Three Hapsburgs and a Reporter Walk Into a Canadian Vault
20th November 2025
The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.
My inbox is regularly deluged with story pitches, so I considered one that came on Sept. 15 with my usual dose of skepticism.
A publicist was offering “a potential exclusive” regarding “a highly sensitive, confidential matter,” involving a collection “lost to the world for decades.”
It sounded almost too titillating to be true. So I agreed to get on the phone and hear more.
Thus began my journey of reporting on the 137-carat Florentine Diamond, which had been missing for 100 years and was assumed to have been lost, stolen or recut and sold in pieces. It turned out the diamond had been under our noses all along: in a bank in Canada, where the Hapsburg family had stored it in a vault for security.
Jewels! Secrecy! Royalty!
Who could ask for anything more?
Quibble: The Order of the Golden Fleece is NOT the “Habsburg family house order”, which is the Order of Maria Theresa.
The Order of the Golden Fleece (Toison d’Or) is one of the oldest chivalric orders in Europe, originating in the Duchy of Burgundy in the 15th century and making it’s way to the Spanish Habsburgs over the course of time. During the War of the Spanish Succession it was claimed by both the King of Spain and the Archduke of Austria (Holy Roman Emperor), and it has been doubled ever since—any formal portrait of King Felipe will show him wearing it. (Since he’s a Bourbon, he wouldn’t be giving such pride of place to a “Habsburg family house order”.)
(But, really, who expects a scribbler for the NYT to get the facts straight?)