SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Researchers have unearthed details about a 13th century cold case involving the brutal murder of a high-profile royal.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
First, let's set the scene. Imagine a nunnery in Budapest, Hungary.
DETROW: A place where the devout might have sung chants like this one.
(SOUNDBITE OF GREGORIAN CHANTING)
DETROW: About 800 years ago, a duke was murdered near this convent.
ANNA SZECSENYI-NAGY: Bela of Macso. So he was the duke of the Arpad dynasty.
SUMMERS: Bela of Macso was a pretty important Hungarian duke.
SZECSENYI-NAGY: And this dynasty ruled the Hungarian Kingdom for almost 300 years.
SUMMERS: That's Anna Szecsenyi-Nagy, a geneticist at the Research Centre for the Humanities in Budapest. She says, in 1272, Bela went to a meeting near the nunnery with some rival lords.
SZECSENYI-NAGY: He was invited to a council there, but instead of a council, it was probably an assassination plot.
SUMMERS: The lords thought the duke was a threat to Hungary's young king.
SZECSENYI-NAGY: Bela was accused of treason and of secretly collaborating with the king of Bohemia.
DETROW: The medieval histories all said that Bela had been killed. So when a damaged skeleton was found buried under the convent centuries later, in 1915, archaeologists figured it was Bela, but they had no way to be sure.
SUMMERS: Now a huge group of researchers have picked up where the archaeologists left off. Szecsenyi-Nagy's team compared the skeleton's DNA to samples from Bela's royal dynasty.
SZECSENYI-NAGY: The nicest and most solid proof was basically the analysis of shared autosomal segments, which we could compare with two known kings of the Arpadian dynasty.
SUMMERS: The body was his, but the scientists still had more questions.
MARTIN TRAUTMANN: Was it an accident, or was it really interpersonal violence leading to death - assassination, duel or some brawl that he did not survive?
DETROW: Martin Trautmann is a forensics expert. He examined the nearly 800-year-old skeleton.
TRAUTMANN: At first, never heard the name before. I heard of some of the major Hungarian kings. Maybe I never heard of Bela because he was killed before doing something really great.
DETROW: Trautmann found 26 wounds on the duke's body.
TRAUTMANN: It was clearly visible that these were not fractures or blunt trauma, but from cutting and slashing. Falling down the stair was no explanation for these wounds.
SUMMERS: Through a painstaking process, he pieced together what happened in the duke's final moments.
TRAUTMANN: He suffered blows from the front, from the right side and from the left side.
DETROW: Multiple people attacked him. Trautmann says Bela wasn't wearing armor and likely never even drew a sword.
TRAUTMANN: An attacker inflicts much, much more damage and wounds that were necessary. There was this, I want - not like, I want to kill you, but I want to kill, kill, kill, kill, kill you.
DETROW: The intensity of the blows proved one final detail of the story for Trautmann. The people who killed Bela were likely known to him and may have been the very lords he had come to meet.
(SOUNDBITE OF JULIOUS TANTZ'S "UNGARISCHER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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