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Turi first wants to rule out one version of events recorded at the time that Cangrande was killed by contaminated water.
Cangrande is described as having the flux, so diarrhoea, being sick and a fever. And one of the Chronicles talks about him having had very cold water on a hot day, and that might have been would have killed him. I'm pretty sure that's not likely to have been the case.
Something that could have killed him, though, is dysentery. Now, that's also known as Camp Fever. You've got Cangrande and he is laying siege to Treviso. Certainly, the symptoms seem to fit, what Cangrande had.
Dysentery was a common problem in medieval sieges. Historically, in battle disease killed more men than their enemies. In the American Civil War, more than 600,000 men died, about two thirds of them through disease. But there is a problem with the dysentery theory.
The counterargument, though, is that dysentery is highly infectious. And the chronicles only talk about Cangrande getting ill.
If no one else had dysentery during Cangrande’s siege of Treviso, it looks more likely that he was poisoned.
Representation: www.josarsby.com/turi-king