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Nicholas Harlai, seigneur de Sancy, bought the 55 carat pear shaped gem in Constantinople about 1570 and took it back to France. He later became the French superintendent of finance. King Henry VI asked to borrow the diamond to use as security against a loan. A messenger was sent with the stone to Paris but never arrived. It is said that Sancy followed his route and found the messenger dead slain by robbers and the diamond missing. Knowing the messenger's loyalty, Sancy suspected that he may have swallowed the diamond to thwart the robbers, and after a grim search the diamond was recovered.

Sancy apparently sold the stone to James 1 in 1604, when he became ambassador the England. It was listed in the inventory of the British crown jewels in 1605.

In 1644, Henrietta Maria, queen consort of Charles I England, took many of the crown jewels to France to raise money for the royalist cause in the civil war, and gave the Sancy and the Mirror of Portugal to the Duke of Epernon as partial security for a loan. She could not repay the loan and the duke kept the diamonds.

Epernon sold the diamonds to Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister of France, and when Mazarin died in 1661 he bequeathed the two diamonds and 16 others to the French crown, all to be known as the Mazarin diamonds. In the 1691 inventory of the French crown jewels they are so listed with the weight of the Sancy given as 53.75 carats.

There is a story of another Sancy diamond in England at the same time, and when James II was deposed in 1688 he took this Sancy with him to France and later sold it to Louis XIV. The history of the Sancy is further confused by the fact that the gem was listed as 33.75 carats in the 1791 inventory of the French crown jewels, with no mention of the 53.75 carat stone of the earlier inventory.

In 1792, The French crown jewels were stolen and although some were recovered, the Sancy was not. In 1795 the dictorate of France gave some of the state jewels to the Spanish Marquess of Irande as security on a loan and among them was a 53.75 carat diamond which most experts agree was the 1691 Sancy. It was never redeemed and is said to have passed into the hands of the Spanish Bourbons.

About 1828, a diamond called the Sancy was sold by a French jeweler to Prince Anatole Demidoff and it became known as the Demidoff diamond. It was given by the Prince to his wife, the Princess Matilde, niece of Napoleon. On a side note, she patronized the jewelry firm of Cartier, which ensured the introduction of Cartier into court circles. In 1865, the stone was purchased by a Bombay merchant, and two years later was shown at the Paris Exposition by a French jeweler at a recorded weight of 53.75 carats.

In 1906, a diamond called Sancy was purchased by the first Viscount William Waldorf Astor from the Demidoff family as a gift for his son's bride, Nancy Langhorne, and it has been in the Astor family since that time. Most experts agree that the Astor Sancy is the true historical stone. Its weight is 53.75 carats. It was shown as the true Sancy in the "Ten Centuries of French Jewelry" exhibition at the Louvre in 1962.

The history of the Sancy is the most complicated of all famous diamonds, made so by incomplete records and because two diamonds known as Sancy have been confused in various historical accounts. It was one of the first diamonds to be cut in symmetrical facets.