The 10 Most Agonizing and Theatrical Roman Punishments So Cruel They Were Erased From History

The 10 Most Agonizing and Theatrical Roman Punishments So Cruel They Were Erased From History

In the midst of the fire in March 1314, a man shouted out two names: the name of the pope and the name of the state. The Pope died 33 days later and the King followed shortly after. Historians say this was just a coincidence. Yet for 500 years people have used another word to call him.

 Curse The person who lit that fire never felt that he was did something wrong The death caused by power eventually comes back to power itself They are not only soldiers but also the operators of the earliest international financial network in Europe. The king borrows from them and the pope relies on them. Power, and this is exactly the problem. King Felice of France owed a large debt to the Knights and was unable to repay it.

It was he who chose another path. Arrest warrants were executed simultaneously across France before dawn on Friday 13 October. Hundreds of members of the Order were arrested before they even woke up from their sleep. Jacques Demolay was also arrested early that morning. It was heresy, devil worship, and desecration of the cross. Each of them was a capital offense at that time.

There was no evidence but there was torture. The interrogation lasted for 7 years. Jacques confessed under severe torture but was 13 years old. In March 2014, when the public sentencing was held in the square in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, he raised his head in front of thousands of onlookers.

He clearly stated that I was not a heretic and was innocent. I only made false confessions out of fear and pain. This sentence changed his fate. The court reversed the conclusion on the spot. He was judged as a heretic but he withdrew his confession. This meant being burned at the stake. A pyre was piled on the shore of an island in the Seine.

 Canon law stipulates that clergy are not allowed to bleed, so they chose Choose fire There is no knife, no blood, only fire. This is a clean execution in the theological sense. It can destroy a person in the name of God. Without a drop of blood, if the fire spreads quickly, carbon monoxide poisoning will cause unconsciousness and pain within 10 to 15 minutes. Therefore, it is shortened, but if there is insufficient firewood or the wind direction is wrong, the fire will become slower.

At that time, death could last for three to four hours. The fire burned very slowly that day. Historical records record that Jacques de Molay was in the fire. Staying awake in the fire for a long time, he called out two names in the flames: Warrior Huang Kemian and King Felix of France. The pope died 33 days later and soon the king followed.

 Historians say it was a coincidence, but people throughout Europe But he used another word to call him. The burning at the stake is not just the story of Jacques de Molay. It is the most systematic story in medieval Europe. One of the traditional execution methods, Janet was burned to death in Rouen, France in 1431. He was only 19 years old. A British-controlled court convicted him of being a witch and a heretic. There was a huge crowd in the square.

 It was said that some of them were Tears were shed afterwards but no one on that day stepped in to stop the philosopher Giordano Bruno in 1600 He was executed at the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. He argued that the universe is infinite and the sun may not be the center, and there may be other worlds. The church judged this to be heresy. Before execution, they stuffed a piece of metal furniture into his mouth.

To prevent him from shouting his thoughts to the crowd at the last moment. He just disappeared silently into the flames. His mouth was sealed, but his mind was not. 200 years later, science proved him right. Burning is not just a punishment, it is a ritual, a signal to the masses, and the use of flames to tell people where their rights are.

The name of God allowed him to be legitimate, and the law allowed him to execute it. The crowd watched and believed that order was maintained. This belief has kept the fire burning for hundreds of years. However, sometimes the flames are not enough. Those in power feel that death comes too quickly. Then he devised a longer-lasting way to turn the human body itself into a message and display it throughout the kingdom.

The way to make fire last longer and be seen by more people is to make death a process London, August 23, 1305 Smithfield Square William Wallace didn’t get there on foot, he was tied to a horse, Dragging through the cobbled streets of London. Londoners watched from home as the execution began before arriving in the square.

William Wallace was a Scottish knight who led the Scottish War of Independence starting in 1297. against the rule of England. He defeated the British army at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, Once known as the Guardian of Scotland. However, in August 1305, he was betrayed by his companions and fell into the hands of his rivals.

 King Edward I of England personally decided to His punishment for treason in England was not simply death. The law required much more than that. First he was dragged by a horse. After crossing the street, he was hoisted onto a foot platform, but before his consciousness was about to fade, the rope was untied and he fell to the ground. Then, they were cut open while still alive, and the internal organs were taken out and burned on the spot. The body was then divided into four pieces and sent to the hospital.

Displayed throughout the kingdom as the official execution for treason, Huas was placed on a rope in front of a pedestal in the center of the square. He put the pedal on his neck and removed his body, his breathing was cut off. At the moment when his consciousness began to blur, the rope was untied and he fell to the ground. The executioner stepped forward and watched him alive.

His abdomen was cut open, his internal organs were taken out, and he was burned on the spot. Historical records record that Wallace remained intact during the entire process. Whether he tried to say something while holding on to his consciousness is unknown. All that has been passed down is one thing, which he said to the end.

Afterwards, his head was cut off and his body was divided into four pieces. The head was hung on London Bridge, and the right arm was sent to Xin Bao, The left arm was sent to Berwick, the right leg to Perth, Left leg to Sterling. The whole of Scotland received this gift. This is not punishment, it is a map that uses the body to mark the boundaries of where power can extend.

Three hundred years later, the same pattern happened again. On November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes and his 13 companions hid 36 barrels of gunpowder underground in the British Parliament. The plan to kill James and the entire Parliament at the same time would be the largest political assassination in history if successful.

Just before the operation, an anonymous letter was delivered to the royal family, and the plan was exposed. Fox was arrested in the basement with the fuse in his hand. The king ordered that all means be used to force out the names of the conspirators. The torture began, and Fox endured it for several days.

Finally, he said his companion’s name. Afterwards, he couldn’t even write his signature well. The hand has been injured too much. January 31, 1606 On the day of the execution, Fox was escorted to the foot of the square. At the moment when the rope was about to be put around his neck, he jumped from the high platform. It was a calculated fall.

The impact broke his neck bone and he escaped being disemboweled while still alive. However, the law also applies to the dead. The body is divided into four pieces and sent to various parts of the kingdom. Executions continue after death. This method of execution officially existed in British law until 1870, counting from 1305 when Wallace was executed.

The man who carried out all this, who survived for 565 years in the code, went home and had dinner with his family the next morning. Get up in the morning and continue working I have never felt that I have done anything wrong. However, there are other things in history that are more sophisticated and take longer to set up pain.

A more detailed method is not to dismantle the body all at once but to spend several days slowly causing the person to collapse and sometimes die. Death does not end in one day. Toulouse, France, March 9, 1762 Jean Callas has been escorted to the huge wooden wheel in the center of the square since early morning. He is 63 years old and has made a living by selling cloth all his life.

There was no record of disputes with his neighbors, but he was a Protestant in Catholic-dominated France in the 18th century. It could be a danger when his son Marc Antony is found dead in his home in what appears to be a suicide. However, rumors began to spread that the son wanted to convert to Catholicism.

He was killed by his father. There was no evidence, but the conviction of Toulouse citizens was enough to move the court. The trial was short, the verdict passed quickly, and the executioner stood in the middle of the square, Holding a heavy hammer. He’s a well-trained guy who knows where to hit, How strong the force should be, and how to keep people conscious.

Starting from the neck bones and then to the thigh bones, arm bones and shoulders, one after another, between each blow There is a gap so that people can feel the impact. They cannot be killed at once. This is the rule of this execution. Karas kept shouting. Say I didn’t do anything and I’m innocent. The executioner didn’t answer and moved on to the next bone.

After all the bones in his limbs were broken, his body was pulled between the spokes of the wooden wheel. The broken limbs were stuck in the wooden bars. The wheel was erected on a high pillar, exposed to the sky. Occasionally you get close and he can’t move. Historical records record, Karas lived in that state for several more hours.

During the same period, another approach existed elsewhere in Europe. In 1531, the British Parliament formally executed the water owner. It is listed as a legal punishment to fix the criminal on the wooden frame, Put in cold water and slowly heat it up to keep the person conscious. The body temperature rises, internal organs are damaged, and the body disintegrates bit by bit from the inside.

This penalty was only abolished in 1547, It has been in the law for a full 16 years. In ancient Rome, there was also a kind of execution called skin execution. Specially used to absolve sins. The criminal was put into a large leather bag and stuffed with a dog, A rooster, a poisonous snake, a monkey. The mouth of the bag was sewn up and put into the box, and the fear of the animals came at the same time.

It was an elaborate double torture. The Romans wrote this text into law and regarded it as a ritual. It symbolizes how contrary to human nature such a crime is. Four years after Callas was sentenced, the philosopher Forte investigated the case in depth. Collect documents, compile testimonies, and write a book.

In 1765, the French royal court formally overturned Callas’s acquittal. However, Karas had died three years ago. It took three years for the law to admit that he was wrong. After these three years, The law always claims that it is fair, but the parties involved are long gone. But behind the justice, what awaits is more ancient times.

The old and colder fear is that some rulers do not kill the enemy on the battlefield but let the enemy retreat on their own initiative. In 1462, the army of Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire advanced northward on the Shavarakia border. He was The man who conquered the military city of Tantinople in 1453 and ended the thousand-year history of the Byzantine Empire has the whole of Europe with his name in front of it.

After entering Han Chan’s command, the military and equestrian skills were already very high. Wallachia was just a small principality. From the beginning, the outcome seemed to be decided. doomed However, the Sudanese army crossing the border stopped. Wooden piles stretched endlessly on both sides of the road.

 Each wooden pile was stuck with A single villain slowly conquers more than 20,000 wooden stakes with different heights. The higher the status, the higher the rank. The soldiers are on the lower piles, the officers are in the middle, the senior commanders are on the highest piles, and the Sultan is on the highest piles. Recognizable Lian Kong This is not just an execution, this is a letter to the Sultan. Mehmed II stared at the scene in front of him for a long time on horseback.

All without saying a word, he then ordered the withdrawal of the troops and captured the military city of Stantino, which the Sultan found in a small town. After the country retreated, there is a saying in historical materials that is said to be what he said: “I can defeat the owner of this land.” But the way I couldn’t defeat him is really impossible to verify, but the retreat itself is a real thing that happened in Wallachia.

Grand Duke Vlad III, later known as Vlad, was at the stake in Romania when he was called the Impaler by the public. It is by no means his invention. It is recorded in the Assyrian Empire and in the execution documents of the Otuman Empire. There are already traces of this approach, what Vlad did, Not inventing it, but turning it into a strategy, Systematize fear into a weapon.

The tips of the wooden stakes have been polished with grease. If they are too sharp, they will die too quickly. So it keeps the top rounded. When the wooden stake penetrates the body, it will deliberately avoid major organs. And calculate the angle so that the person will not die immediately. After the stake is erected, the weight of the body allows the stake to slowly pass through. People can often survive this process for several hours.

Even more than a day later, it was said that Vlad would personally watch the horror arrive at the front of Wallachia before the army. The confrontation was bound to fail, so he chose another kind of war before the enemy crossed the border. Just let them stop and re-experience a psychological shock that completely invalidated their rational judgment.

 The Sultan’s retreat in 1462 was It is proof that this strategy really works. Hundreds of years later, Vlad’s story was passed to the Irish writer Bram Stoker. Stoker was inspired by the name and image to create the character Dracula. Vampire novels are fiction, but the real person at the root of the fiction leaves a record that is older than the novel.

More specifically, there is a quieter and more sophisticated way of dismantling the human body than Vlad’s in history. That’s not it. For the battlefield but for the negotiation table, the story begins from there August 17, 1571 The fortress of Famagusta in Cyprus Marco Antonio Bragadin was The military commander assigned by the Republic of Venice held the fortress for 11 months and finally resisted the siege of the Ottoman Empire.

The initial garrison had 7,000 men. After 11 months, not even 500 men were left. Food was exhausted, water was scarce, and reinforcements never came. In early August 1571, Bragadin began negotiations for surrender. Ertuman commander-in-chief Lala Mustafa Pasha made conditions, Ensure the safe retreat of surviving soldiers and the personal safety and freedom of Bragadin and officers.

The agreement is reached, the document is written and signed by both parties, Three days later, Bragadin, with only a few followers, Head to the Ertuman camp unarmed to deliver the final documents. With the agreement in hand, the pasha welcomed him into the tent, At first it was just routine greetings, then the atmosphere changed, The pasha said that before the agreement was reached, Otuman prisoners of war had been massacred.

This responsibility must be shouldered. What happened during the war in Braga Dindana was written off in the agreement. Pasha shook his head slowly and followed him on the spot. Bragadin was executed on the spot and tied up. For two weeks he was pressed before the pasha every day and carried a heavy weight.

The goods were routed around the fortress and under the watchful eye of the pasha, ears and noses were cut off. The wound was bandaged to prevent him from dying so that he could be brought back the next day. On August 17, his last day came. Tied to a pillar in the center of Famagusta Square, the executioner stood in front of him, starting from the face to the neck and chest.

The skin on his arms was peeled off layer by layer. Historical records record that he kept chanting hymns in a low voice during the process. Whether that is true or not cannot be verified, but the fact that this story has been circulated for more than 450 years shows one thing. People need to believe that this is true. People need to believe that even in extreme pain, people can still hold on to something.

Whether it’s prayer or silence, it doesn’t end until he loses consciousness and is executed. The skin is peeled off and stuffed into the cracks of straw. What synthetic bra clip nails look like Hanging on a cowhide, going around the streets of Famagusta, Then he was sent to Constantinople and presented to the Sultan.

In 1596, his sons secretly sneaked into Constantinople, Retrieve it and take it back to Venice. It is still preserved in the Basilica of Saint John and Paul in Venice. A man whose skin exists for more than 450 years sometimes remembers Bragadin as a martyr and sometimes as a warrior Defeated generals remembered the pasha as a brutal conqueror and sometimes as a renegade, but this story is the most enduring.

What is remembered is another incident where the Pasha broke the agreement and ordered executions and then continued other military operations the next day He doesn’t think he’s a monster, he’s just fighting, And he believed that this would happen in war. The executioner who peeled off Bragadin’s skin, the executioner who broke Callas’s bones, The executioner who cut Wallace’s body into four pieces, They were all the same executioners who lit the fire in front of Jacques de Molay.

They went home and had dinner with their families, Going back to work the next morning, no one felt like a monster. There are laws, there are orders, there are beliefs, That’s enough. This is the true record of executions in the Middle Ages. Not a knife, not a flame, not a wheel, Not a wooden stake.

 But to design all this, The people who command all this and execute all this, Always believe you are right. It is this belief that has allowed the fire to be lit again and again for hundreds of years, the wheel to turn again and again, and the wooden stake to establish history again and again. History sometimes reads like the story of a monster. However, when we actually look through the historical data, the monster does not appear. It is the acceptance of ordinary people that the monster does not appear.

A person who orders, a person who enforces the law, a person who believes in God, a person who believes that he maintains order After the flames go out, the wheels stop, and the wooden piles decay and dissipate, that belief still survives in different forms. Times have changed and the tools have changed, but the belief that I am right in dismantling other people’s logic has never disappeared.

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