Acqua Tofana could be used without arousing suspicion.
Giulia established herself as leader of the network in Rome, hiring a young woman named Girolama Spara and others who knew Roman society. They obtained arsenic from a priest at the Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, whose brother was an apothecary, and sold the poison in glass jars as a cosmetic liquid called Saint Nicholas’s Manna. Documentation of Tofana’s customers is fragmentary, but evidence from later trials reveals that people of all social classes bought the poison in the 1630s, 1640s, and 1650s. Many were from the poor and middle classes, but some were highly influential in Roman society.
The Duchess of Ceri allegedly poisoned her husband, and many details of the trials were suppressed to protect powerful people in Rome and the Church. Women trapped in loveless marriages with much older men formed a large part of Tofana’s clientele. In a society where misogyny was common and divorce was not available, women seeking to escape unhappy marriages turned to poisoners like Giulia Tofana. Contemporary documents claim she was responsible for around six hundred deaths, though the exact scale of her business is unclear and some deaths may have been attributed to her erroneously.
Unlike Tofania d’Adamo, who was executed by hanging, quartering or by being thrown from a roof in a canvas bag, Giulia Tofana was never convicted of poisoning. According to most accounts, she died peacefully in bed in 1651. Some stories claim she spent her last days in a convent and continued her business through networks of nuns and priests, or that she was arrested, executed, or strangled, but these seem untrue. Her assistant Girolama Spara succeeded her as head of the network, and in 1658 the authorities finally caught up with them.
Spara and several ringleaders were hanged publicly in Rome, and dozens of accomplices and buyers received life sentences. The trials revealed how widespread and well-connected their clientele had been. The name Acqua Tofana became a generic term for slow poison across western and central Europe for generations. It was even suspected in the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who fell ill in September 1791 and died three months later, famously claiming someone had given him Acqua Tofana and calculated the exact time of his death.
No clear evidence supports poisoning, and modern analysis has found arsenic in his manuscript of The Magic Flute, but his death remains unexplained. In the early 18th century, Europe was gripped by fears of vampires. One woman whose strange behavior made locals suspect she was a vampire was Eleonore von Schwarzenberg. Born June 20, 1682, in Melnik, Bohemia, she was the daughter of Prince Ferdinand August of Lobkowicz, an old and respected noble family.
On December 7, 1701, at age 19, she married Adam Franz Karl Eusebius, heir to the Principality of Schwarzenberg. The marriage was largely a financial transaction, with a large dowry of 20,000 guilders promised. It was troubled from the start: Adam had secretly married the daughter of the Austrian ambassador to Rome and had to annul it quickly, and Eleonore did not become pregnant for years. When a daughter arrived in 1706, no son was born to secure the Schwarzenberg line.
Eleonore’s father married Adam’s sister, creating a tangled family web, and he failed to pay the dowry, causing tension. After a miscarriage in 1709 and accusations of adultery, the couple lived apart for most of the 1710s. They reconciled in 1719, after Adam inherited a vast Bohemian estate and Eleonore’s father died in 1715. In 1722, the long-awaited son Joseph Adam was born.
In the 1720s, Adam rose through the ranks of Bohemian nobility, becoming a chamberlain and trusted adviser to Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, and eventually a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece. He was a regular hunting companion of the Emperor. On June 10, 1732, while hunting near Brandeis outside Prague, the weak-sighted Charles mistook Adam for a deer and shot him. Adam died the next day.
Charles, guilt-ridden over killing his friend and adviser, took Eleonore’s son Joseph under his protection, granted Eleonore a large pension, and placed her in charge of the Schwarzenberg estates. Eleonore’s health declined rapidly in the late 1730s. She became extremely thin and weak, and turned to folk remedies, including narwhal tusks believed to be unicorn horns. She ate and slept poorly, became very pale, and reportedly hired witches, alchemists, and purveyors of strange visions.
Charles, because he had accidentally killed her husband, sent her one of his best doctors, who reportedly said she looked like a walking corpse, that her room was always dark because sunlight bothered her, and that she kept wolves caged in her basement and drank their milk for years to boost fertility, though these rumors appear unfounded. Her cries of agony became a regular occurrence in the palace, terrifying all who heard them. She died on May 5, 1714, at age 58, in Vienna. The autopsy confirmed she had suffered from what we now know as cervical cancer, with multiple tumors, one larger than a tennis ball.
She had requested her heart be buried beside her husband, and her body was interred in the Church of St. Vitus in Cesky Krumlov, Bohemia. Fear of vampires was very real at the time. Locals reportedly exhumed corpses and cut off their heads, fearing they were vampires, while others impaled them on stakes or burned them.
Legends arose that the princess had become a vampire, seen wandering the town after death, biting corpses and drinking their blood. In 2007, an Austrian documentary titled The Vampire Princess argued that Eleonore was not only obsessed with vampirism but was also the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. The theory points to an alternate draft of the novel indicating Stoker was inspired by a woman, a princess of the Austrian lands, with details matching the region where Eleonore lived. It also claims she inspired a 1773 poem by Gottfried August Bürger, a Gothic ballad with elements of vampirism set on the Schwarzenberg estate in Bohemia.
However, the evidence is largely circumstantial. Her folk remedies were common throughout Europe, and her heart being buried separately was not unusual for the era; the Habsburgs themselves maintained a similar crypt in Vienna. The claim that she was a vampire princess is intriguing but likely just legend. The mystery of the Dark Countess began on February 7, 1807, when a covered carriage arrived in Hildburghausen, a town in central Germany.
The couple who emerged, a man in his late thirties and a woman closer to thirty, took a house for three years. He called himself Count Vavel de Verse and remained intensely private. In 1810 they moved to the remote Castle of Eishausen, where they lived in self-imposed exile, rarely leaving. When the woman did go out, she rode in a carriage with her face hidden behind a veil.
Locals began calling her the Dark Countess, or Dunkelgräfin. The woman died November 28, 1837, and the man in 1845. After his death it was revealed he was not a count at all, but a Dutchman named Leonardus Cornelius van der Valk who had worked as a secretary at the Dutch embassy in Paris. People wondered how a mere clerk could afford a castle and decades of comfortable living.
Many came to believe he was the lifelong protector of Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, daughter of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Marie-Thérèse had been born December 19, 1778, at Versailles, the only one of her parents’ children to survive to adulthood. During the French Revolution, she and her parents were imprisoned, her father and mother executed in 1793, and her younger brother died two years later. She was released in 1795 and allowed to go to Vienna, but years of imprisonment had left her deeply traumatized.
Some believed the woman who arrived in Vienna in 1795 was not Marie-Thérèse but her adopted sister Ernestine de Lambriquet, who had been taken in by the royal couple and resembled the princess closely enough to be mistaken for her. The theory held that the real Marie-Thérèse, wishing to escape a world that had wounded her, hid as the Dark Countess, while an impostor played her role in the royal courts. Many details seemed to support this, including the Austrian court’s request for Ernestine’s company and irregularities in the party that traveled with Marie-Thérèse to Vienna. In 2013, the grave of Sophie, as the Dark Countess had been called, was exhumed, and her mitochondrial DNA was compared with a modern descendant of Marie Antoinette.
The result was disappointing to believers: the Dark Countess was not related to Marie Antoinette at all. The couple were likely just what they appeared to be, a couple who wanted to live in seclusion in a remote German castle. The legend of the White Witch of Rose Hall began with a woman born Annie Patterson in Britain in 1802, to an English mother and Irish father. When she was nine or ten, her family moved to Haiti, where her parents died of yellow fever shortly after arriving.
She was raised by her nurse, a voodoo priestess, but when the nurse died six or seven years later, Annie was left orphaned. She left for Jamaica, which had been under English control since the mid-17th century and was built on slavery, with a small European minority managing large plantations. Rose Hall, a grand manor built in the 1770s by John Palmer, a senior figure in Jamaica’s colonial community, was on a vast estate. Palmer and his wife Rosa Kelly, the estate’s former housekeeper, died in 1797 and 1790 respectively.
The rest of the Palmer family had returned to England, living comfortably on plantation profits. One member, John Rose Palmer, a nephew of the couple, remained to run the estate. When Annie arrived in 1818, she soon met and married him, becoming mistress of Rose Hall. According to legend, she had practiced witchcraft from her early days in Jamaica, casting a spell on John Palmer to seduce him.
She was then believed to have poisoned him shortly after their marriage to gain sole control of the estate, and to have poisoned distant relatives of the Palmer family. She allegedly remarried, murdered her second husband by stabbing him, and had a third husband strangled by a slave. She reportedly ruled the plantation with extreme cruelty, whipping, torturing, and killing slaves, and converting the basement into a dungeon where she kept the bones of slave children she had killed for black magic. The stories agree that she met her end in a confrontation with an enslaved man named Takoo, once her lover, who killed her in revenge, though accounts differ on whether she had killed his relative or had taken another lover.
After her death, her ghost was said to haunt the estate, tormenting the slaves who had failed to protect themselves, and stories of the ghost persisted for decades. The truth is that John Palmer left Rose Hall around 1820 as the plantation fell into financial crisis with the decline of slavery, and the estate was abandoned for 130 years. The myth was built on a story published in 1868 about Rosa Kelly, an earlier mistress with multiple husbands, and was fully embellished by a 1929 novel. Nevertheless, some Jamaicans continue to believe Rose Hall is haunted, and stories of a figure in green velvet or white and of screaming from the basement persist.
The basement is now a gift shop. The final tale concerns a man so obsessed with a tuberculosis patient that his obsession continued after her death. Carl Tanzler, who later styled himself Count Tanzler von Cosel, was born in Dresden, Germany, on February 8, 1877. He studied medicine and emigrated to Australia, where he lived quietly for over a decade, buying property, boats, an organ, and an island in the Pacific, and working on a trans-oceanic flying machine.
With the outbreak of World War I, as a German citizen in an ANZAC nation, he was interned in a camp and held at Trial Bay until the war ended, then deported to Europe. He made his way to Germany, found his mother, and spent three years with her, then married Dora Schäffer and had two daughters. In 1926, following his sister’s reports of opportunities in Florida, he emigrated with his family to the United States, settling in Zephyrhills. Only upon arriving did he begin using the title Count Tanzler and telling stories of being related to the famous Countess of Cosel and of having seen visions of a dark-haired woman who would become the love of his life.
He left his family and took a job as an X-ray technician at the Marine Hospital in Key West. On April 22, 1930, a Cuban-American woman named Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos was admitted, ill for some time. Tanzler was immediately captivated because she resembled the woman of his visions. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a deadly disease with few effective treatments.
Tanzler, lacking specialized training, took charge of her care, preparing tonics and medicines, and showered her with jewelry, clothing, and declarations of love. She died a year and a half later, on October 25, 1931. Tanzler paid for her funeral and an above-ground tomb, whose key he kept, and visited it almost every evening for two and a half years. In April 1933, he exhumed her remains and took them home.
He began reconstructing the decaying body, wiring bones together with piano wire, fitting glass eyes, and replacing decaying tissue with silk, wax, and plaster of Paris. He made a wig from her hair and hair he had obtained from her mother, stuffed the torso with rags, dressed the body, and used disinfectants and perfume to mask the decay. For the next seven years, he slept with the corpse in his bed. Rumors spread around Key West about the odd recluse buying women’s clothing and perfume, and a local boy reported seeing the doctor dancing with a large doll.
Finally, Maria Elena’s sister Florinda heard the rumors and confronted Tanzler in October 1940. Shocked by what she saw, she alerted authorities, who discovered the elaborately preserved corpse. Tanzler was arrested for grave-robbing. An autopsy was performed, but the accusation of necrophilia could not be proven.
The body was reburied in an unmarked grave to prevent further disturbance. Tanzler was found mentally competent to stand trial, but the case collapsed because the statute of limitations had expired, and he went free. The media portrayed him somewhat sympathetically as a hopeless romantic. He returned to Zephyrhills, where his estranged wife provided some support, and allegedly created a full-size effigy of Elena from a death mask, living with it until his death on July 3, 1952, at age 75.
His body was found three weeks later beside the effigy. His story has been told many times since, including in a 1999 HBO documentary and an exhibition at the Key West Art and Historical Museum.