Cagliostro: The Splendour and Misery of a Master of Magic

Cagliostro was either the greatest healer of his age or its most sophisticated con artist. Perhaps he was both. In this lavishly researched 1910 portrait, W.R.H. Trowbridge mounts a passionate defense of a man whom history has alternately worshipped and destroyed. We follow Cagliostro's meteoric rise through Europe's occult underground: a healer and alchemist who attracted royalty and commoners alike, a Freemason and Rosicrucian who promised transformation. Then came the Diamond Necklace Affair in France, which shattered his reputation and made him a scapegoat. Trowbridge meticulously reconstructs how prejudice and political calculation conspired to destroy him, culminating in the Holy Roman Inquisition's dungeon where he died in 1795. This is revisionist history at its most compelling: an argument that the 'charlatan' label was a convenient fiction, that enemies controlled the historical narrative, and that one of the eighteenth century's most fascinating figures deserves a second look.