Portrait of Ladislao I of Naples
How Ladislao I di Napoli really died , called the Magnanimous ?
Was he the victim of an illness, as the official version wants, or of a murder with risqué?
Officially the cause of the premature death was a ' prostate infection, probably due to his well-known sexual promiscuity.
However, there is also a legend about that it could have a grain of truth.
Ladislao I of Naples was terrified of being poisoned and to avoid any danger he had food and drinks intended for him to be tasted for someone else before him.
The king was not wrong, in fact.
In the courts of the 1400s and 1500s, poison became the most used weapon to eliminate prominent personalities, politicians and enemies in general.
After all, the poison left no traces and finding the culprit was very difficult.
To escape the constant danger, the habit of having a taster spread ( see also https://www.pilloledistoria.it/12580/storia-moderna/assaggiatore-veleno).
In practice, those who feared being a target, before swallowing anything, let a person in charge taste it:if the victim did not die in a few moments, the food and / or drinks were not contaminated.
Ladislao I died in 1414, at the age of 38, after a fiery meeting with a mistress of his from Perugia.
It was said that the woman's genitals were covered with a lethal substance.
Not having the opportunity to achieve the goal in other ways, the opponents would have seen fit to infect the one thing that the suspicious monarch would never have dreamed of having tested ( Photo gives: vesuviolive.it).