A French sleuth may have solved the mystery of the death of France’s famed King Louis IX, better known as Saint Louis. He was the last of the crusader kings and it was believed that he died of plague attempting to recover the Holy Land for Christianity, but scientists now claim he died refusing to eat his greens.
King Louis IX was the French hero-warrior-king who spearheaded both the Seventh and Eighth Crusades. Recorded as having fed beggars from his table, in Egypt in 1249, Louis was captured and ransomed by Cairo’s Mamluk rulers but went on to return the ‘Crown of Thorns’ and part of the ‘True Cross’ of Christ to Paris; hence, a real “hero-warrior-king”.
The new findings of an international team of researchers published in The new scientific report in the Journal of Stomatology, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery suggest that while crusaders were in Tunisia in 1270 during the Eighth Crusade, while the local food contained “lots of vitamin-C”, the crusaders’ fatally stuck to their traditional “meat-heavy diet” which is believed to have brought about the demise of Saint Louis.
The team of scientists was led by French forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier, better known by his Twitter name “Dr Trop Tard” (doctor too late), famed for having studied the heart of Richard the Lionheart and his sleuthing also confirming a jawbone held in Moscow actually belonged to Adolf Hitler. Dr. Charlier believes Louis fell prey to “scurvy” caused by a lack of vitamin C in his diet.
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