The History Blog

Georg Friedrich Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, head of the Imperial House of Hohenzollern and great-great-grandson of Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser of Germany, is selling a diamond that has been part of the crown jewels of France, Holland, England, Prussia and the German Empire. Known as the “Beau Sancy,” the 35-carat modified pear double rose cut diamond is thought to have been mined near the south-central Indian city of Golconda, the same mines that produced the Hope Diamond.

It was purchased in 1570 in Constantinople by diplomat, financier and famed jewel expert Nicolas de Harlay, Lord of Sancy. Harlay also owned a 55.23-carat shield-shaped yellow diamond called the “Sancy” so the smaller, whiter gem came to be called the “Beau Sancy” or “Little Sancy” to distinguish it from its cousin. An avid monarchist, Harlay sold high-end gems to raise money for King Henry III of France’s wars. He loaned both Henry III and Henry IV the “Sancy” diamond. The former king borrowed it to wear on the cap he used to cover his baldness; the latter used it as collateral to finance yet another war.

Harlay owned both spectacular stones for decades, entering into years of negotiations with potential buyers like the Duke of Mantua which went nowhere. He finally sold the “Sancy” to King James I of England around 1604. Legend has it that when Marie de’ Medici, wife of King Henry IV of France, found out that the biggest Sancy stone was now in the clutches of the English monarchy, she was so furious that Henry bought the “Beau Sancy” to appease her. He gave it to her as a gift.

Marie had it set at the top of the crown she wore at her coronation on May 13, 1610. There’s a formal portrait of Marie in full coronation regalia by Frans Pourbus the Younger in the Louvre which depicts the “Beau Sancy” at the apex of her crown. Unfortunately for Marie, on May 14, 1610, her husband was assassinated. Marie was made regent for her eight-year-old son, Louis XIII, and was by all accounts awful at it. Louis had to claim his own throne by force in 1617 and exile his mom to French hinterlands.

She kept intriguing against Louis’ rule and against his puppet master/advisor Cardinal Richelieu in various countries for the next 25 years. In 1641 she was in Amsterdam and deep in debt. To pay off some of her creditors, Marie de’ Medici sold the “Beau Sancy” to Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange-Nassau, for a staggering 80,000 florins, the single largest expenditure in the state budget for that year.

Prince Frederick Henry’s grandson William III of Orange inherited the stone. He gave it to his wife Mary as a wedding gift. After Catholic King James II of England was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the couple ascended the throne of England as King William III and Queen Mary II. They brought the “Beau Sancy” with them to England, and James II took the “Sancy” with him when he fled to France. Broke and dependent on his cousin King Louis XIV, James II sold the “Sancy” to Richelieu’s protégé Cardinal Mazarin who in turn left it to the Sun King in his will. The “Sancy” disappeared during the French Revolution but reappeared on the market in 1828, going through various hands until it was sold to the Louvre in 1978 by William Waldorf Astor, 4th Viscount Astor.

Meanwhile, William and Mary died childless, so after their deaths the “Beau Sancy” went to another grandson of Prince Frederick Henry’s, Frederick III, Elector Prince of Brandenburg and as of 1701, King Frederick I of Prussia. The diamond was considered the most important stone in the crown jewels and was worn by every royal bride until the dissolution of the monarchy after World War I. When Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated as German Emperor and King of Prussia and fled to the Netherlands in November 1918, the diamond stayed in Berlin.

It was kept in a sealed crypt for safekeeping during World War II. British troops discovered the stone after the war and returned it to the House of Hohenzollern where it has remained ever since. On May 14, “Beau Sancy” will be put on the auction block at the Sotheby’s Geneva Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels sale.

The diamond will tour the world before then, stopping at Sotheby’s showrooms in Hong Kong, New York, Rome, Paris, London and Zurich before arriving at its destination in Geneva. “Beau Sancy” has only been on public display four times over the past 50 years, so it’s a rare opportunity. Who knows where it will end up after it’s sold. Philipp Herzog von Württemberg, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, expressed a hope that the French government would buy the stone so the two historic Sancy diamonds could be together again at the Louvre, but I suspect that’s a pipe dream. The pre-sale estimate is $2 million – $4 million. I suspect those numbers are a pipe dream too.

Divers have discovered a Spanish shipwreck from 1583 off the coast of Brazil’s southern Santa Catarina state. Although they haven’t found any remains including the name of the ship, they did find a triangular plaque engraved with the date 1582 and King Philip II of Spain’s name. They also discovered a stone shield bearing the heraldic symbol of the Iberian Union, the dynastic union of the monarchies of Spain and Portugal that united the entire Iberian peninsula south of the Pyrenees under a single crown (the Spanish one).

Archaeologists believe that the triangular plaque would have been used as a marker to claim any newly discovered lands. The Iberian Union was established in 1580. Contemporary documents reference a ship going down on January 7, 1583 off the coast of Santa Catarina, so even without the ship name there is solid evidence that the wreck dates to the early 1580s. If the 1583 date is confirmed, this will be the oldest shipwreck ever found in Brazil.

The recovered pieces and the documentary review indicate the wreck was a supply ship for a fleet that left Spain in 1581 on a mission to build two forts on the Strait of Magellan to stymie the advance of English pirates menacing Madrid’s territories in the New World.

Starting March 14th, divers will return to the site to bring back as many artifacts as they can find, visibility and currents depending. On previous dives they saw a cannon, ballast stones, cannonballs and ceramic fragments which the team hopes to recover on the upcoming underwater expedition.

The Portuguese had landed on the Island of Santa Catarina, the island which today contains most of state capital Florianópolis, in 1514, but they didn’t colonize it until the next century. It was Spain who first began to use it as a base for trade and further exploration just a decade later.

In 1525, Charles I of Spain ordered the friar García Jofre de Loaísa to take a fleet of seven ships and 450 men, sailors plus tradesmen and clerical staff, westward to reach the far east. The expedition’s immodest brief was to cross the Atlantic Ocean, the Strait of Magellan and the Pacific Ocean to reach the Spice Islands (today part of Indonesia). Don Rodrigo de Acuña, captain of the fourth ship, stopped at Santa Catarina Island and left 17 of his crew behind before continuing on towards the Strait.

I don’t know what their fate was, but it can’t have gone much worse than the Loaísa expedition which shed ships and people like a husky sheds undercoat in the summer. Only four ships reached the Pacific, and only one, the Santa Maria de Parral, reached the Spice Islands in 1526 carrying the captain, Andrés de Urdaneta, and 24 of his men. They were captured by the Portuguese for their trouble but eventually made it back to Spain in 1528, thus completing the second circumnavigation of the globe in history.

The first permanent European settlement on Santa Catarina Island was established by Spanish colonists in 1542. The island was used as a supply port by Spanish ships headed towards the Rio de la Plata estuary that today lies on the border between Uruguay and Argentina. The Portuguese took over in 1673, gradually colonizing the island and the mainland coastline. By the late 1670s, the settlement that would become Florianópolis was beginning to grow.

When earlier this month a federal circuit judge ordered Odyssey Marine Exploration to return the vast treasure recovered from the shipwreck code-named “Black Swan” to Spain, I assumed they’d appeal the ruling to a higher court. That’s what they’ve done every other time a judgement went against them in the five years since they first retrieved the gold and silver coins from the Atlantic seabed in May of 2007. I was wrong.

Odyssey did make one last claim in court, but it was already a form of capitulation: they asked that the Spanish government reimburse them $412,814 for storage and preservation costs. On February 18th, US District Court Judge Mark Pizzo denied the claim and ordered the company to grant Spain access to the treasure this week so they could prepare it for transport. Odyssey announced that it would no longer contest Spain’s ownership of the treasure.

Peru isn’t giving up so easily.

On Thursday, the Peruvian government made an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to block transfer of the treasure to give that nation more time to make arguments in federal court about its claim to being the rightful owner.

Peru says the gold and silver was mined, refined and minted in that country, which at the time was part of the Spanish empire. The appeal was directed to Justice Clarence Thomas, who did not indicate when he would respond.

Probably because he’s not gonna. Anyway it’s too late now.

On Thursday evening, two Spanish military Hercules transport planes were loaded with 494,000 silver coins, 100,000 gold coins and assorted artifacts Odyssey Marine delivered to MacDill Air Force Base from their secured storage facility in Sarasota. The treasure of the “Black Swan,” aka the frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes which sank off the coast of Portugal in 1804, is now winging its way to Spain.

Spanish officials counted and weighed the treasure before loading it on the planes. Odyssey actually lowballed the discovery when they announced they had found 17 tons of gold and silver. The total weight was 49,000 pounds, or 24.5 tons. Despite Spain’s floundering economy, massive debt and 23% unemployment, the coins will not be sold or, heaven forfend, melted down. As cultural patrimony, the treasure must by law be preserved intact. The current plan is to divide the coins and display them at a number of museums in Spain.

There’s footage of the cargo being loaded onto the planes and Spanish Ambassador Jorge Dezcallar de Mazarredo’s tarmac statement in this local news story:

In April of 2011, an archaeological investigation on the future site of the North European Gas Pipeline (NEL) near the Lower Saxony town of Syke unearthed a large hoard of Bronze Age gold jewelry, the regional Ministry of Culture revealed today. An engineer located the cache while exploring an excavation area with a metal detector. They found several corroded bronze pins, a small gold spiral curl and an engraved gold cuff, then decided to cut a solid two-foot square block of the earth around the discovery spot instead of digging any further.

The block was sent to the State Conservation Office in Hanover where researchers took detailed CT scans so they could know exactly where every artifact was before attempting recovery. They even created a 3D plastic model of the block based on the scans so the conservator could dissect the block and remove each piece with utmost precision.

The final tally was 117 individual items — gold rings, spirals, cloak pins — packed inside a linen bag closed with four bronze needles. The total weight of the artifacts is 1.8 kilos, about four pounds, making it one of the largest prehistoric gold finds in Central Europe.

The gold cuff turned out upon closer investigation to be a cloak pin, decorated with circles and sun symbols. Those decorations date the piece to 1400 B.C., the Middle Bronze Age. The remains of the linen bag are in the process of being radiocarbon dated, but we don’t have the results on that yet.

University of Hanover archaeological metallurgists examined the artifacts using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) testing, scanning electron microscopy and Laser Ablation Mass Spectrometry (LAMS). The results were surprising, even revolutionary, providing a whole new insight into the capabilities and range of our Bronze Age ancestors. For one thing, the gold was not hammered but drawn, a more advanced technique that historians didn’t think was used during the Bronze Age. The gold content of each artifact is 90 percent. Such a high percentage indicates that the jewels were not made from natural gold, but rather from recycled gold. They also discovered that the origin of all the metal in the hoard, gold and bronze, is Central Asia, not a local source.

Research on the find is ongoing, as are excavations all along the 275-mile pipeline route through Germany, from the Bay of Greifswald in the northeast on the Baltic Sea through Lower Saxony in the northwest. The pre-pipeline excavations are some of the largest archaeological projects in Europe, employing hundreds and discovering not just pounds of Bronze age gold, but also Stone Age hearths complete with mother figure, hundreds of cemeteries with cremation urns, Roman-era grave goods, Neolithic graves, a gold ring with a blue pearl from 400 A.D., beads and wood remnants from Egyptian trade goods, and much more. Only 10-20% of the sites were known before the pipeline project began.

This is financed by the developers building the pipeline, who must get an all-clear from the archaeologists before they can begin building on any given spot. They started the surveys in 2010 to ensure that they would have a lot of time to excavate and thus help minimize the chances of delays once construction begins.

A metal detector enthusiast has discovered a unique silver penny issued by William the Conqueror in a field north of Gloucester. Maureen Jones and two other women from the Taynton Metal Detecting Club were exploring the open field last November when Ms. Jones’ detector went off. She recognized that it was a hammered silver coin, but didn’t realize that was the face of the Norman bastard himself staring back at her from the obverse.

She reported it to the Portable Antiquities Scheme where Dr. John Naylor, PAS’ National Finds Advisor for Medieval and Post-Medieval Coinage, identified it as a William I silver penny minted between 1077 and 1080 in Gloucester. It’s that minting that makes it unique. There are no other coins extant that date to that period from William’s Gloucester mint. This single silver penny plugs the gap and proves that the mint was in operation through the entire reign of William I.

On the obverse is a crowned bust of William holding a sword bearing the inscription PILLELM REX, i.e., William the King. That initial P isn’t actually a P, but rather the Old English letter wynn which is pronounced “w” but represented by a P in Latin script after the original P-shaped rune.

On the reverse is a cross pattée (that’s a cross where the arms are narrow in the center then broaden out at the edges) with fleurs-de-lis at angles between the arms. It’s inscribed around the edges with [S]ILIACPINC ON GLI, meaning Silacwine of Gloucester, the name of William’s Gloucester moneyer. This is the first evidence of Silacwine minting coins during this period. His previous output stopped at 1077, so this coin extends his years of operation through about 1080.

The penny is in excellent condition. The PAS experts categorize it as hardly worn/extremely fine, and you can tell from the weight that it hasn’t been worn down much at all. The legally required weight of a silver penny at this time was 1.3 to 1.6 grams. This one weighs 1.31 grams. Silacwine wouldn’t have lasted long, at least intact of body, if he had been discovered minting underweight coins. Shorting coins was a crime punished by mutilation or death, which is why every coin had the name of the moneyer clearly posted on the reverse side.

William I’s reign was a heyday of coin production. He had 70 mints going at the peak. By the time his third son William II took the throne in 1087, there were just over 50 mints active, and by the time his fourth son Henry I took over after William II’s death in 1100, only 34 mints were still active.

Archaeologists with the North Abydos Votive Zone Project have had a remarkably fruitful digging season. They found 83 animal mummies, most of them dogs, packed tightly in a single chamber of a monumental structure that bears inscriptions referring to Pharaoh Seti I (reigned ca. 1290 B.C. – 1279 B.C.). The mummies are of more recent extraction, dating to around 2,000 years ago. Most of them have lost their linen wrapping. Experts believe the dogs, cats, sheep and goats were sacrificed and interred in a nearby tomb that has yet to be discovered, and removed haphazardly when robbers broke into that tomb later in antiquity.

Abydos was an important holy site going back to the earliest kings of Egypt. According to Egyptian religion, Osiris was buried at Abydos after his brother Set killed him. A temple to Osiris was built on the site and yearly processions in his honor carried a statue of Osiris from the temple to his tomb where rituals were performed overnight. The next day another procession would bring the effigy back to the temple.

Over the centuries, additional chapels were built along the procession route. One of the important discoveries made by the archaeological team this past summer was an early chapel (about 3,600 years old) built very close to the processional route. This discovery disproves a theory some historians have proffered that the chapels along the processional route got increasingly closer until they began to encroach on the road itself. This chapel is both old and close.

Another significant find is a wooden statue of a pharaoh discovered in a chamber next to the animal mummies. Wooden statues of Egyptian royalty are rare. This one was discovered covered in mud and termite droppings and only identified as a pharaoh once the conservator restored it. Which pharaoh is still unanswered, but there is one particularly intriguing possibility.

The statue’s proportions matched up with those of statues dating from the 18th dynasty of Egypt’s history, from about 3,550 to 3,300 years ago. That is, with one big exception — the waist is significantly thinner.

This brought up an intriguing question — could this statue be a representation of Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh who ruled Egypt about 3,500 years ago? No wooden statues of her are known to exist, so [excavation director Mary-Ann] Pouls Wegner examined large stone statues of her.

“Even though she was portrayed as a man in her [statues], oftentimes they did give a nod to her female physique by making her waist narrower,” she said. In addition the contours of her cheeks and chin are sometimes depicted as being a little more delicate. Could it be her? “I think it’s possible,” Pouls Wegner said.

In that same monumental building — which has walls six feet wide, typical of storage buildings, only the layout of this structure is closer to that of a temple — archaeologists found the richly appointed tomb of a priest. The tomb contains two groups of shabtis, figurines of servants who would work for the deceased in the afterlife. One group is made of Egyptian faience, a non-clay ceramic with a vitrified glaze in shades of blue and green. There are 58 faience workers and six faience overseers.

The second group is less elegant, perhaps, but contains rare social historical clues to ancient Egyptian life.

These figures held clear fingerprints of children, suggesting children in Egypt crafted together shabtis to do the work of the deceased in the afterlife. “One could do fingerprint analysis with them, they’re very crisp and very clear,” Pouls Wegner said.

Archaeologists excavating in the town of Cividale del Friuli in northeast Italy right across from the Slovenian border have unearthed a necropolis of more than 30 Lombard graves of men, women and children. It’s one of the largest Lombard burial grounds ever found.

The discovery is new so the remains haven’t been dated yet. Authorities have hired guards to protect the site, rich in artifacts, from looters. The goods interred along with the deceased are what mark the graves as Lombard.

Spears, swords, knives and bags containing coins and other iron objects were found in the men’s tombs while combs and clips were found in the women’s.

In most cases, ceramic vases had been placed at the foot of the graves. At the center of the necropolis was the tomb of a veiled woman with a bronze clasp pinning the cover to her head and a gold-embossed cross placed on her chest.

Some of the graves show signs of having been looted in the past.

Cividale was the first major city conquered and occupied by the invading forces of Lombard King Alboin in 568. Italy had been severely depopulated by the Gothic Wars between the Byzantine Empire and the Ostrogothic Kingdom that ravaged the peninsula between 535 and 554 A.D. When Alboin crossed the Julian Alps from Pannonia into Italy, he encountered virtually no resistance. Byzantine troops were scarce at the border and the locals were in no condition to put up a fight. There is little evidence of battle violence in the archaeological record, and documentary sources confirm that Alboin basically just walked in and took it.

From Paul the Deacon’s 8th century Historia Langobardorum (History of the Lombards):

When Alboin without any hindrance had thence entered the territories of Venetia, which is the first province of Italy – that is, the limits of the city or rather of the fortress of Forum Julii (Cividale) – he began to consider to whom he should especially commit the first of the provinces that he had taken.

He chose his nephew Gisulf and made him duke of the new Duchy of Friuli with Cividale as its capital. This was as significant socially as it was politically, because before their migration to Italy the Lombards had avoided urban centers. From here on in, Lombard nobility would settle primarily in walled cities.

The Lombards would rule for the next hundred years until Charlemagne’s Franks defeated them in 773-774 A.D.

In May of 2007, Odyssey Marine Exploration, a privately owned marine treasure-hunting company, discovered a Spanish shipwreck somewhere on the Atlantic seabed. Odyssey refused to divulge the exact location or the name of the ship. They ultimately recovered 17 tons of silver coins, plus almost 100,000 gold coins and a number of other artifacts from the wreck, which they code-named “Black Swan.” The site must have been near Spain because Odyssey secretly landed the $500 million treasure on Gibraltar, chartered a flight and flew the loot back to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida.

Spain was displeased, to put it mildly. Odyssey claimed the find was made in international waters in full compliance with the United Nations’ Law of the Seas, but since they refused to reveal the wreck site and pleaded ignorance about the name of the ship, Spanish authorities got suspicious. They filed suit against Odyssey Marine in a federal courthouse in Tampa, demanding that the company reveal everything it knows about the wreck so Spain could claim ownership, and they got a Spanish court order to seize Odyssey ships around Gibraltar and search them for historical artifacts.

The case has been winding its way through the legal system ever since then. In 2009, a Florida judge declared that the “Black Swan” was the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a Spanish frigate sunk by the British off the coast of Cape St. Mary, Portugal in 1804, that Odyssey had specifically set out to find the Mercedes and had succeeded, and that Spain was the rightful owner of the recovered treasure. Odyssey’s claims of ignorance did not impress.

The judge argued that the coins, all dated prior to 1804, matched the Mercedes’ haul of mainly silver coins minted in Lima – part of a haul being brought back to finance Spain’s European wars. He also said cannon found there matched those on board the Mercedes.

“The debris field’s location, coins, cannons, and artefacts persuasively match the Mercedes’s historical record,” the judge said.

“That Odyssey, which set out to discover the Mercedes, found this mix strewn about in an area a few football fields square where the vessel met its explosive ending makes the conclusion even more compelling.”

Judge Pizzo also ruled that Peru, which had filed a suit of its own in 2008 claiming the treasure because the coins were made from Peruvian gold and silver, did not have a valid claim because there was no nation of Peru in 1804.

Odyssey appealed the ruling. Now a federal circuit court judge has upheld Judge Pizzo’s decision, giving Odyssey Marine 10 days to return the loot to Spain. Odyssey will doubtless appeal to a higher court next, so this story isn’t over yet, but they’ll run out of courts soon enough.

Don’t worry about Odyssey, though. They just made a sweet deal with the British government and the Maritime Heritage Foundation to recover the wreck of the HMS Victory which an Odyssey team discovered in 2008. This is the predecessor of Admiral Nelson’s famed vessel; it went down in a storm in 1744 carrying four tons of gold.

The terms of the agreement ensure that all of Odyssey’s costs will be reimbursed and they will in addition receive a percentage of the market value of any recovered artifacts. If the Maritime Heritage Foundation chooses, they will get paid in artifacts rather than cash, but Odyssey prefers cash.

Odyssey will receive the equivalent of 80% of the fair value of artifacts which were primarily used in trade or commerce or were private property and bear no direct connection to the construction, navigation, defense or crew of the ship, such as coins or other cargo.

Odyssey will receive the equivalent of 50% of the fair value of all other objects typically associated with the construction, crewing and sailing of ships including, but not limited to, the ship’s hull, fittings, fasteners, construction elements, clothing, organic remains, foodstuffs, cooking utensils, pottery, weapons, ammunition, ground tackle and navigational equipment.

For any private property including coins or other cargo administered through the Receiver of Wreck, the Foundation has agreed that Odyssey shall receive 80% of the value.

So yeah, they’re doing okay.

Two masked men broke into the Siskiyou County Courthouse in Yreka, California and stole the largest nuggets from a display case replete with gold nuggets, leaf, and dust from the area’s rich mining history. They got in through an unlocked window in the back of the courthouse, then broke a hand-sized hole through the thick bulletproof glass covering the display and helped themselves to the choicest pieces they could reach. Court employees discovered the theft when they arrived in the morning.

Surveillance footage timestamps the theft at 1:00 AM on Wednesday. For reasons still unclear, a silent alarm connected to the display never sounded. Authorities are investigating whether the alarm was intentionally disabled in some way or whether it simply malfunctioned. An attempted theft in 1979 was deterred by the silent alarm; the thief stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of nugget, but was caught by police just a few blocks away. After that theft, the glass was replaced with even thicker glass and a new alarm installed.

The County Treasurer/Tax Collector Wayne Hammar is the official in charge of the gold. He and his team will inventory the remaining gold to sort out exactly what is left. According to the Sheriff’s office, an estimated third to a half of the gold was stolen, including a famously huge nugget known as the “slipper” or “shoe” because of its shoe-like shape.

The Siskiyou County Courthouse gold was donated to the county over the years since 1851 by miners who lived and worked there. It is (was?) the largest gold display in the continental United States and was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco’s Treasure Island. The locals, many of whom have been involved in the mining industry for generations, are deeply connected to these artifacts so dazzlingly symbolic of their history.

That connection is so profound that when faced with a dismal economy the county refused to cash in on their gigantic hoard. They had 20% unemployment in 2010; the county budget was getting slashed left and right. Still, even under that kind of pressure they refused to sell their gold display, worth almost $1,300,000 in gold weight alone and estimated to be worth $3,000,000 because of its historical significance and because the gold is in its natural form rather than melted down into generic ingots.

There’s a very-sad-in-hindsight video of the gold display at the courthouse from 2007 when the Huell Howser PBS show “California’s Gold” filmed a segment there:

Here’s the surveillance video from Wednesday night:

If you have any information about the theft, please contact the Sheriff’s office at 530-841-2900.

During a routine valuation in Dorset, a Duke’s Auctioneers specialist found a rare working model of a guillotine made out of animal bone scraps. According to family lore, the model has been in the family since the 19th century, but they had no idea what it was until Duke’s expert Amy Brenan (who also generously provided the sweet high resolution pictures herein) identified it.

The guillotine was crafted by a prisoner of war, probably French, who was held in Britain between 1805 and 1815 during the Napoleonic wars. He collected sheep bones from the trash, carved them and put them together with impeccable attention to detail to make the 20-inch high model of an execution. An elaborate superstructure crowns the decapitation machine which rests on a platform with a victim lying horizontally waiting for the blade to fall. The victim is surrounded by armed guards on the platform, and the base of the structure is also manned by armed guards and cannons. Each figure has a hand-painted face, the blade of the guillotine drops and the soldiers holding weapons have moveable arms.

Amy Brenan describes its rarity:

“Napoleonic prisoner of war models made from bone and ivory are hard to come by. Many designs such as the model battle ships, spinning jennies and guillotines are so intricate that they disintegrate overtime and this makes any surviving examples extremely rare.

The sheer skill in creating a working model of the guillotine coupled with its social significance at the time, has made the guillotine models particularly desirable.”

Britain held approximately 100,000 prisoners of war over the course of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The Revolutionary government decreed in 1793-4 that prisoners would no longer be ransomed, or even taken, and Napoleon would later also eschew traditional prisoner exchanges. Since Britain was at war with France for pretty much the whole time from 1793 until 1815, they soon had more prisoners than they could stuff into their prison hulks. Enemy officers were allowed parole and housed in various towns across England, but most of the prisoners enjoyed no such privileges.

The first permanent camp built intentionally to house prisoners of war was built in Norman Cross, near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, in 1797. From 1797 to 1816, about 10,000 prisoners were held at the Norman Cross POW camp.

Conditions were miserable — prisoners were crammed into barracks on rows of hammocks, disease was rampant, England was cold and wet — albeit comparatively humane. (French soldiers were known to voluntarily surrender to the British because they treated their prisoners better than anyone else.) Typhus cut a swath through the population in 1800 and 1801 killing 1021 prisoners. At least another 770 more died during the camp’s 17 years of existence.

Many of these soldiers and sailors had been conscripted into the Napoleonic military machine. They had crafting skills from their civilian lives, and desperate to make a little money to pad their meager subsistence, they made models of bone, ivory, wood scraps, even straw which they used to create marquetry baskets. Many of them are signed with the artists/prisoners’ names. The prisoners would then be allowed to sell their crafts to the local inhabitants. (They also fabricated counterfeit banknotes and porn, but the authorities weren’t so supportive of those creative endeavors.)

A British soldier describes being dispatched along with his regiment in 1799:

“….to Norman Cross for the purpose of guarding some thousands of unhappy Frenchmen, cooped up in that place and clothed in yellow (the prison dress), to expiate their revolutionary sins by many years captivity and exile in loathsome prison, cut off from family and friends.

Their necessities forced them to exert their ingenuity in making various curious toys which the disposed of at a very low rate to enable them to procure a few comforts to alleviate their extreme wretchedness…..for want of clothes many of them suffered every privation rather than be clad in a conspicuous and humiliating colour.”

The Peterborough Museum has a large collection of these models from the Norman Cross prisoners, and many of them are in deteriorating condition due to their inherent fragility. A working Napoleonic prisoner guillotine with all the parts moving and all the paint still attached, therefore, is a museum-quality find.

The guillotine will be sold at Duke’s on February 9 with an estimated price tag of £4000 – £8000 (about $6300 – $12,600).