Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankie listener Discretion advised the empire was collapsing around him, but Count Leopold Burke told had a job to do.

It was November one, nineteen eighteen, the tail end of World War One and the end of the Austrian Empire.

The Emperor Charles the First knew that his days were numbered and that he and his family needed to leave the country as soon as possible, and so he had sent Count Leopold, the Lord Chamberlain, down to the Imperial Treasury.

The display of crown jewels was staggeringly impressive.

This is the Habsburg dynasty, for goodness sake.

The display cases boasted glittering crowns, dripping pearls, and diamonds so large that they look fake.

There were jewelry sets that had belonged to some of the most famous women in history, Empress Maria Teresa, Empress Elizabeth Marie Antoinette, and the Forgive Me Crown jewel of the collection was genuinely staggering.

The Florentine Diamond, a stunning one hundred and thirty seven carrot stone with a century's long pedigree.

With the future breathing down his neck, Count Leopold emptied the display case numbered thirteen, wrapping the priceless jewels in paper and packing them into two bags.

That very night, the Count boarded a train for Switzerland, where the Emperor Charles, his wife Zita, and their family would begin their exile.

Fifty three jewelry pieces were taken out of Austria.

Fourteen of those were from the Empress Zita's private collector, while the rest were historical treasures that belonged to the Habsburg Lorraine dynastic household.

But the question of who most of those jewels actually belonged to turned out to be a slightly complicated one.

After all, technically, the crown jewels of an empire aren't really the private property of each individual reigning monarch.

They belonged to the country itself, and that certainly an argument that the new Austrian Republic would try to make, arguing at different points over the next century that the jewels had been removed illegally, even though at the time the imperial family had cataloged them as their personal possessions.

The display case thirteen would be left empty in the Royal Treasury a reminder of the treasures that had been taken.

But you can't argue about who owns something that nobody can confined.

Because after nineteen eighteen, the Florentine diamond disappeared, vanished with no record.

Was it lost, sold, stolen.

The most pragmatic theory is that it was cut into smaller, still probably jaw droppingly huge diamonds and sold off piecemeal.

Some people imagined that a servant had stolen the jewels away to South America, but the mystery of the missing Florentine diamond would go on to inspire novels and operas, captivating writers and creatives all imagining how a historic one hundred and thirty seven carrot diamond might have disappeared without a trace.

In the end, it would take more than one hundred years, but the Florentine diamond would be found in a place that nobody had expected.

I'm Danish Schwartz and this is noble blood.

The Florentine diamond is a genuinely stunning stone.

As I mentioned, it's massive, but it's also a unique and captivating color.

It's yellowish, slightly golden, once described as wine mixed tenfold with water.

Its documented history begins in the seventeenth century with the Medici in Florence, but there are a number of stories attempting to trace its earlier provenance.

According to one story, the original stone was cut for Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, who had been allegedly wearing it when he fought in the Battle of Nancy in fourteen seventy seven.

Spoiler alert for a centuries old battle.

But things did not go well for Charles, clearly if he did have the precursor to the Florentine eye, and it wasn't a good luck charm.

Charles and his men were brutally defeated, and Charles was killed on the battlefield, although his mutilated body wasn't actually found until two days later.

As the story goes, a scavenger had by that point already plucked the diamond off his body in the dirt, and, thinking that the stone must have just been cut, Glass, sold it for two francs to somebody who had all of the luck that Charles the Bold didn't.

The stone then eventually was sold to Ludovico Sforza, and then by way of the prominent Fugar family eventually became a treasure of the Medici, with a pit stop in the collection of Pope Julius the second along the way.

An alternate version of the history of the diamond, if it hadn't been fighting in the Burgundian Wars, is that instead of France, it had been over in southern India, and in the fifteen hundreds it was purchased from the King of Vijayanagar by the Portuguese governor of Goa, who then deposited the diamond with Jesuits in Rome until it was eventually purchased by Ferdinando the First de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Ferdinando the First gave the massive stone to his son Cosimo, who commissioned a Venetian gem cutter working in Florence to refine it.

However it got there, we know that here, with Ferdinando and Cossimo, is where the confirmed journey of our stone really begins, hence its name the Florentine Diamond.

When Cossimo died, the records describe the massive diamond surrounded by a band of smaller diamonds, as a gift from his late father.

Cossimo would eventually gift the stone to his own son, Ferdinando the Second.

He was the owner of the diamond when it was described by a friend, traveler and jeweler named Jean Baptiste Tavernier, who saw the stone with his own eyes in sixteen fifty seven.

But the diamond would leave Florence eventually, Dynastic families fall, but diamonds are forever, and the last of the male medici Aires died in seventeen thirty seven.

The diamond then went to the next Grand Duke of Tuscany, the French Duke Francis the third Stephen of Lorraine and his wife Maria Teresa of Austria.

They were the founders of the massive Habsburg Lorraine dynasty, possibly most famous to most audiences as the parents of Marie Antoinette, and with them the diamond made its way to the Austrian treasury.

Francis Stephen wore it in his crown when he became the Holy Roman Emperor.

The diamond would eventually be given a new setting in a hat agress or an ornament meant to stick out of a hat like a feather.

I imagine a very very heavy feather.

In eighteen sixty five, the head of the Imperial and Royal Court mineral Cabinet, weighed and recorded the stone, and it remained with the Habsburg Lorraine dynasty in the Imperial treasury of the Austrian Empire until the collapse of the Empire itself.

Speeding forward just a little bit, Charles the First was actually an unlikely emperor.

His great uncle was the emperor before him, and the next in line to the throne was his great uncle's son, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Maybe you've heard of him.

Controversially, Franz Ferdinand had married for love to a woman of scandalously low rank, and so their union was only allowed on the condition that it be a morganatic marriage, meaning that any of their descendants forfeited the right to the throne, and so Franz Ferdinand would be next in line, but after him would be Franz's nephew, Charles, who had married the perfectly respectable Princess Zita of Bourbon Parma.

Zita's pedigree was stellar.

Her mother was the daughter of the King of Portugal, and her father was the Duke of Parma and also a direct descendant of King Charles the tenth of France, although just as her husband would eventually lose his throne, Zita's father lost his duchy two before Zita was born, back when the duchy was annexed during the unification of Italy.

But Franz Ferdinand was in perfectly good health and Charles and Zita didn't expect that they would becoming Emperor an empress anytime soon.

That changed when Franz Ferdinand and his wife were shockingly assassinated in nineteen fourteen, and then the then Emperor Franz Joseph died at the age of eighty six.

In nineteen sixteen, World War One erupted over Europe, and Charles and Zida would be the final Emperor and Empress of Austria at the end of World War One.

When Charles and his wife were ousted from Austria, Charles was very careful not to use the word abdicate in his statement.

He still believed he was the rightful Emperor of Austria, even though he acknowledged that the people now had the right to choose for themselves what sort of government they wanted.

While the Austrian Parliament spoke and on April third, nineteen nineteen, they passed the Habsburg Law, officially banishing the family, barring Charles from ever returning to the country, and barring his male descendants from Austria as well unless they renounced all intentions of reclaiming the throne.

The law also confiscated all of the remaining property of the House of Habsburg Lorraine that remained in Austria.

Incidentally, in nineteen thirty five, that law would be repealed and the family would technically be given back its property, but then the Nazis would reintroduce the law in nineteen thirty eight.

The law would then stay in place with the Habsburg heirs band until nineteen ninety five, when Austria was required to repeal parts of it before joining the European Union because some of the law violated international law.

But of course Charles and his family didn't know about that entire saga to come.

At this point, they were in Switzerland in exile, heirs to a defunct empire.

In addition to being the now former Emperor of Austria, Charles had also been the King of Hungary, and he attempted multiple times to reclaim that throne, all unsuccessfully.

After his second failed attempt, Charles and Zita were arrested.

They were only able to make it safely to another exile thanks to the intervention of King George the Fifth in England, who no doubt was still incredibly shaken up by the brutal murders of his cousins, the Romanovs in Russia and wanted to prevent any other royal heads from rolling.

George the Fifth provided a military escort to bring Charles and Zita safely to the very fortified and isolated Portuguese island of Madeira.

Their children joined them soon after.

Charles would die on the island of a cold that developed into pneumonia.

Zita, who at that time was pregnant with their eighth child, was present at her husband's bedside when he passed away at age thirty four.

Zita, just twenty nine years old, was now widowed with almost eight children.

Alfonso the thirteenth of Spain allowed her and her family to come to Spain, and so she settled in the palace of Urubaran on the Bay of Biscay, where she lived on limited finances for the next six years, while educating her by this point eight children at home.

Eventually, the family moved to Belgium in order to be closer to some Habsburg cousins, but any semblance of comfort or the promise of in the restored future was cut short in nineteen forty when Belgium was invaded by the Nazis.

Zita's son Otto was declared an enemy of the state by the Nazis because he had tried to help the Austrian Republic resist the Third Reich.

Their castle was hit by German bombers and the family managed to flee, first to France, then to the Spanish border.

Because Zeita of Bourbon Parma was directly descended from Portuguese citizens, they were able to get Portuguese passports, but they wouldn't find safety in Portugal either.

The ruler of Portugal informed Zita's son that Hitler had demanded his extradition.

It was the United States who would help them, this time, offering them visas and allowing the family to arrive via ship to New York City.

Eventually, they all settled in Quebec, which was fairly conveniencing as everyone in the family spoke French and the younger children didn't actually know English.

Yet.

That was where they stayed for years, living in Quebec, with Zita never remarrying, and they stayed there until nineteen fifty two, when Zita moved to Luxembourg to look after her own mother, who was still astonishingly alive in her nineties.

A Swiss bishop offered Zita use of a residence that he managed, where she would stay for the rest of her life, entertaining her massive family at the manor house and praying at a nearby chapel.

Zita was allowed to return to Austria for the first time in sixty years in nineteen eighty two, a woman who had been born into royalty and seen the remnants of dynasty torn down around her in real time.

Zita died in nineteen eighty nine at age ninety six, and the secret of what happened to the priceless diamond that had once been in her possession died with her, or so we thought.

On November six, twenty twenty five, the New York Times announced that the Florentine diamond had been found, well, not actually found, because something can't be found if it was never lost in the first place.

Turns out, the diamond wasn't lost or stolen, or as pragmatic people had assumed, re cut and sold.

Zida had kept the Florentine diamond safe the entire time and told only two people, her sons Robert and Rudolph, that she had it.

She made them promise to keep the location of the diamond secret for one hundred years after her husband Charles's death.

It wasn't until twenty twenty five that Robert and Rudolph's sons, the seventy year old Lorenz von Habsburg Louthringen and the sixty seven year old Simeon von Habsburg Lothringen, respectively told their cousin, Carl von Hepsburg Lothringen, who spoke in an interview with The Times.

A Times reporter was with the family in the bank vault in Canada, where he opened an old suitcase and unveiled the myth Florentine Diamond, the first time any of the cousins had actually seen the stone in person since at least nineteen fifty three, the stone had been left in the Quebec bank vault by Zita, not sold, not cut up, not bargained with.

Despite the fact that Zita and her family had been pulled ragged through Europe and their finances had been at times very meager.

She held on to what she believed to be an important piece of her family's history, keeping it intact, even if that meant keeping it secret, and she did.

That's the story of the Florentine Diamond.

But keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about what's going to happen to the diamond now.

As I alluded to earlier in the episode, it's a bit of a legal air ball whether the Habsburgs had absconded to Switzerland with their own private jewels or jewels that technically belonged to the state.

The family maintains that the diamond is theirs, after all, it's been in the family for generations, and when the Habsburg Law passed reclaiming all of the Habsburg property in Austria, the jewels were already out of the country.

Now, according to The New York Times in December of twenty twenty five, the Austrian government has put together a commission to see if they can get to the bottom of whether they do still have any claim to the Florentine Diamond or the other jewels that had been hidden in the secret Quebec Cash for their part.

The family has announced their wishes that the diamond be displayed at a museum in Canada as thanks for welcoming their family.

It seems a win for history lovers that no matter where the diamond ends up, it will be on public display, not sold, not cut up, and no longer hidden.

Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey.

Noble Blood is hosted by me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannahswick, Courtney Sender, Amy Hit and Julia Milani.

The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer rima il KLi and executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.