Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (42 page)

In France, the rack, the
banc de torture
, was of the standard type, but by the middle of the eighteenth century a different design had appeared. The victim’s wrists were bound by ropes to a windlass, as usual, but his ankles were secured to an iron hook in the frame, it having been realised that being stretched from one end was just as painful as from both ends, and required only one operator to boot.

Another version involved the use of a large, vertical wheel mounted on a horizontal axis. The victim was forced to lie back against its circumference, his ankles being secured to a stake in the ground and his hands stretched above his head, there to be bound to the wheel. The executioners would then slowly rotate the wheel, straining him upwards and backwards, while the incriminating questions were asked, continuing to stretch the victim until dislocated limbs, rupture and possible death ensued.

In Italy no machine as such was used. Instead, the victim was supported above the ground while his wrists and ankles were tied to rings set in opposite walls. The support was then removed, to be replaced by a stand on which was mounted a sharpened spike. This, positioned immediately under the victim’s backbone and left for an extended period, would result in the spike piercing the spine and could eventually prove fatal.

Whipping the victim while he was being stretched, common in many countries, was popular in Germany, but even that method could be improved by introducing further refinements such as incorporating rollers in the device. The victim was first stretched in the orthodox manner, and then a roller was inserted under his back, over which he was drawn forwards and backwards. Not just a plain, smooth roller, however; some had rounded wooden spikes fixed to them. But the type that ripped away flesh and muscle, tendon and tissue was the one from which pointed iron spikes protruded.

The racks described so far have been either horizontal, in the form of a bench, or vertical, such as the wheel mounted on an axle. However, one differently angled device existed, the Austrian ladder, its use being authorised by Empress Maria Theresa in 1768.

It consisted of a wide ladder leaning at an angle of 45°, its lower end fixed to the ground, its upper end secured to the wall, and between the feet of the ladder was a short axle, similar in operation to that of the windlass on a conventional rack. The victim was then forced to mount the first few steps of the ladder and to turn around so that he faced outwards.

His arms, tied behind his back, were then secured to one of he rungs, his ankles being tied to a rope, the other end of which was connected to the axle.

The executioner then rotated the axle, drawing the victim down the ladder by his ankles and thereby twisting his arms up behind, so that he was forced to lean forward in a vain attempt to alleviate the agonising strain that was being imposed on his shoulder-blades and arm muscles. And should he be recalcitrant, the executioner’s assistants would hold lighted candles under his armpits as extra persuasion. In extreme cases, where the victim was left in this position for some time, death could bring merciful relief.

It was not long before Germany added the Austrian ladder to its repertoire of penalties and, not being restricted by the Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana, the Austrian Code of Criminal Practice, they fine-tuned the ladder method by including such charming little touches as replacing the candles with flambeaux, torches consisting of thick waxed wicks twisted together, as well as applying red-hot irons to the sides, arms and sensitive areas of the helpless victim’s body until mental and physical breakdown almost invariably resulted.

The Ladder Rack

SAWN IN HALF

‘While crossways sawing was comparatively simple, the soft flesh of the supine victim’s midriff offering little resistance to the saw, the lengthways sawing presented certain practical difficulties…’

People who find it entertaining to watch a magician saw a woman in half would doubtless have reacted very differently had they been present in Persia when, in the Middle Ages, the sisters of  Bishop Simeon were accused of being witches and casting spells, causing the Empress to become seriously ill. On the Emperor’s orders, they were sawn, while still alive, into quarters, the gory remains then being nailed to posts between which the empress was carried in order to lift the spell.

Samuel Burder, writing about such customs in 1840, said that the custom was also practised not only among the Hebrews but even in European countries. ‘In the eighteenth century,’ he wrote, ‘it was still in use among the Switzers and they practised it not many years ago on one of their countrymen guilty of a great crime, in the plain of Genelles, near Paris. They put him into a kind of coffin and sawed him at length, beginning at the head, as a piece of wood is sawn in two.’

Burder described how ‘Parisates, King of Persia, caused Roxana to be sawn in two, alive’ and also referred to ‘Sabacus, King of Egypt, who received an order in a dream, to cut in two all the priests in his country.’

The despotic Roman Emperor Caius Caligula derived much sadistic pleasure in watching his victims being executed. Some of those condemned to death, including many of his own relatives, suffered death by being sawn in two across the middle.

Of the two methods, lengthways or across the body, the thought of the saw penetrating the skull would seem to be the most horrific, yet that method at least brought total oblivion rather quicker than one’s torso being subdivided.

While crossways sawing was comparatively simple, the soft flesh of the supine victim’s midriff offering little resistance to the saw, the lengthways sawing presented certain practical difficulties, the bones encountered requiring the force of more than one operator.

This problem was neatly solved by the Chinese, their victims being secured in a standing position, pinned between two wide boards firmly fixed between stakes driven deep into the ground. The two executioners, one on each side, would then wield a long, two-handled saw, working downwards through the boards, cleaving them and the enclosed victim into two halves. No lubrication for the saw was necessary.

Sawing in half

SCAPHISMUS

If horror could be graduated, death by scaphismus, or ‘the boats’ as it was also known, would rate within the top 20, its details being of truly nightmarish proportions. The historian Zonaras, writing in the twelfth century, spared his readers little in his description of the execution meted out by Parysatis, mother of Artaxerxes and Cyrus, to the man who boasted of having killed Cyrus when vying with him for kingship. The fact that the condemned man survived for as long as 14 days before dying almost defies belief. As Zonaras reported:

‘The Persians outvie all other barbarians in that, in the horrid cruelty of their punishments, they employ tortures which are peculiarly terrible and long drawn out, one of the worst being “the boats”.

Two boats are joined together, one on top of the other, with holes cut in them in such a way that only the victim’s head, hands and feet are left outside. Within these boats the man to be punished is placed lying on his back and the boats are then nailed together with iron bolts.

Food is given, and by prodding his eyes he is forced to eat, even against his will. Next they pour a mixture of milk and honey into the wretched man’s mouth until he is filled to the point of nausea, smearing his face, feet and arms with the same mixture. And by turning the coupled boats about, they arrange that his eyes are always facing the sun. This is repeated every day, the effect being that flies, wasps and bees, attracted by the sweetness, settle on his face and all such parts of him as project outside the boats, and miserably torment and sting him.

Moreover, as he does inside the closed boats those things which men are bound of necessity to do after eating and drinking, the resulting corruption and putrefaction of the liquid excrements give birth to swarms of worms of different sorts which, penetrating inside his clothes, eat away his flesh.

Thus the victim, lying in the boats, his flesh rotting away in his own filth, is devoured by worms and dies a lingering and horrible death, for when the upper boat is removed, his body is seen to be all gnawed away, and all about his inwards is found a multitude of these and the like insects, that grows denser every day.’