Louis the XIV and biological weapons

[Sitnam]

The end of the second to the last paragraph for the Louis the XIV entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica reads:

@Britannica

When an Italian chemist offered him a bacteriological weapon, he gave him a pension on condition that he never divulge his invention.

Who was the Italian and what was the weapon?

Louis XIV | Facts, Biography, Children, & Death

[Bear_Nenno]

Certain it was either plague or rabbies. Both had been used around that time. No idea who the chemist was.

[APB]

Martino Poli.

[TSBG]

The wiki doesn’t mention the incident in the OP, though.

[enipla]

@Bear_Nenno

Certain it was either plague or rabbies. Both had been used around that time. No idea who the chemist was.

Rabbies can be weaponized?

Um, how? An aerosol? In water, food? Let lose the Racoons?

That’s sort of terrifying.

I was thinking it would be something more like cholera.

[Bear_Nenno]

The wiki says,

In 1701, he traveled to France to sell a secret related to the war. But the king who refused to use it nevertheless bought this secret by granting him a pension and the title of his engineer and foreign partner, supernumerary in 1702, of the Royal Academy of Sciences,

[Bear_Nenno]

@enipla

Rabbies can be weaponized?

Um, how? An aerosol? In water, food? Let lose the Racoons?

That’s sort of terrifying.

I was thinking it would be something more like cholera.

Placing the saliva of rabid animals into hollow shells and firing at the enemy. Polish did this in 1650.

[TSBG]

@Bear_Nenno

The wiki says,

My bad. I read it twice to be sure and missed it both times.

[Sitnam]

Thanks guys, don’t know why I couldn’t find it.

[jaycat]

@Bear_Nenno

Placing the saliva of rabid animals into hollow shells and firing at the enemy. Polish did this in 1650.

I don’t see what good that would do. It would still only kill one guy at a time. Why not just use a regular shell? (unless they went around biting each other.)

[dtilque]

@jaycat

I don’t see what good that would do. It would still only kill one guy at a time. Why not just use a regular shell? (unless they went around biting each other.)

It’s a terror weapon. Makes the enemy soldiers more afraid than usual, less likely to press the attack. Yes, bullets and cannon balls are just as deadly and probably more so, but the average soldier was likely more afraid of getting rabies than getting shot.

[griffin1977]

There is some reason to doubt it, from
this article:

Other allegations simply require more investigation.
Louis XIV of France supposedly gave an Italian ‘‘chemist’’ a
pension to keep the secret of a ‘‘bacteriological weapon.’’4
The source of that account is an article in the Encyclopedia
Britannica, written by a biographer of the French king.133
The article does not source the story, and others claim,
more plausibly, that the suppressed weapon was an incendiary device.134,135 The event apparently was well known.
The French writer Fontenelle wrote a life of Martino Poli,
the alleged inventor, mentioning the incident without
specifically describing the type of weapon involved.136
Without further evidence, there is no reason to accept the
claimed existence of a biological weapon

[JB99]

@jaycat

I don’t see what good that would do. It would still only kill one guy at a time. Why not just use a regular shell? (unless they went around biting each other.)

Nobody said it was a great idea.

This is attributed to a guy named Kazimierz Siemienowicz. History does not record the result of his attempt, but the fact that nobody has repeated it since 1650 suggests it was not a great success. You are correct that it would almost certainly be better to use a regular shell, or some kind of incendiary such as quicklime (which had been known for some time). The fundamental problem is that biological warfare is hard and just doesn’t work very well, because there are very few diseases with the right combination of traits to make useful weapons.

[bob_2]

No need for complications when a trebuchet and some rotting corpses will do the job.

Gabriele De’ Mussi, a lawyer from near Genoa writing in about 1348, is believed to have recorded the account of the earliest use of plague as a weapon of war at Caffa in 1346.

“The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside. What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many bodies as they could into the sea. As soon as the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army. Moreover one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone. No one knew, or could discover, a means of defence.” (Horrox, p. 17).

Plague at the Siege of Caffa, 1346