A renowned French forensic scientist has launched an investigation into the death of Richard the Lionheart, examining a tiny sample of the 12th century monarch's heart to try to understand what germ killed him.
A statue of Richard the Lionheart in Westminster, London
Richard I died from an infection at the age of 42 after being poorly treated for a crossbow wound during a siege of a French castle.
Philippe Charlier, who previously helped dispel claims that Napoleon was poisoned to death by his British captors, has been given exclusive access to a tiny sample of the heart of the crusading English king
King Richard, famed for his bravery, brutality and bad temper, ruled England from 1189 to his death in 1199.
Dubbed the "Indiana Jones of the graveyards" by the French media, Mr Charlier is using a variety of forensic methods to try to work out what type of bacteria killed him and the embalming techniques of the time.
The scientist and his team have already determined that Vatican-authenticated bone fragments said to have come from Joan of Arc were in fact from a cat and an Egyptian mummy and that a mummified heart came from the uncrowned boy king Louis XVII.
Another coup was to reveal that Diane de Poitiers, the favourite mistress of France's 16th century King Henri II was poisoned to death by the gold elixir she believed would keep her eternally young.
More recently, he identified a mummified head unearthed by an antiques dealer as belonging to Henri IV, the revered French king who died 400 years ago.
Now he is homing in on tiny dust fragments of King Richard's heart, housed for centuries in the Gothic cathedral of Rouen, northern France and saved from marauding revolutionaries.
He is confident that a battery of chemical tests on just "one or two milligrams" of the precious remains – only one per cent of the Rouen relic – will be enough to provide conclusive results, likely to be unveiled in the next three months.
"It is a forensic challenge. We want to get the maximum information from the smallest possible sample," Mr Charlier told the Parisien daily.
He hopes to reveal details on 12th-century embalming, then practised by barbers or even cooks, and perhaps identify the germ that killed the warrior-king, thought to have died of septicaemia.
Initial tests uncovered the presence of human cells, as well as "vegetable, mineral and metal elements".
Caroline Dorion-Peyronnet, curator of Rouen's antiquities museum, said she had refused numerous requests for samples by Britons seeking to establish family links to the defunct monarch, but agreed to Mr Charlier's request as there would be "no DNA tests".
Long loved in England as a pious, brave and highly cultured leader, King Richard is described by historians as brutal, religiously intolerant and unable to control his temper.
He led the Third Crusade of the Christian world against Muslims who had captured Jerusalem in the 12th century but was unable to take the city after feuding with his allies. He died after a crossbow bolt pierced his shoulder during a siege of the castle of Chalus-Chabrol in the Limousin region.
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