Medieval torture...how bad?

[hellenes]

How bad it was?
Its widely known in the popular modern culture that in Medieval times torture was a common thing and people didnt view it as disgracefoul as we do nowadays. Was this the historical case? How common or widespread torture was in the real history?

Hellenes

[Rodion Romanovich]

The witch processes saw some really horrible torture, including a worse version of the water torture (feigning a death experience making the victim feel like drowning) the USA used in Iraq and some places in eastern Europe. The popular fiction and some history magazines really makes it sound like it was an everyday thing that almost everyone suffered from. In a way, if you consider public whipping and similar punishments which were common during some periods. I believe the main effect of that was however humiliation rather than pain. But real torture for the sake of trying to obtain information or make examples of someone, or to vent your superstitious or otherwise irrational fear on some minority you feared or used as an object to let out your fear on, also existed, although probably not in as huge quantities as some popular texts imply. I don't think the Medieval common man had such a different view on torture from what we have, the main differences are rather in technological, society structural and other non-psychological factors. First of all modern torturers have often developed more intense pain or fear methods to get the time to torture more victims, while Medieval torture usually used slower working methods. Secondly, people hadn't like today realized that torture was usually inefficient for gaining information or that making examples with it was quite unsuccessful in the long run except in a few cases where however those who made examples didn't lose completely but there the making example wasn't really what helped them, extreme military and political advantages instead did.

So those are probably the main reasons why we think of Medieval torture as so horrible - because in practise it was, even though the humans who lived then probably didn't think too much differently than we do - but did what they did because the prospects were different and the experience in how useless torture and it's consequences are was very limited.

[Rodion Romanovich]

Sorry spelling mistakes and accidentally omitted words in post above, please delete the one above...

The witch processes saw some really horrible torture, including a worse version of the water torture (feigning a death experience making the victim feel like drowning) that the one the USA used in Iraq and some places in eastern Europe. The popular fiction and some history magazines really makes it sound like it was an everyday thing that almost everyone suffered from. In a way, if you consider public whipping and similar punishments which were common during some periods. But I believe the main effect of that was however humiliation rather than pain. But real torture for the sake of trying to obtain information or make examples of someone, or to vent your superstitious or otherwise irrational fear on some minority you feared or used as an object to let out your fear on, also existed, although probably not in as huge quantities as some popular texts imply. I don't think the Medieval common man had such a different view on torture from what we have, the main differences are rather in technological, society structural and other non-psychological factors. First of all modern torturers have often developed more intense pain or fear methods to get the time to torture more victims, while Medieval torture usually used slower working methods. Secondly, people hadn't like today realized that torture was usually inefficient for gaining information or that making examples with it was quite unsuccessful in the long run except in a few cases where however those who made examples didn't lose completely but there the making example wasn't really what helped them, extreme military and political advantages instead did.

So those are probably the main reasons why we think of Medieval torture as so horrible. Even though the humans who lived then probably didn't think too much differently than we do, they acted differently because the prospects and knowledge was different.

[Sardo]

Paraphrasing this from the introduction to our 'Economic history of the Middle Ages' course: torture was used by all the 'great' cultures (e.g. the Greeks and Romans), but as a part of judicial practices was not known in Europe until the 13th century, when it was revived along with Roman Law. Medieval torture as an interrogation technique was juridically fully regulated, whereas today, it is illegal but also much more sophisticated. Also, in its legal form it survived the Middle Ages by a few centuries: in the Southern Low Countries it wasn't abolished until 1794, and even later in other countries.

The witch trials are almost completely post-medieval: the first (sporadic) burnings didn't happen until the end of the 15th century and the height of the witch-craze occurred between the last quarter of the 16th and the middle of the 17th century. In the Middle Ages, by contrast, one did not really burn witches so much as try to establish wether a witch was combustible.

[Watchman]

Torture was mostly employed as a punishement anyway, particularly for crimes that were for one reason or another considered particularly heinous such as patri- or regicide. It was meant to set a cautionary example, although in practice the common folk tended to treat it as a sort of public spectacle and its sheer nastiness often afforded the one being punished a certain degree of sympathy which wasn't really the intention. Foucault's Observe and Punish or however it now is called in English has a famous and lenghty discourse on the topic; the case he discusses happens in, if I recall correctly, mid-1700s or so, on the side casually demonstrating that horrid torture as a legal remedy was by far not a merely Medieval concept.

The Inquisition was actually pretty boring. They had a few, simple, painful, not particularly savage tricks they relied on, and never came even close to the disturbing ingenuity the temporal authorities displayed. Then again, the Holy Office used torture as an interrogation method in particularly severe or deadlocked cases and not as a straight means of corporal punishement, so they had pretty good reasons not to be overly bloodthirsty - the least of which wasn't the fact that the person interrogated usually *wasn't* executed at some point afterwards, and unnecessarily crippling a fellow Christian would hardly be a very pious or proper thing to do.
The Inquisition was overall a far less dreadful bunch than the popular image has it. For example most of the time if an Inquisitor (or for that matter a higher temporal justice organ) got involved in a witch trial the suspect walked away free, as both normally required certain minimum standards of evidence to prosecute.

In the Middle Ages the folks who burned at stake were mainly heretics and suchlike; I understand death-by-combustion was actually specifically reserved for irredeemable heretics and the like, most of the others burned were first killed by some other means and only their corpse burned afterwards.

All that said, the people of old clearly did have a rather different perception of physical pain than we do. A fair bit of psychohistorical research has gone into examining why for example it was perfectly normal in country fairs for kids to tie cats to sticks and grill them alive, why public spectacles of wanton cruelty to animals were popular entertainment, and why the legal punishements on the average were decidedly several orders of magnitude more brutal than ours (the much-maligned Islamic sharia with its emphasis on amputating offending body parts - a thief's hand or a rapist's genitals, for example - is actually pretty tame compared to its European Medieval contemporaries; it merely seems unusually cruel by our time's standards).

[Rodion Romanovich]

The witch trials are almost completely post-medieval: the first (sporadic) burnings didn't happen until the end of the 15th century

You're right, but it was 1. just a parallell, 2. some define middle age to end in middle 16th century so it felt like part of the subject. Anyway, the peak was later and probably the more sophisticated torture stuff also happened later in the witch hunting era... just a little parenthesis...

[Watchman]

The Middle Ages extend beyond late 1400s only in some local contexts - but then again those localities usually didn't yet have too much witch-hunting around those times either...

No, witch-hunts are mainly a post-Medieval thing. Surprisingly many issues actually started getting worse soon after the Middle Ages actually. Women's standing in society was one - and yes, that's related to the increase in "witch" numbers...

I don't think later eras had much to add to the repertoire of torture-block nastiness the Medieval folks had already mastered though. When you're stuck with ironmongery, temperature and your own imagination which does *not* have the benefit of advanced psychological understanding, there's limits to what can be achieved.

It's not really relevant to witch-hunts anyway though since those were usually more like lynchings (and bloodthirsty mobs aren't terribly ingenious or sophisticated overall), or involved the relatively light-end Inquisition-grade interrogation torture. The disturbingly creative stuff was mainly the territory of the temporal judicial agencies.

[Kraxis]

I think much of the oercieved brutality does indeed stem from the inquisitions. They were painfully obvious being broadspectered and public. For instance the gauntlet runs of 'convicted' people that had renounced their old ways. Running through the public crowd who would then administer what they thought was appropriate. Nice...
Even ifthe inquisitions weren't too unjust the amount of rather brutal proceedings would have been rather substantial given the extent of the inquisitions.

Anyway, my personal opinion on the matter is that the most brutal tortures were normally in execution. Getting a red hot iron poked up your rear until it exited some point higher up, with a crossbar so you wouldn't slide down, then raised like in cruxifiction... Well call me squemish, but that is nasty! Or being SLOWLY drawn until you break up, unlike quartered by horses. Damn I have even read a translation of a French execution in that manner where the convicted man was simlpy too strongly built to be ripped apart. Well, since his execution had to be in this manner they began cutting his tendons and muscles, that didn't work and he still lived, they tried cutting open his belly (in the hope that he would rip like canvas). And this went on for an entire night and morning until the man finally died from bloodloss. YUCK!!!

[Watchman]

That's likely the incident Foucault discusses, or at least it sounds pretty similar. Could also be that humans are solidly enough built they're actually pretty difficult to tear to pieces with just traction - in that case they first tried one horse for each limb, then doubled the horses or something similar, and then the executioners had to start carving the man up so his limbs actually came off.

Probably a bit embarassing for the executioners really, they were after all professional artisans.

[Rosacrux redux]

Torture pertains a certain degree of "culture" and "State culture" for that. So, the first organized mass-scale, state-sanctioned torturing methods we have ample evidence from, come from Rome. Several Greek city states - especially "imperial" Athens - had a few torture methods in place, reserved for the "enemies of democracy" (wannabe tyrants and such) but didn't employ those in a mass scale (even the infamous gruesome "apotybanismos" was used in very few instances).

We are aware of torturing methods in the middle East, the Persian Empire and even the older incarnations of Pharaonic Egypt. Torturing survived in the hellenistic world, where we have some pretty well known instances (like the martyric death of the Macabees). But only in Rome we have such a thorough, detailed, well-established and wholly-accepted tradition of torturing.

It was extremely popular (in the fine roman tradition of panem et circensis) and there are a dozen really awful methods of torturing surviving in Roman era descriptions.

Torturing was quite popular (I mean it; torture was a public spectacle and in many occassions an interactive process in which the "public" also participated actively!) in Byzantium, especially in the 7th to 10th centuries. By the same time, 7th century, it started becoming more widespread in the "West" also, after a few centuries of lack of centralized rule after the collapse of Rome. By the 10th century the "West" has surrpased the "East" in torturing methods and sheer brutality, although the coming of the steppe people in the "civilized" world revitalized the whole torture concept in the East after the 11th century. It is the time when in the East the "impalement" - a very ancient tradition of the steppe cultures, along with skinning alive - becomes popular in the East, especially in the Turkish-related areas. Talking about impalement, it might own it's infamy to Vlad Dracul, but he was only the best student of the (masters of the art) Turks.

OTOH, in the West the tortures were quite sophisticated and by the 16th century have vastly surpassed anything the Muslim world had to offer. By 17th century Ming China has surpassed everyone else in sheer brutality and effectiveness of torture, of course.

In the Near East, tortures were in 99% of the times just the means of putting to death someone in a really horrible way and thus serving as both a punishment and an example. That is why all the Byzantine (Roman) torturing methods lead to death (bar one: the apotyflosis, blinding) and all Turkish/Muslim ones (impaling, skinning alive etc.) also. On the contrary, in the west in the post-medieval times, torturing was used mostly for other purposes.

I am not an expert on Far East and I am not aware of pre-Ming torturing methods used in China, so I can't comment on them.

[Fragony]

Anyway, my personal opinion on the matter is that the most brutal tortures were normally in execution. Getting a red hot iron poked up your rear until it exited some point higher up, with a crossbar so you wouldn't slide down, then raised like in cruxifiction... Well call me squemish, but that is nasty! Or being SLOWLY drawn until you break up, unlike quartered by horses. Damn I have even read a translation of a French execution in that manner where the convicted man was simlpy too strongly built to be ripped apart. Well, since his execution had to be in this manner they began cutting his tendons and muscles, that didn't work and he still lived, they tried cutting open his belly (in the hope that he would rip like canvas). And this went on for an entire night and morning until the man finally died from bloodloss. YUCK!!!

Good old times

The chinese were creative as well, they would let bamboo grow right through you DEAR GOD!

[matteus the inbred]

the nastier sections of Viking society used to practice both death by archery (the subject was tied to a tree and shot full of arrows, but only hitting non-vital bits at first, i think an Anglo-Saxon king died like this and was considered a martyr...hence the 'faction leader executed' graphic in Viking Invasion) and 'blood-eagling', a supremely nasty method by which the victim's ribs were cut and pulled outwards to form 'wings', exposing the innards...

i did study some chronicle records from the late 14th century for my BA thesis describing a group of knights torturing a priest (one of the knights was a subject of the thesis, not the torture!), and they made use of ropes, weights, and fire, and paid particularly attention to certain dangly bits. the priest did not survive...! it certainly wasn't sophisticated torture by Ming standards, but it implies a degree of familiarity with that sort of thing.

[Rosacrux redux]

Yah, the Ming-standards sophistication is something like the "1000 cuts"... very creepy, indeed...

The enwalling (not in the Poe-ish style, the real enwalling) was widely used in W. Europe and it was if not sophisticated, yet brutally, convincingly, agonizing, long-lasting and darn effective...

[Kraxis]

the nastier sections of Viking society used to practice both death by archery (the subject was tied to a tree and shot full of arrows, but only hitting non-vital bits at first, i think an Anglo-Saxon king died like this and was considered a martyr...hence the 'faction leader executed' graphic in Viking Invasion) and 'blood-eagling', a supremely nasty method by which the victim's ribs were cut and pulled outwards to form 'wings', exposing the innards...

The 'Blood Eagle'... It is even worse than this, in some cases at least. When the ribcage had been opened the person could live quite long afterwards, long enough to be boring in the end. But if you were clever you would slap the lungs onto the back of the victim. The lungs would still be able to breathe somewhat (but the oxygen would soon run out) making it a gruesome spectacle.
But I wouldn't call that torture, 'merely' a nasty way of killing. Like cutting off arms and legs and letting the stump stand on the ground until he died.

The 1000 cuts is also pretty nasty and I would consider it a torture. Skindeep and rather long cuts, akin to papercuts, but continually for hours until you died of bloodloss or even a stroke (caused by pain).

[matteus the inbred]

But I wouldn't call that torture, 'merely' a nasty way of killing

i would! the dictionary defines torture as -
1.
1. Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion.
2. An instrument or a method for inflicting such pain.
2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony: the torture of waiting in suspense.
3. Something causing severe pain or anguish.

another medieval death sentence was 'peine forte et dure', which consisted of laying the condemned between two panels of wood and then adding weights on top over a period of days so the victim was slowly crushed to death. unless they got 'lucky' and died of exposure first...I think it was also used in the coercive form of torture.
for sheer unnecessary nastiness the rumoured method of Edward II's murder beats nearly anything else I can think of...! Vlad Tepes would've loved it. well, he probably used it.

[Fragony]

for sheer unnecessary nastiness the rumoured method of Edward II's murder beats nearly anything else I can think of...!

Well cough it up! What did they do?

[matteus the inbred]

it'll get censored...! mind you, kids love this sort of post i reckon, children can be so inventively nasty.

the story goes that they didn't wish to kill him leaving a mark on his body...so they put a plumber's horn (or a funnel of some kind) up his fundament, and then shoved a red hot poker where the sun don't shine...of course, agonising as this might be, you'd have to shove it all the way up to the diaphragm to kill someone immediately.

it's probably not true, but was invented because Edward II was almost certainly homosexual and this was seen by contemporaries as fitting for a sodomite. As to the leaving a mark on his body thing, well, i reckon some severe burns on the buttcheeks might have resulted, whereas suffocation would have been easier and (much) quieter...

[Rosacrux redux]

Skinning alive I consider the most gruesome way of killing someone... especially if the executioner is skilled... a great-great-great grandparent of mine, leader of a revolution against the Ottomans in Crete (Daskalogiannis) was killed that way. The executioner in his case was quite skilled and was skinning the man alive for more than 20 hours... just before the end, he was virtually left with no skin at all, from head to toes, but still was breathing, half-crazed by the tormenting pain and agony...

Impaling could also be extremely nasty... in some cases - when the executioner was a master in his "art" and could impale the victim from rectum to throat without harming any vital organs - the victims have survived up to 4 days, eventually submitting to internal bleeding!

[Fragony]

Ahum, the word I am probably looking for is YIKES

[matteus the inbred]

Impaling could also be extremely nasty... in some cases - when the executioner was a master in his "art" and could impale the victim from rectum to throat without harming any vital organs - the victims have survived up to 4 days, eventually submitting to internal bleeding!

sounds similar to the Japanese variant of crucifixion, where the victim was suspended on the cross and then had long spears inserted carefully into their body. a skilled executioner could insert up to 14 spears without piercing internal organs, and it took days to die...

[Sardo]

Well, this is certainly a good thread to cause sleep deprivation... And seeing as I'll be needing all the sleepless time I can get in this time of exams, please do break out the most horrible torture practises you can think of!

About the Blood-Eagle - I seem to vaguely recall reading somewhere, sometime that this was actually more of a myth and not really practised by the Vikings. Any conclusive evidence on this?

[Ironside]

Well, this is certainly a good thread to cause sleep deprivation... And seeing as I'll be needing all the sleepless time I can get in this time of exams, please do break out the most horrible torture practises you can think of!

About the Blood-Eagle - I seem to vaguely recall reading somewhere, sometime that this was actually more of a myth and not really practised by the Vikings. Any conclusive evidence on this?

Red something simular about the Blood-Eagle, but it's as vague as for you.

And for torture-practices:

You strap a human with the stomage upwards, then you take a cauldron upside down and place it on the stomage (or somewere around there), while trapping some rats in there. Then you start to heat up the couldron. The rats will panic and will desperatly try to dig themself out, through the human.

Also strapping someone on a v-shaped log (each leg on each side) with the pointy end up and then putting weights on the legs so you will slowly be cut in half.

Cruel enough?

[Rosacrux redux]

There is a variation to that reserved only for females - the bronze cage (a fine, chinese IIRC, method of torture). Instead of a bowl they used a bronze cage with a single rat inside and they placed this strategically... ahem... attached to the womans genitalia. They heated the cage, the rat panicked and tried to ...wel... eat his way out, through the only side that was not barred - the one leading to the womans insides.

A very horrible way to die, if you are a lady...

[doc_bean]

Heck, they probably tried that with a man and some hungry rats too, I hear rats will eat ANYTHING

[Just A Girl]

I still think Hung drawn and quaterd is the worst.

Although ive heard aof a torture that involves a Thin cilinder of glass.
that is inserted in to mans penis. "through the only hole"

And then the mans penis is hit with a hammet or other blunt object that smashes the glas cilinder in to Loads of little slivers.

(BOUND TO HURT!)

[Kraxis]

Also strapping someone on a v-shaped log (each leg on each side) with the pointy end up and then putting weights on the legs so you will slowly be cut in half.

I'm pretty sure this is a myth.
There was a very similar practice in use here in Denmark for use when the peasant (as in singular) didn't do as the local noble demanded on his time. This is from 1600-1800 (ca).
The peasant would be put on the 'horse' (that was it's name) and he would be in for a horrible time of pain, but it would neither be fatal or even permanently damaging to him.

The blood eagle could very much be a myth made up by scared monks. But the fact is that the vikings when enraged about honour could be very cruel. After all they had that common pagan belief in strength and derived from that, the right.
So a blood eagle would not be beyond them.

I mean they were actively found to be playing 'football' with heads at times. So while they were no barbarians, they were still not nice enemies.

[Sardo]

I still think Hung drawn and quaterd is the worst.

Although ive heard aof a torture that involves a Thin cilinder of glass.
that is inserted in to mans penis. "through the only hole"

And then the mans penis is hit with a hammet or other blunt object that smashes the glas cilinder in to Loads of little slivers.

(BOUND TO HURT!)

I actually physically cringed at this and could barely suppress multiple exclamations of horror. This is just too much. My goodness.

And now I actually do need to go to bed. Thanks a lot... Maybe this'll get real interesting if I manage that lucid dreaming thing from the Frontroom thread.

[matteus the inbred]

About the Blood-Eagle - I seem to vaguely recall reading somewhere, sometime that this was actually more of a myth and not really practised by the Vikings. Any conclusive evidence on this?

it's practice is certainly disputed, and may have been based on a misinterpretation of Icelandic sagas...still, Vikings were terribly inventive people for pointless nastiness!
IIRC correctly, Spanish peasants had been known to kill people they didn't like by lowering them very slowly, toes first, into a cauldron of boiling water...this may have only be practised during the Peninsular War however.
i do remember the quote 'the peasants were entertained by his screams for a whole afternoon'...perhaps watching Strictly Come Dancing isn't the worst way to spend Saturday evening after all.
the most amusing method of torture i read about was the notorious Reynald de Chatillon's attempts to get the patriarch of Antioch to finance an expedition. Reynald had him stripped, staked out in the sun and covered in honey, and left him for hours to bake and be tormented by flies and insects...naturally, the patriarch decided he'd been hasty and probably could afford to 'lend' Reynald some money...!

[Kagemusha]

I dont know if this classifies as torture,but pagan Finns tied christian priest inside a barrel and lots of hay and coverered the man and the hay with tar.After that they set a light the hay and kicked the barrel downhill.
I know that the subject was medieval torture,but always when i hear torture i think the native americans should be mentioned.
Im not sure that i remember right but there are some pretty disturbing eyewitness storys specially how the Eastern Indians tortured some of their enemies to death.
I remember one account where one of the tribes of the Iroques confederacy had captured warriors of some neighboring tribe.There was English soldiers witnessing what happened to some of those men and it was pretty awfull.They burned the enemy soldiers but not like Europeans burned witches in a huge stake.They tied the men on their hands to samekind of construction like the gallops for hanging many men but the Iroques tied them only by their hands.After that they started fixing small fires made from dry branches under the men,so small that the men wouldnt sufficate on the smoke.The fires burned their flesh of So the men were still alive when their feet were already charred.During the execution the enemy warriors sang their death songs and tryed not to show anykind of pain.I remember that the eyewitnesses told afterwards that the burning lasted for hours and first the warriors who were executed tryed to call names on the Iroques and ridicule them after that they started singing and as the pain started to be more bad the note of the songs turned more sad and finally stopped when they became unconcious or died.I cant imagine more terrible death then been burned slowly to death.

[Rosacrux redux]

matteus

IIRC the issue of dispute between Raynald and the patriarch of Antioch was the financing of the retaliation campaign against Cyprus, then a Byzantine land, because Manuel Komnenus (Byzantine emperor) turned down the matchmaking with Raynald's sister...

The funnier part is when the Byzantine army showed up in front of Antioch, with Manuel leading it. He was pretty mad at Raynald after all he did to Cyprus (surely the poor Patriarch eventually financed the band of mercenaries Raynald needed) but he chose a stylish way to take revenge: he forced Raynald to become his squire! When Manuel met with Baldwin of Jerusalem, the man leading Manuel's horse and aiding the emperor to get down from it, was... Raynald.