17th century plot to use plague hats as bioweapons revealed
DON’T try on that fez. During the world’s longest siege, a 17th-century scientist hatched an ambitious plan – to weaponise the bubonic plague by painting it onto hats.
The plot, which has just come to light, was discovered by Eleni Thalassinou at the University of Athens in Greece and her colleagues in six letters sent between 1649 and 1651. During that time, the town now known as Heraklion in Crete was under Venetian control but besieged by Ottoman troops.
Michiel Angelo Salamon, a doctor in what is now Croatia, had an idea. The letters, sent between the rulers of the Venetian empire and the governor of a Croatian outpost, detail Salamon’s scheme for harnessing the plague, the deadly infection that swept across Europe in 1348 and had been circulating there ever since.
Salamon appears to have devised a method for distilling the essence of plague. “He availed himself of the presence here of the plague to distil a liquid expressed from the spleen, the buboes and carbuncles of the plague stricken,” wrote the governor of Zara (Historical Review, doi.org/9fs).
The governor proposed painting this liquid onto goods that besieging Turks were likely to buy – such as hats known as Albanian fezzes.
Such a plan reflects people’s understanding of the plague at that time: that it spread from person to person, and could be transmitted through cloth contaminated by bodily fluids.
The Venetian authorities were enthusiastic, but insisted Salamon personally oversee his plan – which he reportedly agreed to with “great unwillingness”. However, we do not know whether he ever executed his scheme because the letters end in 1951.
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