Executioners

by Phil Clarke

  The head of the family, Paulus, confessed to have crippled or slain a total of 100 infants, forty-four adults and ten elderly people. He also apparently stole alcohol from the cellars of innkeepers, robbed churches and set fire to houses and barns. His wife admitted killing 100 children and nineteen elderly people through sourcery, as well as causing four gales and hailstorms, poisoning crops and cattle.

  When this bout of torture was finally over, the family were taken to the place of execution. Commissioner Wrangereck forced the Pappenheimer’s youngest son, ten-year-old Hansel, to stay and watch the ordeal, as if this would somehow transform the young boy into a model citizen. First the executioner took hot pincers to Paulus and his eldest son, ripping wounds in their tired torsos.

  His wife, Anna, had her breasts cut off and these were used to torture and degrade her and the two men further. Next, as if this was not enough, the prisoners were taken to a cross to pray and drink some wine (as was the custom in this part of Bavaria). Christoph Neuchinger, the official in charge of pro­ceedings, made the following official statement, giving his approval to the executioner. It was common at this time for executions to generate such hysteria that executioners were sometimes lynched by the spectat­ing crowd. Neuchinger’s words gave him passage to proceed in safety.

  I order the executioner to carry out his duty, and I warrant him peace and safe conduct, whatever may befall him.

  The executioner had been instructed to draw out the deaths as much as possible, and so was careful not to kill them too quickly, but after being broken on the wheel, Anna was eventually burnt alive and Paulus was impaled, as described here in the German manual ‘Punishment in Life and Limb’:

  This (impalement) was one of the most revolting punish­ments ever devised by human imagination and even in those days it was hardly ever used. The penal code of Charles V did not make provision for it. In barbaric regions, particularly the Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Salee where inveterate pirates dwell, if a man is thought guilty of treason he is impaled. This is done by inserting a sharpely pointed stake into his posterior, which then is forced through his body, emerging through the head, sometimes through the throat. The stake is then inverted and planted in the ground, so that the wretched victims, as well we can imagine, live on in agony for some days before expir­ing . . . It is said that nowadays not so much trouble is taken with impalement as once the case, but such criminals simply have a short spit thrust into their anus and are left to crawl thus upon the earth until they die.

  This was poor Paulus’s fate, skewered like a hog for no reason at all other than to provide an example to his fellow citizens.

  Duke Maximillian was certainly not the first, and he would not be the last person to inflict this punish­ment on his fellow man. The ancient Egyptians, the Persians, the ancient Indians and the Romans all practised some form of impalement. As did the Zulus, the Polish-Lithuanians and the Swedes. There are a few historical figures in particular who made impalement their trademark, and in some cases even their raison d’etre. Their names were Ali Pasha and Vlad the Impaler.

  Vlad the Impaler

  Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad III Dracula, or Vlad Tepes, was born in Sighisoara, Transylvania, late in 1431. He was the second son of Vlad II or Dracul, a military governor and an esteemed member of the Order of the Dragon, a secret brotherhood whose membership comprised Slavic rulers and warlords sworn to defend Christendom from the Turkish infidel.

  The word ‘Dracul’ has two meanings, the most common translation is ‘dragon’ but it can also be used to mean ‘Devil’. As a young man Vlad added an ‘a’ to Dracul meaning ‘son of’, so the translation of his full name would have been something similar to ‘Vlad Son of the Dragon’ or ‘Son of the Devil’– not a name to forget in a hurry, and one that the young man would certainly grow into.

  Vlad: The Early Years

  In order to begin to understand the life and actions of Vlad the Impaler, it is important to understand a little about the world he inhabited. Romania during the Middle Ages was nestled between two powerful forces: the Hungarians and the Turks. During this time of widespread political and social unrest, paranoia was rife within the ranks of the aristocracy. Life was cheap – even the life of a Romanian aristocrat. Infighting, inbreeding and frequently shifting alliances meant that anyone in a position of wealth or influence was in danger of being betrayed and killed by a member of their own family, and the House of Basarab, the royal family of Wallachia, were no different.

  Vlad II and his brood lived an opulent lifestyle during Vlad III’s early life. In 1436, his father assassi­nated Alexandru I – a Danesti prince – and rose to the throne of Wallachia. He and his family took up residence in the palace of Tirgoviste.

  Vlad Senior had been playing a dangerous game, remaining apparently faithful to the Order of the Dragon while simultaneously paying tribute to the Turkish sultan. Following the Hungarian invasion of the area, he betrayed the order of the Dragon, pledg­ing alliegance to the Turks in order to secure his position on the throne of Wallachia. He committed his two sons Vlad III and Radu the handsome to the Turks as ‘insurance’. Vlad senior sent them as hostages to Adrianople, where Vlad III would remain until 1448. It was here that he would have learnt about the Turkish culture, and the extremely violent ways they dispatched with their prisoners – impalement was widely used by the Ottoman forces at this time. On the death of his father at the hands of the Huns, at just seventeen years of age, Vlad III was installed on the throne of Wallachia – and then – just when it seemed that Romanian history could get no bloodier – the real carnage began.

  Bloodier and Bloodier

  Most of us know Vlad the Impaler as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, published in 1897. Compared with Stoker’s work of fiction the true story of the man himself is far more horrifying. The young Vlad III grew up to become one of the most brutal and depraved tyrants the world has ever known. In 1456, during his second reign as king of Wallachia (this time supported by the Huns instead of the Turks), Vlad began building Poenari Castle in the mountains near the Arges River. The very con­struction of the castle was a bloody affair, as anyone too old or weak to work could expect to be swiftly executed, and many of the slaves forced to build it expired due to injury or exhaustion in the course of the project. Vlad had already made his name as a particularly ruthless tyrant who was not to be trifled with, but worse was still to come.

  The Method

  Impalement is one of the slowest and most painful, not to mention gory, ways a human being can die. Vlad’s chosen method meant a horse was attached to each of the prisoner’s legs, and a stake was slowly driven into the body, usually through the buttocks, though sometimes through the abdomen, the chest or another bodily orifice. There is some evidence to suggest that infants were sometimes impaled on the same stakes forced through their mother’s chests, and ocasionally victims were impaled upside-down on the stake. Presum­ably, in these instances the stake entered the body through the mouth and existed at the other end – it’s difficult to guess which would be more painful! The stake itself was made of wood and oiled at the top, its length indicated the rank of the victim. Care was taken to make sure that the point was not too sharp so that the condemned died slowly in agony, rather than quickly from shock or ruptured vital organs.

  Vlad III was particularly concerned with matters of female chastity, so an unmarried woman who entered into a sexual relationship, an adulterous wife or a promiscuous widow could expect to endure an incred­ibly agonising death. Her genitals would be removed and her breasts sliced off, then she was skinned alive and impaled through what was left of her vagina on a red hot stake. Given this threat it is difficult to believe that any woman would consent to intercourse with any man outside of the marital bed! The likelihood is that these so called ‘adulterous’ women were actually victims of rape to begin with and innocent of the charge against them, but that didn’t seem to matter to Vlad. He killed them anyway.

  M
ost societies who utilised impalement as a form of capital punishment tended to reserve it for special cases – those of high treason or mass murder. Vlad, however, did not descriminate, using any excuse he could find. He murdered peasants and noblemen, men, women and children – anyone he considered superfluous to his master plan, or an unnecessary waste of resources. The sick, the lame, the poor and the destitute all met with this punishment. Many of the people he murdered were boyars – or members of the upper class, merchants and civil servants, who he considered deceitful. He recruited their replacements from the loyal working class in order to further secure his position on the throne. It was the boyars who were responsible for the betrayal and assassination of Vlad’s father and his elder brother Mircea, who was buried alive after his eyes were gouged out, following defeat at the battle of Varna. Vlad hated the boyars with a passion, and it seems he attempted to wipe them off the face of the earth, sometimes destroying entire families.

  Vlad impaled his victims in their hundreds and even thousands. The stakes were often arranged in geometric patterns, most commonly in a ring of concentric circles around a city’s outskirts. The decay­ing corpses were often left to rot for months on end – the sight and smell of such a spectacle must have been overwhelming and the potential for disease and parasites would have weakened the surviving population still further.

  The Forest of the Impaled

  In 1462, the Turkish army were growing stronger under the leadership of Sultan Mehmed II, and they invaded Wallachia with the intention of transforming it into a Turkish province. He came with an army three times larger than Dracula’s, possibly because Vlad had systematically brought his own country to its knees and murdered many of the people who would otherwise have fought in his army. Not having any allies he could call on, he was forced to retreat. He made for the capital Tirgoviste, burning his own villages and poisoning the wells on his way so that the Turkish armies would have nothing to eat or drink in persuit of him. When the sultan and his armies reached Tirgoviste, hungry and exhausted, they were confronted with a horrifying sight. The rotting carcasses of some 20,000 Turkish prisoners impaled on stakes were there to greet them at the entrance to the city. The incident came to be known as ‘The Forest of the Impaled’. The exhausted Turkish army fled in terror.

  Perhaps Dracula’s sole reason for these mass culls was to scare prospective invaders into believing that a sadistic madman ruled Wallachia, a man so depraved he would torture and kill his own subjects in their droves, poison their wells and burn their villages just to thwart his enemies. After all, if he did this to his own people – what would he do to his real enemies?

  Historians differ in their analysis of Vlad the Impaler’s motives. Some believe he, like Dracula of the novel, was actually involved in satanic rituals and enjoyed drinking the blood of his victims, believing it made him more powerful. Others think his actions were committed as an act of revenge against a society he hated for betraying his father, Vlad II. It is also possible that he committed these atrocities as a genuine attempt to enforce a stern moral code. However, few historians doubt that Vlad the Impaler derived some kind of perverted sexual pleasure from these cruel, painful and degrading executions.

  As an example of an executioner Vlad the Impaler is quite unusual. Most people who kill on behalf of the state are fairly level-headed members of society who believe they are working for the moral good, and confess a sense of discomfort at the prospect of dispatching people who are essentially innocent of any serious crime. Vlad relished administering pain and suffering to anyone – even young children. He made no known attempt to justify his actions and did not confess any feelings of remorse, putting him in much the same league as psycopathic serial killers such as Elizabeth Balthory or John Wayne Gacy. Indeed, later in his life, as a prisoner in Russia, it is recorded that Vlad tortured and executed the birds and animals that were unfortunate enough find themselves in his cell. He routinely impaled them on tiny spikes, perhaps proving that, far from killing his victims out of commitment to a strict moral code or as part of some convoluted home-defence strategy, he enjoyed it immensely – and found the thrill of the kill both personally and perhaps sexually fulfilling.

  Ali Pasha

  Ali Pasha, or the ‘Lion of Yannina’ as he came to be known, is generally remembered as something of an enigma. He was regarded by many as an important political figure in Albanian public life. Ali Pasha was born in 1744 in the village of Hormove, near the Albanian town of Tepelene. His contemporaries re­garded him as the promising son of a powerful clan and an energetic, quick-witted, sharp and determined young man with a bright future ahead of him. He was apparently extraordinarily skilled, democratic, non-religious and surprisingly modern in his general outlook.

  The Romantic ‘Hero’

  Later in his life, European authors, men of letters and emminent scholars visited his camp, and consulates from the four major world powers of England, France, Russia and Austria existed in Ioannina under his rule. It is easy to see why a formidable figure like Ali Pasha would have excited and intrigued western romantic writers and thinkers such as Lord George Gordon Byron, who remarked in his work Childe Harold that ‘his highness is a remorseless tyrant, guilty of the most horrible cruelties, very brave, so good a general that they call him the Mahometan Bonaparte . . . but as barbarous as he is successful, roasting rebels etc, etc.’

  And there’s the rub. Ali Pasha was not as civilised or as forward thinking as he seemed on the surface, and he certainly was not without a troubled past. In 1758, when his father Veli, the governor of Tepelene was murdered, the young Ali escaped to the moun­tains with his mother Hamko, joining the bandits who infested the region at this time. Ali’s natural mental tenacity, coupled with the position of his birth, meant he quickly rose to power among the bandits. It was during this period that Ali Pasha honed his leadership skills and developed the violent, vengeful temper and bloodthirsty lust for power that would see him go down in legend as an oppressive tyrant who was hellbent on attaining and holding on to power by whatever means necessary.

  When the government, recognising his talent for leadership, installed Ali Pasha as the governor of Rumelia, he quickly became dissatisfied and seized power of Ionnina. It would become his base for the next three decades. He then exploited the weakness of the Ottoman government to expand his territory still further, gradually gaining control over most of Albania, western Greece and the Peloponnese.

  As a ruler, Ali Pasha was both strict and unfor­giving. He punished his many prisoners and enemies using the most barbaric practices, burning, roasting and drowning among them (he once had a rival publicly executed by sledgehammer – breaking every bone in the man’s body) but the gory, excrutiatingly painful and visually spectacular process of impale­ment was his favourite method of punishment, and he engaged in it as often as possible.

  Ali the Impaler

  In Ali Pasha’s favoured method, the victim was made to lie down with his legs spreadeagled and his hands tied behind his back. So as not to distract the executioner from his work, the victim was rendered motionless by the executioner’s assistant who sat on a saddle placed on the victim’s back while the executioner prepared the stake. He smeared the shaped end of the stake with lard and then grasped it with both hands and forced it into the anus of the victim as deeply as possible. Presumably this would have required quite a lot of energy on the part of the executioner – perhaps even a small run-up! Then he picked up a mallet and pounded the end of the stake so that it penetrated another 38-50 centimetres (15-20 inches). The victim was then hoisted upright and the stake implanted firmly into the ground. The victim’s feet were left dangling in the air so that the weight of his struggling body forced him down still further on to the stake. Relatives of the condemned may have attempted to pull downwards on the lower half of their loved one, forcing the stake further on it’s journey, thus hastening death.

  As with the Romanian method adopted by Vlad the Impaler some 300 years earlier, the end o
f the stake was left blunt so that it squeezed aside the vital organs rather than punctured them. Victims could expect to survive in agony for up to three days, depending on where the stake left the body. Friends and relatives hoped that the stake took a quick exit through the left side of the body, causing cardiac arrest. If it took a right and pierced the armpit, the shoulder or the chest, the victims agony would be prolonged and death would finally come through gradual blood loss or exposure. If a roasting was in order, the family of the impaled prisoner would be forced to turn the spit on which they sizzled, or face the same hideous fate.

  PART FIVE: NEWGATE PRISON

  Newgate Gaol

  The first prison in London became the final home for many condemned to death. Newgate was where the majority of convicted criminals were sent to await execution, but the inside of this prison proved just as deadly as the executioner himself.

  Newgate was one of the seven main gates into the capital set in the surrounding Roman wall. During the twelfth century a prison was built on the banks of the Fleet River, which ran parallel to this rough, ragstone boundary. It started life as a royal prison incarcerating those deemed dangerous to the Crown, that is until the reign of Henry IV, when it no longer discrimi­nated, taking any common criminal from London and Middlesex. The structure of Newgate changed many times over the centuries, usually out of necessity. Along with the countless volatile characters that dwelled within its walls, Newgate was visited regularly by fire, ensuring constant renovation. Not only was it badly damaged during the Great Fire of 1666, but fire returned in 1762, then in 1780 as a consequence of the Gordon riots and yet again in 1877. These incendiary incidents must have gone some way to perpetuating the belief that those who resided in the cells dwelled in the depths of hell.