15 Famous People Who Allegedly Died of Food Poisoning

Henry I of England, the fourth son of William the Conqueror, ruled from 1100 to 1135, and was known as a harsh but effective monarch. According to a chronicler, he died in the Normandy town of Lyons-la-Forêt – supposedly after eating too many lampreys (a type of jawless fish with sharp teeth) against his physician’s advice, though many historians are convinced that it was food poisoning that claimed his life..

Pope Clement VII was head of the church from 1523 until his death in 1534, and oversaw a particularly turbulent and consequential political, military, and religious era at the tail end of the Italian Renaissance. He is best known for approving Copernicus’s theory that the earth revolves around the sun and commissioning Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” fresco in the Sistine Chapel. After months of illness, which included liver failure and blindness, he died at age 56, and while his death was attributed to eating poisonous mushrooms at the time, the cause is debated among modern historians.

The Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of the Austrian Habsburg monarchy Charles VI was in power from 1711 until his death in 1740. After a day spent hunting in cold and wet conditions, Charles fell ill and died; the official cause of death was eating poisonous death cap mushrooms. His death sparked the War of the Austrian Succession, which plagued his successor, Maria Theresa.

Anton Fils was a German composer who penned at least 34 symphonies and about 30 concertos in his short life (he died at age 26). In an odd bit of classical music trivia, a biographer attributed his death to a habit of eating spiders, which he claimed tasted like strawberries.

Johann Schobert was an Alsatian composer and harpsichordist in the household of Louis François I de Bourbon, prince de Conti, and is best known as a major early influence on Mozart. In 1767 he went mushroom picking with his family. Two restaurant chefs turned him away when he asked them to cook what he’d foraged, because they recognized the mushrooms as poisonous. Schobert refused to believe them, and a doctor friend reinforced that belief, so he made them into a soup at home. Schobert, his wife, the doctor, and all but one of his children died as a result.