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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Menke. Listener discretion advised.

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The empire was collapsing around him. But Count Leopold Berchtold had a job to do. It was November 1, 1918, the tail end of World War I and the end of the Austrian Empire. The Emperor Charles I 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 Empress Maria Theresa, Empress Elizabeth, Marie Antoinette. And the, forgive me, crown jewel of the collection was genuinely staggering. The Florentine diamond, a stunning 137carat stone with a centuries long pedigree. With the future breathing down his neck, Count Leopold emptied the display case numbered 13, 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. 53 jewelry pieces were taken out of Austria. 14 of those were from the Empress Zita's private collection, 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 belong to the country itself. And that's 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 13 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 find, because after 1918, 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 137 carat diamond might have disappeared without a trace. In the end, it would take more than 100 years. But the Florentine diamond would be found in a place that nobody had expected. I'm Dana 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 17th 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 1477. 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 diamond, 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 2 francs to somebody who had all of the luck that Charles the Bold didn't. The stone then eventually was sold to Ludvico Sforza and then by way of the prominent Hoogier family, eventually became a treasure of the Medici, with the pit stop in the collection of Pope Julius ii. 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 1500s 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 I de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Ferdinando I 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 Cosimo is where the confirmed journey of our stone really begins. Hence its name, the Florentine diamond. When Cosimo died, the records describe the massive diamond surrounded by a band of smaller diamonds as a gift from his late father. Cosimo would eventually gift the stone to his own son, Ferdinando ii. He was the owner of the diamond when it was described by a French traveler and jeweler who named Jean Baptiste Tavernier, who saw the stone with his own eyes in 1657. But the diamond would leave Florence eventually. Dynastic families fall, but diamonds are forever. And the last of the male Medici heirs died in 1737. The diamond then went to the next Grand Duke of Tuscany, the French Duke Francis III, 3rd Stephen of Lorraine and his wife, Maria Theresa 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 aigrette, or an ornament meant to stick out of a hat, like a feather, I imagine. A very, very heavy feather. In 1865, 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 I 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 X of France. Although just as her husband would eventually lose his throne, Zita's father lost his duchy too, 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 and Empress anytime soon. That changed when Franz Ferdinand and his wife were shockingly assassinated in 1914. And then the then Emperor, Franz Josef, died at the age of 86. In 1916, World War I erupted over Europe, and Charles and Zita would be the final Emperor and Empress of Austria. At the end of World War I, 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. Well, the Austrian Parliament spoke, and on April 3, 1919, 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, property of the House of Habsburg Lorraine that remained in Austria. Incidentally, in 1935, that law would be repealed and the family would technically be given back its property. But then the Nazis would reintroduce the law in 1938. The law would then stay in place with the Habsburg heirs band until 1995, 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 V 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 V 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 34. Zita, just 29 years old, was now widowed with almost eight children. Alfonso XIII 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 any restored future was cut short in 1940, when Belgium was invaded by the Nazis. Sida'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 Zita 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 convenient, seeing 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 1952, when Zita moved to Luxembourg to look after her own mother, who was still astonishingly alive in her 90s. 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 60 years in 1982. A woman who had been born into royalty and seen the remnants of dynasty torn down around her in real time. Zita died in 1989 at age 96. 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 6, 2025, 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, recut and sold. Zita 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 100 years after her husband, Charles death. It wasn't until 2025 that Robert and Rudolf's sons, the 70 year old Lorenz von Habsburg Lothringen and the 67 year old Simeon von Habsburg Lothringen, respectively, told their cousin Karl von Hapsburg 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 mythic Florentine diamond, the first time any of the cousins had actually seen the stone in person since at least 1953. 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 going to happen to the diamond. Now, As I alluded to earlier in the episode, it's a bit of a legal airball. 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 2025, 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 cache. 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 iHeartRadio.