The Ruspoli Sapphire is a historic blue sapphire of Sri Lankan origin, weighing approximately 135.74 carats in its current cushion-shaped form, with a documented but contested provenance running from the seventeenth-century Indian Ocean trade through the Roman Ruspoli family and into the French Crown Jewels under Louis XIV. The stone is one of the most discussed of the great historical sapphires, both for its size and quality and for the long debate over whether the gem currently associated with the name is the same stone described in earlier records, or a separate sapphire whose identity has become entangled with the Ruspoli legend.

Documented history

The conventional account holds that the stone was acquired in Bengal by a member of the Roman Ruspoli princely family in the seventeenth century, brought to Europe, and offered to Louis XIV through the agency of jewellers attached to the French court. The price paid is variously reported in seventeenth-century sources at around 170,000 livres. The sapphire entered the French Crown Jewels and is recorded in inventories of Louis XIV and his successors. It survived the upheavals of the Revolution as part of the still-largely-intact crown collection, and is described in nineteenth-century inventories as a cushion-shaped stone of around 135 carats and exceptional Ceylonese colour.

The 1887 sale of the French Crown Jewels under the Third Republic dispersed the historical collection across the international trade. The sapphire identified at that sale as the Ruspoli passed through several private hands and is now reportedly in a private collection, with its current location and condition not consistently published.

Identity and confusion

The complication in the Ruspoli account is that nineteenth-century scholars and twentieth-century gemmologists have not always agreed on which surviving stone, if any, corresponds to the original sapphire described by Tavernier and the seventeenth-century court records. Some authorities identify a particular cushion-cut sapphire as the historic Ruspoli; others argue that the original was reset or recut at one or more points in its history and that the published images represent a stone with substantial differences from the seventeenth-century descriptions. The matter is further confused by the existence of several large historical Sri Lankan sapphires whose provenances overlap in the literature.

Gemmological character

Stones identified with the Ruspoli name are uniformly described as Sri Lankan in origin, with the silky, slightly cornflower colour and high transparency typical of the finest historical Ceylonese material. The cushion outline, the size around 135 carats, and the documented court ownership place the stone in the very small group of historic blue sapphires comparable to the Stuart Sapphire, the Star of India, and the Bismarck Sapphire — though the Ruspoli is faceted rather than star-cut and is unenhanced. No published modern laboratory report has been issued under the Ruspoli name in recent decades.

In the trade and the literature

For dealers and historians, the Ruspoli stands as a representative example of the Indian Ocean sapphire trade that supplied European courts from the late seventeenth century onward, and as a cautionary tale about the difficulty of tracking individual stones through resettings, recuttings, and changes of ownership. The standard references are the catalogues of the 1887 French Crown Jewels sale, the published inventories of the Louis XIV collection, and the gemmological literature on historical sapphires; the trade has long since accepted that the precise identity of the gem now bearing the Ruspoli name will probably never be fully resolved.

Further reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — historic sapphires
• International Gem Society — famous sapphires
• Lotus Gemology — sapphire reference and history