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Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit,

the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs,

from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise,

relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft.

Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

On the 11th of September 1599, a young woman was taken to her execution in Rome.

Her name was Beatrice Chenchi, and she was just 22 years old.

Beatrice's tragic story begins in a remote fortress high in the Abruzzo Mountains,

where her father, a nobleman named Francesco Chenche, held his family prisoner.

For years, Beatrice and her stepmother Lucrezia endured his cruelty, his depravity, his unspeakable violence.

Francesco Chenche was a man of immense wealth and aristocratic power, a man who'd committed crimes so numerous that Rome itself whispered his name in horror. Yet he walked free. Bribery and

bloodline protected him from justice. The law it seemed

did not apply to men like him until his family decided it would. On a September night in 1598,

deep in that mountain castle, a conspiracy unfolded, a poisoned cup, a sleeping draft, a hammer, an iron spike driven

through flesh and bone, and a body hurled from a balcony to hide the truth.

Francesca Chenchi was dead, but the reckoning was far from over.

...