King Richard's heart was richly preserved

PARIS - King Richard I, the 12th-century warrior whose bravery during the Third Crusade gained him the moniker Lionheart, ended up with a heart full of daisies, as well as myrtle, mint, and frankincense.

Those were among the findings of a French study, announced Thursday, which analyzed the embalmed heart of the English king more than 810 years after he died.

The biomedical analysis also uncovered less flowery and spicy elements such as creosote, mercury, and perhaps lime in the heart, which has been in the western French city of Rouen since his death in 1199.

Despite the embalming ingredients, the heart turned to powder long ago, doubtless because the lead box cradling it wasn't airtight. It's so unsightly now that it's kept from public view.

The study's leader, Philippe Charlier, suggests the flowers and spices were to give the king the "odor of sanctity." The study came out less than a month after a team of British archaeologists uncovered the long-lost remains of 15th-century King Richard III - a relative but not a direct descendant of Richard I - under a parking lot in Leicester, England.

Unlike that ignominious ending, Richard the Lionheart, leader of the Third Crusade, was ceremoniously laid to rest in three places.

His entrails were interred in the central French town of Chalus, where he died in a skirmish with a rebellious baron; his body reposes at the Fontevraud Abbey, beside his father Henry II and later his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine; and his heart, wrapped in linen, pickled for posterity and placed in a lead box, was sent on to the Cathedral of Rouen.

In 1838, the heart, already turned to powder, was rediscovered, transferred to a glass box, and placed in Rouen's Departmental Museum of Antiquities.

Charlier, a forensic medical examiner, and his 11-member team used the latest biomedical techniques to decipher the composition of the Lionheart's heart, the most symbolic of human organs.

Charlier maintains that it is the oldest embalmed heart ever studied and, belonging to a king, certainly the most prestigious.

The study was published in Scientific Reports, part of the Nature Publishing Group.

While the team used barely 2 grams of the brownish white powder that the heart had become, they found an array of flowers and spices used to embalm it, aimed at both conserving the heart and, Charlier theorizes, giving it a fragrant smell.