mental_floss magazine
SUBSCRIBE >
GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS >
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS >
subscriber services >
Having touched briefly upon the lamentable scouring-to-death of Bibiana, patron saint of hangover cures, we promised to elaborate further on this method of execution, and famous folk who have endured it. Unfortunately, there weren’t all that many famous people to be found: besides Jesus, who was scourged (but not to death) by Pilate, other scourgees include little-known martyrs like Jeremiah of Cordoba, executed in 851 by the Islamic rulers of his Spanish town for denouncing Muhammad in public. (Not exactly a household name, Jeremiah of Cordoba.) So we thought we’d expand our survey to include celebrity victims of keelhauling and drawing and quartering, and then promptly got sidetracked by the sheer multitude of elaborate, creative and horrible methods of execution thought up by our venerable forefathers (and mothers). Which got us to thinking: which would be the worst? Tell us what you think:
• Being scourged. For those of you who missed the memo, scourging is like whipping with a nasty twist: the whip has between three and nine ends (or “flays”), which often have nasty things like metal spikes sewn into them. (For you etymology geeks, “scourge” comes from the Italian scoriada, ultimately from the Latin: excoriare = “to flay” and corium = “skin”.)
• Being buried alive. A punishment exacted by Romans upon Vestal Virgins who had broken their vows. They were tossed into tombs with a tiny bit of bread and water, to give the goddess Vesta a better opportunity to save them, if she wanted to.
• Keelhauling. Given that this is uttered in nearly every sentence bespoke by movie pirates, precious few realize how nasty a punishment it really is. This is the least ancient of the tortures covered here — the Dutch navy officially sanctioned it in 1560 and banned it in 1853. Naughty sailors were tied to a rope that looped beneath the vessel, thrown overboard on one side, and dragged under the ship’s keel. As the hull was often covered in barnacles, you can imagine it wasn’t a pleasant ride.
More unpleasantness after the jump …
• In the Netherlands, evisceration was considered apt punishment for criminals guilty of regicide, and consisted of removal of the vital organs through the abdomen. The English, on the other hand, didn’t stop at mere disembowelment; for those unfortunates convicted of treason in the commonwealth, this was only the beginning — then you lost your head, and the rest of you was cut into four pieces — popularly known as “drawing and quartering.”
• Death by a thousand cuts, which is pretty much exactly as it sounds, and was popular in China from as early as the Song Dynasty (905-1279) until the turn of the twentieth century. It was abolished in 1905 after it became a Western symbol of the brutality of the Chinese penal system (and something of a PR problem).
• The brazen bull. We swear, we’re not making this up; only the ancient Greeks could have devised a torture so diabolical. Metalworkers fashioned a hollowed-out, brass statue of a bull, just large enough to fit a person — er, victim — inside. Once occupied, a fire was lit underneath, slow-roasting the tenant into oblivion. Inside the bull’s head was a complex system of tubes and stops which converted the prisoner’s screams into sounds like the bellowing of an infuriated ox. (I think this one gets my vote!)
• Another Roman favorite: being rolled downhill in a spiked barrel.
• Snake pit! Naughty folk were thrown in during the (apparently torture-happy) Song Dynasty in China (905-ish) and the Europeans also used it now and again, for instance in dealing with captured Viking warlord Ragnar Lodbrok in 865.
• This Persian method of execution takes the prize for weird: scaphism involves force-feeding the convicted, then leaving them tied up in the sun for the bugs to get ‘em. It’s not the bugs that kill you, however, so much as the gangrene and septic shock that their presence in your system invites, as well as old friends dehydration and starvation. On second thought, maybe this one gets my vote — it can take weeks to finally kick it.
There are lots more nasty ways to be capitally punished out there — but these are our (least) favorite. Next time, we’ll delve into the realm of fiction: our top ways to be killed in a horror movie.
Comments (33)
Comment
- Follow mental_floss
Hey, you didn’t mention the Catherine Wheel. This was a method where a person was tied to a wheel and spun around while the executioner clubbed them until their bones were turned to powder. A truly gifted torturer would not break the skin. THAT gets my vote.
posted by Nicole Jordan on 10-26-2006 at 12:28 pm
I’m just wondering if there is some sort of high-tech training involved in being able to inflict 999 bleeding wounds in a person without killing them until the very next one.
Or is 1000 more of a generality?
posted by punkinsmom on 10-26-2006 at 1:06 pm
I also remember hearing about a medieval European way of torture- hang the criminal upside down, naked, and saw them in half from the bottom to the head. If they passed out, vineger was poured on the wound.
Unless that’s a rumor of sorts that the House of Torture at the Renaissance Faire around here found interesting…..
posted by Kate on 10-26-2006 at 1:35 pm
Anybody who thinks the above methods of execution are the worst has never watched network TV on a Saturday night.
posted by Sheldon Siegel on 10-26-2006 at 1:50 pm
I can’t wait for the blog-sequel about death in horror movies!
posted by Lulu on 10-26-2006 at 2:05 pm
Another saint who was scourged was St. Bartholomew. He was punished for converting the King of Armenia’s brother. According to legend, he was scourged and then crucified upside down. One of the most famous portraits of him is in the Sistine Chapel. He is pictured holding is own skin….the face on/in the skin is said to the that of Michaelangelo. His saint day, August 24, has some pretty bloody connections. It couldn’t have been a good day for Bart, himself; in 1459 Vlad the Impaler had 30,000 people impaled; in 1572 the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France claimed at least 10,000 people. A good day to stay in bed.
posted by Worrals on 10-26-2006 at 2:07 pm
Not so ancient – only a couple years old but still, really, really bad.
Having to endure the immense pain until death apparently, of having one’s tax-funded gov’t display for all the world to see – their moronic parade of imbecility in a foreign land. Sacrificing one’s own blindly loyal followers in the ridiculously inane belief that their brave but foolish efforts to instill a foreign governance model into human tornado of calamity has any chance of succeeding. The excruciating cherry on top occurs as the head honcho of the fallacy appears to be the only one in the whole world incapable of recognizing the colossal defeat it appears to be. Oh, the pain.
posted by alan on 10-26-2006 at 2:50 pm
alan–may I suggest suicide? If you’re in that much anguish, there’s no reason to prolong it. Bullets are cheap and you can *rent* the gun.
posted by Jason on 10-26-2006 at 3:19 pm
Hey hey, cool it, guys! No reason to get all political here. We’re only talking about state-sanctioned murder through the ages!
posted by Ransom on 10-26-2006 at 4:19 pm
In the way of nasty tortures, the Blood Eagles also comes into my mind. A favorite of Vikings as an execution method. The victim was striped to the waist and tied. Using an axe, 2 holes were made on the back, and the lungs pulled out through them. The inflating and deflating lungs would give the impression of a pair of bloody wings beating. Death would come after some agonising ours.
posted by Rui on 10-26-2006 at 4:21 pm
Oh, sorry R, I lost my head for a minute there. Come to think of it, that is the idea of the subject matter after all:)
posted by Alan on 10-26-2006 at 4:35 pm
As far as torturous deaths, I think the Spanish inquisition holds a few…gems? Their focus points were the orifices, such deaths would include being forced to sit on a triangular cylinder as weight is put upon your shoulders and one nasty little device that is forced up the urethra and then turned which expands it and eventually bursting…yeah, then you bleed to death. Alan, have you ever considered a poetry club? If you do opt for suicide remember its up the road not across the street when slitting your wrists. By the way I would agree Scaphism seems to be the least preferable.
posted by Jarred Hanson on 10-26-2006 at 4:45 pm
In middle school, I had a world history teacher (who’s name escapes me; hell, my own name escapes me sometimes) who kept his students rapt by having a legendary lecture on torture around the globe. I recall one particularly vile means of disposal carried out by some sort of Native American tribe:
Stake an offender down in the desert, all splayed out & face-up. It would be quite hot, needless to say, and blistering and thirst would quickly set in. The lousy part, though, was that their eyelids were slit away before they’d been abandoned in the desert. With no means to shield their eyes, they would start to cook and the buzzards would come and peck them out, usually before death had arrived. I imagine they had the consistancy of underdone pannacotta.
posted by Amanda on 10-26-2006 at 4:47 pm
Thanks, guys. This is exactly what the comments section is for: the stuff too gross to print in the actual body text.
I’ll never eat underdone pannacotta again.
posted by Ransom on 10-26-2006 at 4:55 pm
don’t forget that the brazen bull was commissoned by some king and then when it was presented by it’s creator, he was tossed in as a way to test the thing!
posted by moonablaze on 10-26-2006 at 5:12 pm
I can think of two others. The iron maiden, a spike-lined sarcophagus, and, the Roman practice of strapping a corpse to the body of a capital offender until the culprit was infested with the effects of decomp.
posted by donovan merchant on 10-26-2006 at 5:26 pm
I think the NAzis deserve a mention here, considering their tortures were only decades ago. The doctor in charge of the Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, conducted experiments on the inmates in the name of Science. He was particulary interested in twins. He would inject the eyes of one twin with dye to investigate the effect on the other, leave one submerged in sub-zero or boiling water for the same purpose. He also tried several times to create conjoined twins, by sewing veins and skin together. He also once cut the side of the abdomen out of a man, and hanging a piece of meat in the hole to observe the effect of gastric juices. All done while they we still alive, however death would usually follow after a few hours, or days.
posted by shocked hippie chick on 10-27-2006 at 5:15 am
The Thai penal system practiced a particularly nasty form of prisoner torture up until the onset of the British and French colonial days. Much like the previously mentioned spiked-ball-rolling-down-a-hill but with one “glorious” difference. The victim was placed inside a bamboo and rattan ball which was lined with the ubiquitous spikes, then elephants would basically play football with the poor bugger.
posted by Lulu Jayne on 10-27-2006 at 6:05 am
The “Head On” commercial gets my vote.
posted by Vern on 10-27-2006 at 7:18 am
In the Middle Ages in French dungeons, there were stone recesses six feet deep by 18″ high by 28″ wide. A prisoner was shoved head first and face up into the opening and a locking grate at his feet was secured. The prisoner was unable to turn over or turn around. Nothing other than the prisoner was ever added or removed from the little chamber. They were simply left there to go crazy, scratching at the stone, until they died from dehydration, sepsis or rat bites. Of course the chambers were never cleaned of waste or bones. Other prisoners were simply added on top of the dessicated remains of the previous occupant.
Lovely, huh?
posted by Applesauce McKoy on 12-4-2006 at 8:34 pm
One of the most famous legends surronding the pirate black Beard is that if one stole from him. HE would tske the gold or silver the man stole melt it and poor it down his throat.
posted by spanky on 12-31-2006 at 3:07 am
surely chinse water torture ? leaving a poot victim left alone with no food or water tied down with water dripping on his for head making him go crazy and die of starvation or dehidration ….lovly aye
posted by morho on 6-8-2007 at 1:58 pm
When I came across your site I was looking for a reference to a form of execution I saw in a movie as a kid. the hapless miscrient is forced to dive headlong from a platform down a long curved blade. I can’t remember back that far (57 soon)except for this so it must have made an impression on me at the time for me to remember it for this long. I definately would not like to try it!
posted by Kev on 10-12-2007 at 5:41 am
What disgusts me more than these forms of torture is the enthusiasm with which they’re discussed. This isn’t entertainment — this is torture we’re talking about. Real people suffered those inhuman punishments! Rather than glorify them through documentation and discussion, we should forget them and never mention them again. I would hope we, as a human race, have evolved beyond the grotesque, plebeian schadenfreude of the Dark Ages.
posted by Raoul on 11-29-2007 at 12:15 pm
Raoul, I think it’s great that we discuss this subject. We must learn from the past, lest we repeat it. Besides its extremely interesting, and anybody reading this is probably taking the subject mater seriously. If not, everybody knows that there is a certain time limit before tragic things become comedic. It seems in your opinion we should stop discussing things of the past, and perhaps burn books while were at it.
posted by Leah on 11-29-2007 at 2:20 pm
“Time limit before tragic things become comedic”? Are you serious? Would you laugh about the Holocaust now, or will you wait a few more years before you do it?
“Burn books”? Your powers of comprehension astound me. If that’s the message you got from my comment, I might as well not have written it.
posted by Raoul on 11-29-2007 at 4:25 pm
if you can’t laugh about something you’ll only cry, and joking about torture is in no way condoning it. i’m also sure you’re not saying we should forget the holocaust, like other horrible instances in history. learn and live
posted by zach on 11-29-2007 at 11:13 pm
I think this one was done by the Aztecs or Mayans;
The condemned was tied down to the ground, secured at each limb, laying on his back.
Then, a metal bowl filled with rats was placed on the abdomen; upside down so that the rats could not escape.
A fire was lit on the top of the bowl, forcing the rats to burrow through the condemned in order to escape.
Sheesh.
posted by steppeppy on 1-21-2008 at 1:52 pm
I would have to say that the Iron Maiden was pretty gruesome.The prisoner was forced into something almost like a sarcophogus that had spikes and things on the inside.Death was by impalement and was instant if they were lucky.If not they suffered for up to two weeks in the sun and blood.bleah
posted by AiveeRose on 2-18-2008 at 1:38 pm
The ‘Death by 1,000 cuts’ was, in my opinion, far worse than it sounds.
It involved not so much slicing the victim, but more cutting bits of flesh from them, beginning at outer extremeties.
The victim would have cuts made to the ir arms and legs, but then would have things like their nose, ears and some fingers cut off. In response to ‘Punkismom’, the 1,000 is a general term, although I imagine care would have been taken to cut areas that inflict pain without the quick loss of blood.
Not pleasant! What people do to one another!!!
posted by James on 2-22-2008 at 5:23 am
The Blood Eagle sounds the worst in my opinion. The victim was tied up with their arms up, and someone took an axe and cut 2 holes in their back. They then pulled out each of their lungs through the holes and watched them breathe in and breathe out. This resembled bloody angel wings flapping.
posted by Stephen on 10-17-2008 at 1:20 pm
Crucifixion has my vote. It’s very painful but not enough to cause unconsciousness. The victim was often tied into position. Using nails actually hastens death.
There is evidence that the modern picture of crucifixion was perpetrated by Medieval artists who never witnessed one. In a real crucifixion the victims feet were placed flat against the upright and the arms were tied horizontally. The victim was in a permanent crouch and, with the tension on the arms being excruciating, the victim constantly adjusted — futilely seeking a non-painful position. It was possible for the victim to last a week or more. It was a favorite of the Romans.
Suspending someone by the arms over the head is a form of crucifixion. This was practiced by the Nazis and recently by the US Military in Asia.
posted by DAV on 9-19-2009 at 2:01 pm
Stephen,
The person would not be able to breathe once the lungs were removed because there is no way to produce a pressure differential. Outside of being painful, the victim will pass out after only a few minutes. Agonizing perhaps but blessedly brief in comparison with other methods.
posted by DAV on 9-19-2009 at 2:14 pm