QI The Book of the Dead

the death warrant of thirty-five entirely innocent men, changed the law of the land and disrupted the lives of thousands of English Catholics. He spent his last years in obscurity writing religious tracts that nobody read and haunting the Westminster law courts as a spectator. He never tired of complicated, self-justifying stories.

     
    If Titus Oates had any redeeming features, history does not record them. The same cannot be said of Alessandro, Count Cagliostro (1743–95). He too was a liar and a charlatan, but he became a genuine celebrity all over late eighteenth-century Europe. Magician, Freemason, alchemist, forger, spiritualist and healer, he inspired both Goethe’s Faust and Mozart’s The Magic Flute . It’s hard to think of another historical figure whose storyalso links Pope Pius IV, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, Casanova and William Blake.
    Born Giuseppe Balsamo in one of the poorest parts of Sicily, he lost his father while still a child. His mother couldn’t afford to educate him so, at the age of fifteen, with the help of relatives, he was sent to a nearby monastery. The Fatebenefratelli, or ‘Do-Good Brothers’, were Augustinian monks famed for their network of hospitals. Medicine and chemistry were well taught and Giuseppe was a gifted pupil, spending his free time in the library, poring over books of occult lore. But he was still a Sicilian street brat at heart and – rather like Oates – foul-mouthed, belligerent, and lazy. During mealtime readings of the lives of the saints, he swapped their names for those of notorious Palermo prostitutes. The monks rapidly tired of these games and let him go. Bright and unscrupulous, he settled into a life of petty crime and soon became a gang leader. Using what he’d learned in the monastery, he was also able to pose as a convincing alchemist. In this guise he persuaded a goldsmith called Marano that he had sold his soul to the devil and could locate a cave in the mountains stuffed full of gold, but that first he would need 60 ounces of the precious metal to perform some expensive preliminary magic. The venal and credulous Marano fetched the money and, at midnight, set out for the hills where he was promptly ambushed by six of Giuseppe’s accomplices dressed as devils armed with pitchforks and, according to the terrified merchant, blowing blue and red flames. They beat and robbed him and left him for dead. Giuseppe pocketed his share of the cash and left Palermo, never to return.
    The attention to detail is impressive. The costumes weren’t strictly necessary for the robbery, but they gave life to a tale thatwas told and re-told and which always left Marano looking a fool. This imaginative approach to crime – with the victims appearing to deserve their come-uppance – was to become Giuseppe’s trademark.
    Arriving at Messina on the other side of the island, he lodged with his well-to-do uncle, Joseph Cagliostro, before swiftly making off with some of his money and his surname. As Giuseppe Cagliostro, he set out on a series of escapades in Egypt and Turkey in the company of a mysterious adept called Althotas, an alchemist who spoke several Eastern languages. To fund their travels, they hawked a chemical formula devised by the old magician that supposedly transformed rough fibres of hemp so they appeared to be silk. These could be sold on to merchants at a profit, a rather more practical alchemy than turning base metal into gold.
    By 1765 he was in Malta, in the service of the secretive Knights Hospitaller, Europe’s richest and most powerful charitable institution. The Grand Master was himself an alchemist and Giuseppe’s training as an apothecary came in handy: he ground medicine during the day and concocted his own potions in the evenings. After three years, he decided it was safe to return to Italy and, in 1768, surfaced in Rome, carrying letters of recommendation from the Grand Master himself. These secured him the patronage of Cardinal Orsini, whose secretary he became. Rome had a thriving Sicilian community: sharp-witted, resourceful immigrants keen to make money, from whom Giuseppe learned how to forge paintings and antiquities and sell them to tourists. At the same time, he put his medical skills to good use, presenting himself as a physician and peddling the fruits of his Maltese experiments: an Elixir of Life that was said to delay the ageing process.

    Not long after he arrived, he fell in love with and married a