One of the many arts cultivated in Renaissance Italy was the black art of poisoning. The Medici Granducal Archives are teeming with references to this nefarious branch of chemistry, including a series of documents confirming Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici's involvement in a plot to assassinate Piero Strozzi by means of poisoned food or drink in 1548. In February of that year, an anonymous tipster writing in cipher to Cosimo pointed out that ‘P St usually stops to drink a few times during his journey,' and explained that all that was needed was ‘an excellent toxin that could simply be put in his drinking flask.' A 1563 inventory of Cosimo's personal archive implicates him further in such sordid affairs: it shows that he kept a recipe for a deadly poison among his important private papers.
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