There are hardly any savage tribes in human history that have not used torture for religious purposes or as a form of punishment. In many parts of the world, prisoners of war have accepted torture as something inevitable and a normal consequence of captivity. This is why they often preferred to take their own lives before they went to prison. The Aztecs of Mexico thus sacrificed all their prisoners to their god Tezcatliepoc. The captive was placed on his back on a stepped pyramid, the full length of the sacrificial stone. The priests held his hands and feet firmly. A priest dressed in scarlet opened his chest with a sharp object, pushed his hand into the bloody wound and ripped out the still-warm beating heart. Sometimes, for a change, the victim’s hands and feet were cut off beforehand.
In Peru, the Incas sacrificed only important people, while ordinary prisoners were tortured and killed on the spot. The victim was stripped, tied to a stake and a sharp blade was used to cut pieces of flesh from different parts of the body. Such sacrifices also had a magical element. Men, women and children dipped their hands into the victim’s bloody body and smeared the blood over the body. Nursing mothers smeared it on their nipples, mixing it with their milk.
We can see that people have had different attitudes to torture at different times. For example, although many historians have argued that the ancient Greeks only tortured slaves, today we know that torture was also used as a punishment, and that it could strike any citizen. They saw the torture chamber as a suitable tool for this. It is true, however, that torture was never used to extract a confession.
The Romans also did not use torture to win confessions from free people, except when someone was accused of treason. Incidentally, different Roman rulers had different views on torture. Severus allowed the torture of a common-law murderer, Maximus in cases of incest, Constantine on suspicion of witchcraft. However, torture was used on martyrs, never against witnesses and never before the start of a trial. During the Roman Republic, individuals could also torture their debtors, imprisoning them in private dungeons, but they were not allowed to kill them. Theodosius’ code also allowed the flogging of heretics. The Roman flagellum whip was known, made of oxen’s thongs with lead balls at the end of them that dug into the flesh like a knife.
The most common way the Romans used the windlass was to twist the rope more and more so that it cut into the flesh of the man. Emperor Constantine devised a special form of torture for slaves accused of betraying their masters or seducing free women; molten lead was poured down their throats.
But no form of torture was as imaginatively devised as the fights of the Roman gladiators. They fought against beasts or against their own equals. They were never – as various writers like to describe them – heroes eager to show their strength. They were all already condemned to death and gladiatorship only prolonged their lives. They were preordained to die, so many of them committed suicide rather than suffer in the arena. There is the famous case of Sumacus, who ordered gladiators to fight each other in honour of his son’s birthday, but they preferred to knock each other out.
The Jewish principle of vengeance was also adopted by early Christians. Because of Jesus’ humanism, many have assumed that Christianity rejects cruelty, but this is wrong. The Roman principles of torturing traitors were taken up by early Christianity and extended to heresy as a betrayal of God, the worst crime against humanity. Proof of heresy was therefore of primordial importance and the masses did not wait for the church to prove it. They tortured heretics into confessing and finally burned them at the stake. Death at the stake was therefore originally an invention of the enraged masses, not of the state. It was only later that the Church reserved to itself the exclusive right to this type of punishment.
The Inquisition
No organisation in the Middle Ages that deliberately used torture has been written about as much as the Inquisition. The Holy Inquisition was the Church’s tribunal for trying heretics and suppressing their thought. We have seen that heresy was punished harshly even before the Inquisition, not always by death, but often only by excommunication.
This relatively light sentence encouraged those who doubted the teachings of the Catholic Church to take action, and various sects quickly sprang up to challenge the teachings of the official Church. The Inquisition, as soon as it was formed, set about the business with all zeal. It spread a wide network of spies across Europe, and the slightest suspicion could lead to a trial in a court of law.
But what led the church to act against dissent with such cruel and painful punishments as burning at the stake? The Edict of Tolerance, issued by Emperor Constantine in 313 AD in Milan, ended the persecution of Christians and restored their confiscated property. Even the Emperor himself became a Christian. Just twelve years later, the Council of Nicaea laid down obligatory church dogmas and threatened death to anyone who agreed with Arius, the heretic of all heretics, or even read his writings.
These decisions were then repeated and confirmed by the emperors in subsequent assemblies. Anyone who refused to submit to the new ecclesiastical orthodoxy, whether pagan, Jew or Christian heretic, was condemned, punished and executed.
In the 11th century, something new emerged in Provence and Languedoc, the most enlightened lands of Europe. A secular culture, the first to emerge after the collapse of antiquity, was beginning to emerge. Self-confident bourgeoisie added to their lives the glitter of beauty and luxury, alongside the dry necessities of daily life. They no longer wanted to be servants to princes and bishops, but to elect their own consuls. They began to live in a joyful and luxurious way for those times. Women, condemned to silence by the Church, became the centre of social life, and their favour had to be won not by the sword but by song and music. Troubadours were respected and highly valued.
New life has also sprouted in the religious centre. There were people who did not want to be told how to live the Gospel life by priests who had lived undignified lives. Since they did not know Latin, they wanted to read the Gospels in their mother tongue. They believed that each person had to come to the knowledge of Christ’s teachings on his own, not through priests whom they did not trust. In some places there was also a demand that priests should be driven from their properties.
The most widespread heretical division at the time was the Cathars (the name comes from the Greek word katharsis, meaning purification). Not content with exposing the abusive state of the Church, their movement completely rejected the priesthood, the cult of the sacraments and the worship of the saints, and regarded the Roman Church as an invention of the devil. They even rejected the cross as an empty outward sign.
They were forbidden to eat meat, they fasted permanently and marriage was only allowed in exceptional cases. They also founded their own church. The most fantastic things have been said about the Cathars, whose austere life could not have appealed to the frivolous. The Church saw that it was impossible to kill heretics with the weapons of the spirit, since they understood and interpreted the Bible better than the priests, so it decided to use force, since for centuries these were the Church’s greatest strengths.
Christian kings humbly accepted their laws from Rome, and the Emperor of Germany and Italy stood humbly before the Pope in Canossa. Popes commanded rulers to eradicate heresy in their lands, and rulers obediently obeyed. In 1017, King Robert the Pious burned the first heretics at Orleans. Thirteen of the fifteen refused to hear of recanting their beliefs, even though they were promised pardon. Similarly, in Oxford and Cologne, their executioners were convinced that Satan himself had wrung their hearts and rendered their flesh insensible to the pains of fire.
The pyre in Orleans was not lit by the church, but by the ruler, because the church was not quite clear on what to do with heretics, and the people were divided. In some places, people felt sorry for the unfortunates who burned at the stake; in others, they were influenced by the clergy and did not want to miss the unusual spectacle.
In Provence, the danger to the Church was greatest, and in 1167 the Cathars even held an assembly in the Toulouse area, attended by envoys from various lands, even from Istanbul. They elected bishops and established a firmly organised church. The Roman priests could do nothing against this. In 1172, the Lateran Council announced a crusade, not against the Muslims, but against the Cathars in southern France. An army led by a papal legate invaded southern France in 1181, but without much success.
Inocent III therefore sent an envoy of three monks to southern France, with the task of finding heretics and handing them over to the secular authorities for execution. The secular authorities, with the monarch at their head, did not, however, make any particular effort to destroy them. These three monks, who had the Pope’s plenipotentiary power over church princes and provincial rulers, were the beginning of the papal inquisition. One of the monks, Pierre de Castelnau, even excommunicated Raimund, an independent provincial ruler, for his inactivity against heretics, but this did not help, since Raimund preferred splendour and art to religious quarrels.
There were more heretics than orthodox in the land. But the Church did not give in and finally forced Raimund to lead a crusade against the inhabitants of his own land in 1209, joined by all those whom the Pope could persuade to participate in order to save their sinful souls. Soldiers from home and abroad rampaged through the land, killing, raping and stealing. Cities fell, the Crusader army killed everything that moved, and the country was on the verge of collapse.
Raimund was succeeded by his son, who realised that he was no match for the many armies invading the country and promised the Pope to persecute heretics for the rest of his life. He became a vassal of the King of France, and the Inquisition reigned in his land. Heretics were outlawed and their property confiscated. Although no executions were mentioned, the Church’s anathema (excommunication) was identified with the death penalty, since anyone could kill the outlaws with impunity.
The first Inquisition Court was established in Toulos in 1233, followed a few years later by Aragon, Germany, Holland, the rest of Spain and Portugal. The procedure in all the courts was the same and everywhere it usually took some time before a trial took place. Sometimes a prisoner would sit in prison for several months before being summoned to court.
The torture to extract the suspect’s confession was first authorised by Pope Innocent. The court first asked the victim to confess his guilt. When he did not, he was taken to the torture chamber and shown the torture preparations, which had a profound psychological effect. The torture chamber was a dark underground room, lit only by torches, and the main means of torture were a pulley, a strainer and fire. There were few who did not confess their guilt after the torture was over.
In 1704, an English woman living in Madeira was accused of heresy and sent to Lisbon to face the Inquisition. She spent four months in prison with bread and water, but still did not confess heresy, and was repeatedly flogged and her breasts burned with a red-hot iron. Then they tied her to a chair so that she could not be moved, and put an iron clog on her left leg, which had been smashed in the fire. The clog remained on her leg until her flesh was burnt to the bone.
The English woman fainted, and when she woke up, she was flogged so cruelly that the flesh in her rags hung off her back. Then they threatened to plant a glowing clog on her other leg. The unfortunate woman could no longer bear the pain and signed a confession. She died a few weeks later.
During each interrogation, the Inquisitor or his representative was present, and the decision on what kind of torture to use was taken by the Inquisition’s tribunal. Any confession obtained by torture had to be signed by the victim at a later date. If they refused to do so, the torture continued. The tortures varied in length, but always in accordance with the practice or internal rules of the Inquisition. Thus, Philip III limited it to one hour, although victims often fainted long before that. For this reason, the torture was often witnessed by a doctor, who determined whether the unconsciousness was genuine or feigned.
The confession was followed by a verdict. For minor offences, the punishment was flogging, imprisonment, galleys or banishment; for more serious offences, it was the stake or strangulation. But confession did not always mean that the torture was over. It could have continued and the death penalty was only an additional punishment. Those sentenced to death were taken to the morgue in procession. This ceremony was known as the ‘auto ad fé’, was always held on a Sunday and ended with the condemned person being burned at the stake.
These were usually burnt publicly at the stake. Beforehand, they had to march in procession wearing a “san benito”, a knee-length tunic of yellow cloth, and holding a yellow candle. The tunic had flames drawn on it, reaching up to the sky, which meant that the victim would be burned alive; if the flames were pointing downwards, it meant that the victim would be strangled first and then burned.
There have always been enough victims. When French troops invaded Aragon, their general ordered the doors of the Inquisition Palace to be opened, and as many as 400 condemned to death marched through. It is difficult to know how many people were murdered by the Inquisition. The Catholic writer Llorente, who was secretary of the Spanish Inquisition for four years, told us that between 1481 and 1517 alone, in less than forty years, 30,000 people were burned and 17,000 sentenced to other punishments.
The Inquisition did not shy away from torturing nobles, rich men and priests. Don Carlos, the elder son of Philip II, attacked its brutal methods in front of his friends. This came to the Inquisition’s attention and the prince was arrested. Philip II realised that his power was less than that of the Inquisition, so he kept a low profile and did little to free his son.
Don Carlos was sentenced to death, but his position allowed him to choose the manner of his execution. He chose to cut his veins and bled to death. The power of the Inquisition was demonstrated by the case of Archbishop Carranza, famous throughout Europe. As the primate (leading bishop) of Spain, he was present at the death of King Charles V and gave him the last oil. He was always a militant ecclesiastical dignitary and converted many heretics in England, but the Grand Inquisitor Valdez hated him.
At a time when the struggle against Lutheranism was in full swing, Carranza was accused of being a Lutheran because of some statements that were taken out of context and thus took on a completely different meaning. Valdez managed to convince Philip II that the archbishop was guilty and to get permission to imprison him.
The King himself appointed the judges, and the trial dragged on for years. No records were kept, so we can assume that the priest was also tortured. The case was also taken up by the Council of Trent and came to the attention of the Pope. In 1576, during the seventeenth year of the trial, Carranza was brought to Rome and sentenced to solemnly recant his errors before the Pope and the Cardinals and to submit to ecclesiastical penance. The Inquisition thus triumphed over Spain’s highest Church dignitary.
There is plenty more proof that the Inquisition was not afraid to imprison even people of the highest nobility. Such was the fate of Queen Ivana of Navarre, her son Henry of Bourbon, King Philip of Aragon and others. There is no historical evidence that Don Carlos was condemned and killed by the Inquisition at the request of his father, Philip II. However, Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, was condemned by the Inquisition, as was Francesco Borgia, the third general of the Jesuits, who, although he escaped to Rome in time to avoid condemnation, had his writings banned.
Witchcraft
The only other thing comparable to the work of the Catholic Inquisition is the witch trials. But witches and wizards suffered the same fate in Protestant countries. What is more, people devised special methods of torture to persecute witchcraft. It was widely believed that a person practising witchcraft was marked by the devil himself. Therefore, the search for signs of the devil on the body led to various methods of torture that were used only in such cases.
Witchcraft has been persecuted since the dawn of time, but it was not until the Bull of Pope Innocent III that witches were identified as particularly dangerous enemies of Christianity who must be exterminated. Proving witchcraft sometimes did not even require torture. A witness statement or the mark of the devil on the body was enough, and a distinction was made between visible and invisible signs of the devil.
There were oddly shaped birthmarks, warts and freckles, strange scars and the like. The invisible ones were already harder to detect, but the judges were very resourceful. A spot on the body that was insensitive to pain, or from which no blood flowed when it was cut, was identified as the devil’s spot. They used a long sharp needle for this purpose and virtually always found a spot that did not bleed or was insensitive to pain. This could be explained by the fact that the victims had become insensitive to pain after prolonged torture.
This pricking of the body with a sharp object was particularly common in Britain, where it developed into a real profession. Those who practised it travelled the length and breadth of the country offering their services. The most famous of these was John Kincaid, hired by the city of Newcastle in 1749 for this very purpose. The contract they made with him stated that, in addition to his travelling expenses, he would be paid 20 shillings for every witch or wizard he found with whom he found signs of witchcraft, and that this finding would lead to a conviction.
During the reign of Charles V, a large stock of witches was discovered in Navarre. Two girls, aged about ten, accused themselves and confessed to being witches. They stated that they had been accepted into a sect that practised witchcraft. They also betrayed other witches and their meeting place. Both of them were supposedly able to tell which woman was a witch by her left eye.
The witches were thrown into prison, where they betrayed each other, and eventually the number of witches rose to almost 150. At the consecration ceremony to be admitted as a witch, each one had to be united bodily with a young man and then renounce Christ. A black goat then appeared in the circle of witches and received a kiss of submission from each one.
The men attending the ceremony turned into goats and each woman sat on one to bring all sorts of misfortunes to people, animals and crops. All these witches were punished severely, as there were too many to burn at the stake, but the executioner refused to torture them, saying that it was so much work that he would never finish it. So they just whipped them all severely.
Asian-style torture
Of all the countries in Asia, it is China that has been widely rumoured to have the most frequent, the most cruel and the most bizarre torture. This was the result of the accounts and writings of those who had lived in the country. But, hand on heart, in any country torture methods can be unusual, different and extremely cruel.
Thus, in China, monks caught committing adultery were punished very severely. A hole was drilled in their neck with a red-hot iron and a long chain was put through it. They were then driven naked through the city. When a monk bent down to grab the chain to relieve his pain, another monk, holding the chain with a whip, hit him on the back. The procession continued until the monk had raised enough money for his monastery.
China had several methods of capital punishment, from strangulation to beheading, the most gruesome of which even had several names: torture with a knife, death by a thousand cuts or cutting into ten thousand pieces. Sometimes such deaths were quick, but they could last for hours.
The torture was carried out as follows: the executioner had a basket in front of him, covered with a tablecloth. Inside were many different knives, each with a note on which part of the body it was intended for. He reached into the basket and, without looking, took out a knife. Only then did he see which part of the body he was going to cut. Sometimes he was bribed by the victim’s relatives to take the knife intended for cutting the heart first, and the unfortunate man died quickly.
In Japan, torture was also recognised by the authorities as a means to seek the truth. During the reign of the Tokugawa rulers from 1652 until the mid-19th century, Japan used mainly four methods of torture. People were flogged with sliced bamboo sticks, the sharp edges of which tore the flesh from their back or buttocks. Even kneeling on sharp stones, with knees weighted down with heavy stones, was not an option.
They were also able to bind the prisoner’s hands and feet so tightly that he soon found himself on the verge of death due to blood stasis. Only then was he unbound again. Sometimes they tied his hands behind his back and hung him from the ceiling. Now his wrists held all his weight, and the rope cut deeper and deeper into them until it reached his bones.
In Japan, they like to resort to the “death dance”. The convict was wrapped tightly in a light cloth and then set on fire. He burst into flames and jumped back and forth in pain, appearing to the onlookers to be dancing. They also knew something similar to the Chinese “twenty-one wounds”. Here, the condemned man was literally cut into 21 pieces, the last wound having to be fatal.
The Indian subcontinent has not been immune to torture. Much has been written about the torture called “kittee”, a kind of wooden squeeze. Using several boards, the hands, feet, head, nose, genitals and fingers were squeezed. The “anundal” was also often used. It was characterised by forcing the convicts into the most unnatural body postures. For example, their head could be pulled down below their knees and their legs tied with a rope tied behind their necks. Sometimes a leg was pulled sharply upwards and tied behind the neck.
In India, tax collectors had their own methods of torture to force farmers to pay taxes. Taxpayers were often made to squat with their buttocks touching the ground and their hands holding their ears.
Never again?
There have been many opponents of torture since ancient times. But their protests were directed only against the abuse of torture in courts, not against torture as such. Time and again, lawyers have declared that torture is against the common law, but it has nevertheless persisted in the courts for centuries.
In the Middle Ages, torture even gained importance as a procedure before the courts. One of the first to publicly protest against the practice was the Spanish scholar Juan Luis Vives in 1624. In 1740, Frederick the Great outlawed torture in Prussia, and the Frenchman Voltaire also spoke out against it. In 1764, Cesare Beccaria argued in his famous work An Essay Concerning Crime and Punishment why it was illegal to use torture to obtain a confession. Among other things, he wrote:
“For those who are guilty, the law should determine the punishment, so torture is unnecessary and confession is irrelevant. When someone is found not guilty, it means that an innocent person has been tortured, because in the eyes of the law, anyone who has not been proven guilty of a crime is innocent.”
The efforts of Beccaria in Italy, where torture was outlawed in 1786, and Voltaire in France, where the straitjacket and flogging were abolished in 1789, had repercussions in other countries. In Russia, torture was abolished in 1801, and in Spain in 1812. But often, sentences were the result of punishments not very different from torture. In England, for example, judicial torture was abolished as early as 1640, but burning at the stake continued until 1789, branding with a red-hot iron until 1834, and in Russia convicts were branded until 1863.
In the early years of the 19th century, the public was very upset about the brutal floggings in the English navy and army. Despite many protests, it was only abolished in 1881 and restricted to convicts in military prisons.
Crossing
The oldest form of torture was crucifixion, which can be traced back to the Phoenicians. The wooden cross as we know it today took different forms among different peoples and at different times. The cross, on which Christ was crucified, was probably the usual means of punishing the condemned in those times. It was customary for the condemned person himself to carry the wooden part of the cross to the place of execution, while the stake was permanently placed and driven into the ground.
The assumption that Christ bore the whole cross is therefore false. The condemned man was flogged after he had been tied to the cross, not before. Ropes and rarely long nails were used to tie him up. Only then was he lifted up and tied to the top of the stake.
The crucified man’s wait for death was long and agonising. Sometimes they even gave him water and food to keep him alive longer. During all this time, the crucified was subjected to additional torture. He was stabbed with sharp sticks, had flesh torn from his body with hooks, his legs broken, a small stake pushed into his anal opening or his face smeared with honey to attract insects. The Romans and other peoples usually left the body on the cross for so long that the flesh fell off and only the bones remained.
Torture by fire
This method of execution can already be seen in the Babylonians, the Jews and, of course, the Romans. They wrapped the condemned man’s feet in cotton dipped in oil and raised him high enough for the crowd to watch his death. His hips and ribs were scraped with a sharp iron, so that he was soon covered in blood. Then they lit a fire under his feet, which soon engulfed the oil-soaked cotton. The flesh of his legs was soon burnt by the fire, so that the bones showed and began to crack like dry shit from the heat.
Jehovah also used this punishment for incest and prostitution. “If a man has sex with his mother, it is ungodliness, so let both he and she burn in the fire.” The Roman Emperor Constantine ordered that any slave who had sex with a free woman should be burned alive, and the Inquisition condemned tens of thousands to death at the stake, and Protestants were not far behind. We need only recall the fate of the Virgin of Orleans and Jan Hus.
The speed of death at the stake depended on preparation and weather conditions. An unprofessionally prepared pyre, rainy weather or a headwind could prolong the agony of the victim. Later, it became customary to strangle the condemned first and then burn the corpse. Burning at the stake was never recognised as torture by the Spanish Inquisition or the English courts, but only as a form of deserved punishment.
Only torture by fire in a dungeon was recognised as torture, a typical way of gaining recognition in Spain and Italy, but less so in other countries. Here, the accused was tied to a log so that only his legs were free, and then his feet were smeared with lard. A fire was lit under them and they were literally roasted. When the victim started screaming, they pushed a piece of wood between the fire and his legs, separating the fire from the body and demanding a confession. When the victim refused, the piece of wood was moved away and the process continued. This method of torture was used when the confession could not be obtained with a tension rod or a pulley.
Branding with a red-hot iron was once the most widespread but mildest form of punishment and torture in England. The iron was shaped into various letters, according to the offence to be punished. The mark was usually branded on the inside of the left arm; for vagrants the letter R, for thieves the letter T, for murderers the letter M. The courts knew immediately that they were dealing with a repeat offender.
Sometimes, the stamp was also stamped on more sensitive parts of the body. For shoplifting, it was stamped on the cheek; for blasphemy, on the tongue; for perjury, the letter P was stamped on the forehead.Stamping was also used in France for a range of minor offences. For this purpose, a lily mark was stamped into the body of the convicted person.
Death by boiling water is also a very old form of punishment. The procedure was as simple as possible. It was particularly painful when the water was slowly heated and the condemned person was subjected to indescribable torture. A cauldron or shallow tub was used, sometimes with oil poured in. But these were all very simple forms of torture. Therefore, the ingenuity and perversity of some torturers knew no bounds.
Ancient writers have already described a torture device called the bronze bull as an invention of the greatest perversity. This device, made of life-size bronze, had an empty space inside and an opening on the back that could be closed. All this was used to allow the victim to enter the bull’s interior.
The inventor of this device knew that the tyrant Phalaris was a very cruel man, so he presented the new torture device to him himself. The condemned man was to be pushed into a bull, the entrance door closed and a fire lit under him. The heating of the metal would cause the convict to scream and howl, and a special system of whistles and flutes in the bull’s nostrils would turn these sounds into melodious mooing.
Phalaris was both surprised and horrified by the perverse thinking of an inventor who wanted to turn human torments into pleasant melodies. He cunningly ordered him to show him how the device worked. The inventor, pleased to have satisfied his master’s wish, climbed into the bull, and a fire was lit under him until he screamed in pain. The tyrant ordered him to be pulled out of the bronze bull shortly before his death and thrown into the abyss. Of course, he then used it to torture his enemies.
Pulley and winding mill
Torture with a pulley was a familiar tool of the Inquisition. The victim’s feet were shackled and his hands were tied behind his back with a rope hanging from a pulley attached to the ceiling. Then they hung heavier and heavier weights on her legs and pulled her up to the ceiling so that her feet no longer touched the floor. If the victim did not immediately confess, the pulley was pulled almost to the ceiling and then suddenly lowered towards the floor by a metre or two. The sudden fall was usually caused by a dislocation of the shoulder joints.
This was repeated until the torturers got a confession. This process had several stages, depending on the crime to which the victim was confessing. When the Inquisitor ordered torture to be used in the interrogation, the victim was simply hung by his arms, crossed on his back. If he ordered her to be tortured severely, this meant lifting her three times with a pulley, and when he ordered very severe torture, weights were also hung from her legs.
Another tool of the Inquisition was the stretcher, made of a wooden frame with rungs like a ladder. The suspect was tied to it and his wrists and ankles were secured with strong ropes to rollers at each end of the frame. On command, the prisoners began to wind the ropes around the rollers. The human body was stretched, limbs were dislocated and sometimes arms were torn off. There were, of course, several types of windlasses. In some places, the rope was wrapped three times around the legs and secured with wooden pegs, which were slowly twisted. The ropes were eaten into the flesh until they reached the bone.
In the case of extremely stubborn victims for whom the straining device was unsuccessful, water torture was used in addition. The accused was tied to a straining device, a silk or linen strap was placed in his mouth and water was slowly poured into his mouth. The constant flow of water gradually crawled down his throat, causing the same sensation as drowning. Sometimes the defendant’s nose was also blocked and water was poured into his mouth. The victim’s mouth gasped for air and swallowed more and more water.
Northern countries such as England and Scotland also had a special device called simply a boot. This was a kind of iron boot that reached down to the knee and had several small openings on the sides. Wooden or iron pegs were driven into them to butcher the leg. Then, when the torture with the first boot did not work, another boot with differently arranged holes was used and the torture continued.
It was the English who invented a special device called Scavanger’s Daughter. It consisted of iron rings, each made up of two parts that could be joined together. The accused had to get down on his knees and shrink as much as possible. The executioner pushed the ring between his legs, then sat on his shoulders and pushed them down until he was able to join one part of the ring to the other. The torture was so unbearable that few people lasted the hour or hour and a half that was the time allowed for torture. After half an hour, the victim usually started bleeding from the nose and mouth.
Whip
There is no older punishment than the lash, and while flogging cannot always be equated with torture, it has been recognised almost everywhere as a form of execution of court judgments. There were many types of whip. One need only think of the “cat o’ nine tails” used in the English navy, the knotted whips, the bastonads of the Arab and Turkish peoples, and the Russian knute.
In ancient times, flogging was mainly used by the church for punishment. When the Inquisition did not impose the death penalty, convicts were often sent to the galleys as rowers, where flogging was a normal part of the day. During the rowing, six unfortunate men were chained in a row behind a large oar, and then paddled continuously for eight to ten hours a day, with the aid of lashes. In the second half of the 19th century, when French Protestants were being persecuted by their fellow Catholics, flogging was very popular to punish women. However, this was hardly a real flogging, as a kind of racket was used, with nails sticking out of it, to hit the bare backside of women.
Ever since the 1689 Act allowed flogging, the British army has been convinced that it is the best way to maintain discipline. Thus, the British ‘cat o’ nine tails’ had nine ropes, each knotted in three places. A blow from this whip cut the skin as if it were made of paper, the knots tearing the flesh from the body. By the end of the 18th century, military courts could impose punishments of up to 1 000 lashes, and 600 to 700 lashes were commonplace. When the victim could no longer bear the torture and became unconscious in a pool of blood, the other lashes were continued at a later date, when the wounds had healed at least partially.
Flogging was already demanded by Moses as a punishment for transgressions against society, but he limited the number of strokes to forty, so that even in later times it was considered a common form of punishment. Less serious offences, such as drunkenness on a Sunday, having a child out of wedlock, or contracting smallpox, were not punished so severely, but in England in particular, special places were set aside in the towns for whippings for such offences. As flogging was already quite common, it was often used for private purposes. Masters flogged servants, teachers their pupils, mothers their wayward sons and husbands their tongues-tongued wives.
God’s judgement
For centuries, it was believed that the human body, with God’s help, could withstand fire. The guilty cannot do it, only the innocent can emerge unscathed from the judgment of fire. This thinking is evident in the biblical stories of Abraham, and this way of testing innocence has been used in early history as well as in medieval civilisation.
In England and on the continent, suspects were thus required to hold a broken piece of iron in their hands or walk blindfolded between nine broken plough blades, spaced at different distances. Such “divine judgments” were accompanied by church ceremonies, which were obligatorily accompanied by a priest. The accused was therefore required to spend three days with “bread and water” and attend prayers before being judged.
Given that many people managed to prove their innocence in the face of such a verdict, it is possible to suspect that some people already knew how to avoid getting burnt. Similar tests were also carried out with the “judgment of God”, using boiling water, which in some periods became as popular as the fire test. The victim had to push his bare arm up to the elbow into a cauldron of boiling water and pick up a coin or ring from the bottom. Sometimes the hand was wrapped in cloth, sealed by a priest, and left untouched for three days. Then the bandage was removed and if the hand was not burnt, innocence was proven.
Modern times
You would think that people in the last century were more civilised and less cruel than in the dark days of the Middle Ages. But this was not usually the case. The tortures were just as horrific, and many times the same methods of torture were used that were in place centuries ago, and the victims suffered just as much as they did in the past. These acts are close to us in time and are therefore familiar to us, whether they are the tortures of the First or Second World War, including the Holocaust, the apartheid tortures in South Africa, the massacres in Vietnam, the gulags in Siberia, the mock trials in Eastern Europe and the dictators in various countries of the world.
As we can see, Europe and America have not been immune to illegal methods of evidence gathering and have mainly used “third degree” torture. It is this type of torture, which can be both physical and psychological, that is rarely talked about. This method, especially the psychological one, is often used by the police, who want to extract a confession, but do not want to leave any trace of their work.
The third stage can be a prolonged interrogation, usually involving the deprivation of food and water. The same purpose is served by constantly waking up in the night and being taken in for interrogation, by making veiled threats against relatives, etc. Thus, in 1929, a murderer in America was locked in a cell with a mosquito infestation and no bed, and after a sleepless night he was taken in for interrogation, which lasted all day. Another defendant was taken to the morgue at 3 a.m., where he had to examine all the corpses in detail in the refrigerated warehouse. The police have consistently denied that such methods are used, because, in principle, such torture leaves no trace and everything is fine for the outside world, we only get upset when the newspapers make a big deal about it.
