The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  One of the more nefarious devices adapted by the Romans was the wheel, mentioned earlier. Unlike the Greek wheel, the Roman version was more like a drum than a cart wheel. In the simplest version, the victim was simply strapped to the outer face, or rim, of the wheel and rolled downhill until they were crushed to death. An alternative version had the wheel mounted on an axle and suspended over a fire pit, allowing the condemned to be cranked around, again and again, slowly being burnt to death – not much different than being spit-roasted, but a lot slower. For a more direct approach, there was yet another version of the wheel where the outer surface of the rim was set with spikes and it was across these that the victim was tied. On the ground beneath the wheel was another bed of spikes. When the wheel was turned the poor wretch was literally ground to pieces.

  Possibly unique to the Romans was the sentence imposed on those who murdered their father. Patricides were tossed into a large canvas sack. Before the bag was sewn shut a handful of poisonous snakes were tossed in and the entire package was then thrown into a convenient river, lake or the Mediterranean.

  All these creative tortures not withstanding, the method of execution most identified with the Romans will always be crucifixion. As early as the late Republic, crucifixion was adopted as a means of executing slaves convicted of capital offences, but it was not until the Empire that people other than slaves could be condemned to this particularly nasty fate. Because crucifixion was such a slow, painful death, and because it made such a grand public spectacle (particularly when large groups of victims were crucified together), it became a favourite method of disposing of ‘enemies of the state’. It was crucifixion that would eventually become the execution of choice for disposing of both the recalcitrant Jewish population in Palestine and the proliferating number of bothersome Christians who began infesting the Empire during the second and third centuries after Jesus.

  At the time of Jesus’s crucifixion, around 27 or 28 AD, wholesale terror in the provinces was still in its infancy; Emperor Tiberius was too busy wreaking havoc back home. A half century later, when the Jews rose against Rome, Emperor Vespasian had plenty of time on his hands to crush the life out of them. When General Titus besieged Jerusalem in 70 AD, he crucified Jews at the rate of 500 a day. The problem was never finding enough Jews to murder, but finding enough wood in that arid land to build all those crosses.

  Here we witness the execution of four women by crucifixion. Note that the women are merely tied to the crosses and left to die of hunger, thirst and exposure. The woman on the left has been pieced through by lances and as such will die fairly quickly. It is uncertain whether the other three women will be granted a similar ‘mercy’.

  Tiberius, mentioned above, reigned from 14–37 AD and was a paranoid misanthrope who hated his subjects nearly as much as they hated him. Never being a hands-on kind of ruler, he spent much of his later years isolated on the Isle of Capri and left the brutalising of Roman citizens to his henchmen. To wile away his idle hours, Tiberius had a constant string of prisoners brought to his island where he enjoyed thinking up particularly inventive ways of murdering them. Most of these victims were his political enemies, or at least he thought they were, and they were seized and hauled to Capri without either a trial or an arrest warrant. They simply disappeared. It was an amazingly subtle method of terrorising his opponents and one that would be used again and again over later centuries – specifically by dictators in Africa, South America and by one particularly vicious German despot. As was true under dictators in all time periods, there were a few who spoke out against the Roman use of torture. One of these was the philosopher Seneca (4 BC–65 AD), who recognised that torture was not only unjust but a terribly flawed way to discover the truth. Fortunately, Seneca never pointed a finger directly at the emperor and was never invited to spend a weekend on Capri: his message, if it ever reached Tiberius’ ears, went unheeded. As a last insult to the Roman people, Tiberius selected his insane nephew to succeed him – his name was Caius Caesar. We know him better as Caligula.

  Like his uncle, Caligula preferred torturing people in private (such as in the same room where he was throwing dinner parties) over imposing terror on the population as a whole. Indeed, Caligula knew how to curry favour with the people of Rome and it was he who changed the Roman Games from true athletic competitions into the orgies of blood and death for which they are remembered. Fortunately, Caligula only ruled for four years before being murdered at the age of twenty-nine. Although his successor, Claudius, strove to return Rome to some semblance of sanity, his efforts were doomed. When his wife poisoned him in 54 AD, after a reign of thirteen years, she installed as emperor her son by a previous marriage – Nero.

  Fat, stupid, spoiled and vain, Nero may not have been as psychotically murderous as either Tiberius or Caligula, but the results were much the same. In mid-July, 64 AD, while Nero was holidaying in the country, a fire swept through Rome, nearly destroying the city. Contrary to legend there is no evidence linking Nero to the disaster, but people love to gossip, particularly about their government. When rumours of his possible involvement reached Nero he knew he had to find a scapegoat. There didn’t seem to be any Jews handy, so he picked on the equally troublesome Christians and instituted one of the most brutally public purges in recorded history. Hundreds of Christians were tortured into confessing to arson and thousands more were rounded up on suspicion of complicity.

  For months, Christian victims were sacrificed in the Coliseum. Dozens of new and cruel ways were thought up to kill Rome’s ‘enemies’ and delight the bloodthirsty crowd. They were dressed in the skins of animals and set upon by packs of dogs; they were sent unarmed against trained gladiators; they were hung by their thumbs and roasted over a slow fire, beaten to death or skinned alive. Some were crushed in wine presses; shoved into suits of chain mail that had been heated to red-hot; impaled on stakes or had their stomachs ripped open only to have their entrails eaten by wild animals while they were still alive. According to chronicler Magentus Rabanus Maurus:

  In this image we can see how two early Christian martyrs met their deaths by boiling oil. It shows how they were not only forced to suffer a bath of boiling oil but were also showered with it simultaneously adding to their unimaginable torment.

  Some were slain with swords; some burnt with fire; some scourged with whips; some stabbed with [tridents]; some fastened to the cross; some drowned in the sea; some flayed alive; some had their tongues cut out; some were stoned to death; some had their hands cut off or were otherwise dismembered.

  Some were even roasted in great frying pans – much like Darius had used to fry the Hebrew boy centuries earlier. A description of this particular torture comes down to us from the chronicler Gallonio, who wrote:

  The frying pan … was filled with oil, pitch or resin, and then set over a fire; and when it began to boil and bubble, then were the Christians of either sex thrown into it, such as had persisted steadfastly and boldly in the profession of Christ’s faith, to the end that they might be roasted and fried like fishes …

  When these brutal games were held at night, Christians were tied to stakes, doused with oil and lighted, serving as human torches to illuminate the playing field. Even the Roman historian, Tacitus, who was no particular friend of the Christians, wrote: ‘they were put to death, not for the public good, but to satisfy the lustful rage of an individual’. Possibly for the first time in human history torture was being carried out specifically for the purpose of public sport.

  And thus it went until the final, ignoble collapse of Rome during the fifth century, but the fact is, none of these ancient people understood how to use torture effectively. Brutal tortures and bloody executions were carried out without the least thought to the psychological aspect of pain. What the ancients failed to realise is that the anticipation of torture can be just as devastating, and produce far more confessions, than the immediate and uncontrolled application of brute force ever can. Torture a man for a little while, give him a few da
ys in a filthy cell to think it over, and he is far more likely to confess the next time he is dragged into the dungeon than if he is simply torn to bits during the first round of questioning. Would their descendants learn more effective uses of torture than these ancient people ever did? In the next chapter we will examine the techniques of torture used in the medieval world to find out just how sophisticated the application of pain became over the next thousand years.

  TORTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WORLD

  After the final collapse of Rome in the early fifth century the centre of power shifted to Constantinople, leaving Western Europe at the mercy of the Germanic tribes, the Goths and Vandals. Common sense dictates that no matter how brutal things might have been under the Romans they probably got a lot worse. The truth is that many of the so-called ‘barbarian’ tribes had a more enlightened approach to justice than the Empire ever had. Writing three and a half centuries earlier, the Roman historian Tacitus recorded that the only crimes the Germanic people considered worthy of execution were desertion on the battlefield, cowardice in battle, consorting with the enemy and homosexuality. Other, lesser crimes, including robbery and murder, were punished with a fine which could be paid in cattle or other property – half of the fine being paid to the family of the victim, the remainder to the local chieftain or king. It would seem the Germanic tribes were more concerned with keeping every possible man ready for battle than in extracting judiciary retribution. Apparently, they took an equally enlightened view of religion. In 410 AD, the year Alaric, King of the Vandals, sacked Rome, he declared that any Roman who sought sanctuary inside a church was to be spared – a far cry from the treatment the Christians had received at the hands of the Romans.

  As followers of the gentle teachings of Jesus, it is not surprising that the early Western Church and the Christianised Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople, had progressive views on crime and punishment. The legal codes of Emperors Theodosius and Justinian confined capital punishment to murder, treason, adultery and counterfeiting if it was carried out by a slave. Under pressure from the Church, the Germans, who now controlled the remnants of the Western Roman Empire, grudgingly included murder in their slate of capital crimes. Generally, under Church law, lesser crimes were punishable by a variety of penances, the severity of the penance being in line with the severity of the crime. In many cases, the Church decreed that when the facts in a case were less than clear, punishment should be left in God’s hands; thus preventing human judges from making mistakes which God might construe as grievous sins. In the year 865 Pope Nicholas I wrote to the ruler of the Bulgar people insisting that forced confessions (extracted through the prolonged use of torture) violated the basic concept of Christianity. Considering the times it was a truly enlightened approach.

  Elsewhere, punishments were not always imposed with such wisdom. In Britain and Gaul (now France) criminals, slaves and those captured in battle were still sacrificed and personal disputes and criminal proceedings were settled by trial by combat (where the accused engaged in one-to-one battle with their accuser), or trial by ordeal, (where the accused might be forced to plunge their hands into scalding water or grab a bar of red-hot iron). If you won the battle or came away unscathed by the boiling water, you were presumed innocent. If these seem as harsh and unenlightened as Roman punishments, it is well to consider that much of Great Britain and Western Europe was about to fall under the domination of a group whose concept of justice and punishment were even more basic and frightening: the Vikings.

  The first major Viking raid on the British Isles took place at Lindisfarne Abbey, located on a small island near the Scots/English border, in the year 763 AD and was carried out with a brutality that became the hallmark of these intrepid warriors. As primitive as they may now be considered, Viking raids were carefully planned affairs, designed to provide the greatest possible psychological impact. When a Viking war party landed in their terrifying, dragon-headed ships, they swarmed toward their chosen target, killing anyone who put up the least resistance and many who did not. Men were routinely murdered, women were murdered – or raped and murdered – and babies impaled on spear points. When the object of their attention was a monastery, as it so often was, the goal was the plunder of coinage and any church ornament that could be hauled away. But the Vikings also knew that the clergy were part of a political infrastructure, capable of spreading the word that ‘the Vikings are coming and they were not to be trifled with’. The more people feared them, the easier the next conquest was likely to be. It was as clever a campaign of terror as any devised before or since.

  But Vikings were not only raiders. After conquering an area, they generally established a colony and made themselves lords over the local population, imposing harsh punishments and stiff fines on all who ran afoul of Viking law. To make clear that they meant business, when local chieftains or kings were defeated by a Viking army, they could be publicly executed by a method known as the Blood Eagle. This particularly decorative form of butchery involved hacking open the back of the victim with an axe and dragging his lungs through the gaping wound so it looked as though the poor wretch had sprouted a pair of bloody wings. In the words of one of the Viking Sagas: ‘… and [they] made them to carve an eagle on his back with a sword, and cut the ribs all from the backbone, and draw the lungs out there, and gave him to Odin for the victory they had won’. The same punishment was inflicted on any of their new subjects who dared kill a Viking.

  There were, of course, other punishments for other crimes. Murder and robbery were routinely punished by throwing the victim from a cliff and lesser crimes were punished by the imposition of a fine – sometimes as high as confiscation of all of a man’s property. Such fines, including those imposed on neighbouring, non-Viking, political entities to buy-off any possible Viking attack, were known as Wergild. For those petty kings and chieftains who refused to submit to this Dark Age protection racket there was always the option of going to war. In 870, King Edmund of East Anglia (soon to be known as Edmund the Martyr) refused to knuckle-under to these outrageous, pagan demands, took to the field of battle – and lost. As punishment for his effrontery, and for refusing to renounce Christ, the Vikings tied King Edmund to a tree, whipped him mercilessly, shot him full of arrows and hacked off his head.

  Two men sentenced to death by starvation in a stock inside an isolated cave.

  As northern England slowly collapsed under the Viking onslaught, the southern kingdoms, inhabited by the Anglo-Saxons, were making far better progress toward becoming civilised. Curiously, the only crime in Anglo-Saxon England generally punished by death was theft; in this harsh, primitive world stealing a person’s possessions was considered crueller and more malicious than simply killing them. When arson was involved, that is to say when one person deprived another of their home or crops by burning, the culprit himself was burnt. Most other crimes, including murder and rape, were punished by a stiff fine. When a fine did not seem sufficient to the degree of the crime, or when the public demanded some visible punishment, a turn in the pillory (called the healfang, or half-hang) was often added to the sentence. When the miscreant was a woman she might be subjected to the scealding (or scolding) stool; a device similar to the ducking stool of later years, wherein the condemned was tied to a chair and subjected to a good dousing in the local pond. There is no evidence that any of these duckings lasted long enough to cause any more damage than serious embarrassment. In general, the overriding concept in Anglo-Saxon justice was one of mutual responsibility, everyone was equally responsible for helping to keep their neighbour on the straight and narrow: peer pressure can exert a considerable force in small, isolated communities. Sometimes, when an offender continued to commit crimes over and over, rather than imprison or execute them, they were simply banished from the kingdom. What they did elsewhere was someone else’s problem.

  Whether this device was intended to restrain a victim whilst plunging them beneath the surface of a lake or river or was intended to hold them aloft and
captive for public display and ridicule is uncertain. It is likely that it probably served both purposes. This fine example can today be found in the Museum of Torture in San Gimignano, Italy.

  In an effort to codify, and thereby equalise, the laws of his kingdom, the seventh-century king of Kent, Ethelbert I, became the first English ruler to write down his laws. Like those of his contemporaries, Ethelbert’s laws relied far more on a sliding system of fines (peppered with the occasional public humiliation) than on physical punishment or execution – the need for soldiers to fight off the Vikings was too great to allow the death of any but the most hardened criminals. Women, on the other hand, did not fight and were therefore expendable. Women found guilty of theft or murder were executed. To make his concept of crime and punishment clear, Ethelbert even assigned values to specific parts of the human body and to life itself. Murder was punished by a fine of 100s. Should one person cause another to lose an eye, they were to pay the victim 50s or an equal value in goods. Should the damaged part be a toenail, the fine was 6d; the same fine being imposed if a man’s reproductive organs were damaged. Naturally, the fines increased if the injured party was a person of great social standing: rank hath its privileges. What all this shows us is that the power of the Church (at this period in time at least) played an important part in civilising the laws of those nations that had accepted Christianity. Inevitably, a share of all fines collected as punishment for a crime found its way into the coffers of the local church; a small price to pay for dragging society away from blood feuds and barbaric tortures.