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.