Worst Punishments in the History of Mankind Compilation

there are many horrific devices of the distant past that were intended to inflict unbearable pain or flat out kill their target some of these such as the brazen bull a brass statue in which the victim would be burned alive sound pretty terrifying the breast ripper or pair of anguish are other examples of things that you just know you wouldn't want to have happen but say you were captive and those in charge threatened to bring out the wheel the catherine wheel you might think well that doesn't actually sound so bad you'd be in for quite a shock we'll explain why in this episode of the infographic show the catherine wheel worst punishments according to legends the catherine wheel is named after saint catherine of alexandria who is a patron to those academically or philosophically inclined and prevents unexpected death now there's no mention of this individual before the 9th century although she supposedly lived in the fourth so it's suspected that she did not truly exist nevertheless her story was a well-known one that began in egypt she was believed to be noble if not a princess as well as very studious however some might consider it less than wise that she rose up to protest the wrongs of the then roman emperor of the time maxentius who was relentlessly persecuting christians maxentius allegedly selected several scholars to engage in a battle of wits with the young catherine but ultimately the wise men lost as a further insult while she was imprisoned for her words catherine managed to convert many of maxentius's soldiers and even his wife to the christian religion needless to say that didn't exactly sit well with maxentius after torture in which he declared jesus christ her spouse she was sentenced to death this is when the wheel came into play which was the intended executionery device the story goes that it shattered at her touch and so in desperation the emperor ultimately had her beheaded she was then carried to mount sinai interestingly later on saint joan of arc identified catherine's voice as one of the several she heard so what is this wheel that catherine had miraculously escaped but that went on to kill many of the less fortunate another name it's known by the breaking wheel will probably give you some ideas it was a wheel made of wood similar if not the same as those used on carriages in addition to being made of hefty wood these wheels were outfitted with a metal rim though sometimes they would be modified so that they could inflict further damage with protruding iron blades these massive wheels would then be dropped on convicts all over their body breaking bones upon impact another approach was to tie a person to the wheel and hit his or her limbs with iron hammers or bars while the wheel was rotated as long as the bones were shattered that was all that mattered the exact amount of wheel drops or hammer hits were already determined beforehand this would depend on the extent of the convict's crimes such as if they committed acts of robbery or murder for the worst offenders efforts were made to better match their punishment to the crimes for example sharp pieces of wood would sometimes be set underneath the victim to bring yet further torture on the other hand for those they wanted to spare the worst they could deliver a fatal blow during the wheel dropping or iron hitting process or right after it was over unfortunately most were not so lucky and the bone breaking was only the beginning or step one of two or three following step one bodies were typically threaded through the spokes of another wheel while this would be difficult to do with a normal person it was much easier once their limbs were broken the wheel was then attached to a pole and displayed for all to see much like those who had undergone crucifixion at this point some would be cut apart or strangled which would finally though painfully in their suffering others would be placed above a blazing fire or alternatively thrown directly in one it was even possible for the individual to be hung while on the wheel though this option was generally reserved for those who had been found guilty of either the very worst crimes or multiple serious offenses the executioners in charge had no mercy even upon the souls of those they had killed bodies were simply left where they had been thrown or hung up to be eaten away by the beaks teeth and claws of wild animals many believe that this would prevent the souls from ever finding eternal peace it would also serve as a gruesome warning to others but there was one little hope for those sentenced to death by the catherine wheel and that was if they somehow became disengaged or if the wheel in some way failed to do its job in these circumstances it was seen as divine intervention and the conflict's life would ultimately be spared however this was highly unlikely it happened so rarely that when it did it would become the subject of religious paintings depicting the miracle more often than not those given this sentence never made it into the works of art further their suffering could drag on seemingly endlessly before they died there are stories of a murderer in the 14th century who held on for three days before he expired another time a man by the name of bonadius lasted for four full days and nights a more questionable account of a german serial killer in the 1500s claimed that he remained alive with the help of alcohol for as many as nine days but again more likely than not this last account is just another legend the catherine or breaking wheel was quite a horrible device it was used as a method of public execution in europe from antiquity to early modern times bavaria utilized it until it was outlawed in 1813 and its suspected last use was in prussia as late as 1841 we are all too thankful as are modern day criminals that over time it lost favor with most societies welcome back to our macabre series of shows featuring some of the worst things people have done to each other in the name of punishment while in other shows we've talked about instruments of torture and killing that could be said to be basic claws that rip flesh cudgels that smash bones this particular instrument of horrifyingly inhumane torture could be said to have been cooked up by creative folks as with just about anything we've talked about in this series it would be unimaginable to suffer this treatment but hey we aren't going to say it's any worse than having your intestines chewed on by starving rats like that punishment though this one was slow making hanging or head chopping seem very merciful in comparison this form of execution was created by the ancient greeks it had a few names and it might also be called the bronze bull or the sicilian bull but how do we know anything about it at all one of the answers is because it was written about in something called the bibliotheca historica which translates as historical library it consists of many books written by an ancient greek historian named diodorus seculas in these books you'll find his version of the history of the world from what went down in ancient egypt to the leader alexander the great quite a lot of it is still intact but some parts in the series are missing or in fragments in one of these books mr sequels wrote about the brazen bull and this is what he said the guy who invented it was an inventor by trade and he was named perilous of athens it said before he built this thing somewhere between 570 and 554 bc he actually pitched the idea he was what you might call a creative technologist of the past looking for some funding he got that funding from a man named phalorus the tyrant of acrogas given his frightening title you wouldn't be surprised to hear that this man was said to be very cruel in some accounts of his life it's written that he enjoyed torture and even went so low as to eat children we should say that encyclopedia britannica cites research that says he wasn't as cruel as some people have written whatever the case it seems he commissioned the building of the brazen bull so how did one perish in a brazen bull well it was certainly a thing conjured up by a creative yet sadistic imagination it was said to be the same size of a bull but shaped from bronze with an opening where a man could enter the thing a fire was then lit under the bowl and the man would slowly roast to death but get this it was made so that when the man was howling in agony his shrieks would emanate through specially distorted pipes built into the bowl so the impression an onlooker would get was an animal bellowing in pain this might have been the fun part for someone like the tyrant of acrogas the smoke would come out through the holes in the bull's nose and that nose was filled with incense since burning bodies don't smell so good the bones that were left would then be turned into bracelets so the story goes when the idea was pitched by perilous it said he said this to the tyrant folaris the occupant will shriek and roar in unremitting agony and his cries will come to you through the pipes as the tenderest most pathetic most melodious of bellowings your victim will be punished and you will enjoy the music when the bowl was finished followers told the inventor to get inside the thing to test out the sound but some sources say he lit the fire and the inventor died there others say he pulled him out but then killed him by pushing him over a cliff it seems for all his hard work perilous was killed but perhaps not because falris didn't want to pay even though falrus is said to have been keen on cruelty it's written that he said this to perilous after hearing about the execution method his words revolted me i load the thought of such ingenious cruelty and resolve to punish the artificer in kind i said to him if your art can really produce this effect to get inside yourself and pretend to roar and we'll see whether the pipes will make such music as you described by the way it's written that upon his downfall falrus was also killed inside the bull so that's inventor and commissioner both killed at their own hands in a way word of the brazen bull was passed down and histories were written and they linked the device with these two men the inventor and the tyrant but the history of the ball doesn't stop there the romans it said had a taste for the brazen bowl and if you've watched our other shows on roman torture you won't be surprised to hear that some people wouldn't have had many scruples about roasting a man to death and enjoying his screams we might look at the story of a man named saint eustis it said he became a martyr after being killed in the second century the romans were punishing many christians before they themselves converted to christianity under the emperor constantine but that was in the 4th century a.d before a lot of christian blood was spilled and it seems a few christians also got cooked to death inside of bronze animal saint eustace was said to have been one of them before he converted to christianity he had served under a roman emperor but he saw the light so to speak when he had a vision one day which involved a stag and a crucifix christians might tell you that this man then lost everything which was one of those tests of god he lost his cash his servants and his wife and kids were taken away from him by of all things a lion and a wolf yet his faith remains strong throughout there are a few different stories as to what happened to this man but some people will tell you he got his wealth back as well as his family but in the end he his wife and children were all roasted to death in the brazen bull on the orders of emperor hadrian we looked at some christian sources and they seemed to back that up although they don't say his family got the treatment too we also found this piece of christian history written in the 1800s it seems to suggest that when eustis and his family got roasted they died but some miracles did happen this is from that text the holy martyrs by divine power remained alive for three days praising and blessing the great giver of life and death at last when their voices ceased the bull was opened and all four were found without life but also without any injury to their bodies or garments it's written that other christians close to him at this time went the same way for instance a man known as saint atipas this was written about him they became enraged and dragged him to the temple of artemis and there they threw him into a glowing red-hot copper or brazen metal bowl where they normally put their sacrifices to the idols to cast demons out of their own people he loudly prayed god to receive his soul and strengthen the faith of the christians and begged god to forgive those who were inflicting on him his torment he then departed as peacefully as if he fell asleep we should say that there are a lot of people who don't believe these stories and relate them more to legend than truth it's not for us to say what's true or not but most serious historians will at least tell you that the stories from the bulls surprising beginnings in greece to christian martyrs not feeling any pain while being roasted are hard to verify what is very much true is that stories of the brazen bull have been passed down throughout the ages and those manuscripts can still be read today by the way while you might see a brazen bull in a museum in the world it won't be the real thing only a depiction of one in terms of justice the ancient persian empire could be said to have been harsh but fair the criminal code included the principle of lex talionis an eye for an eye tooth for a tooth misdemeanors usually warranted fines you might be branded for slander and for the worst crimes you'd get the death penalty on occasions there was a two strikes rule meaning someone wouldn't be executed for their first offense so there you are in ancient persia two strikes down you're wondering how the death penalty will be metered out will it be suffocation by ashes perhaps or maybe having molten gold poured down your throat as what might have happened to the roman emperor valerian it's hard to say which would be worse but today we think we have a persian punishment that was the most brutal of them all while the ancient persians did have strict laws pertaining to matters of justice as we said that at times didn't stop them from being tremendously brutal we'll give you a few more examples before we get to possibly the worst punishment of them all take for example the death of a persian judge called sisemnis it's said that he was corrupt and king cambises ii of persia who ruled from 530 bc to 522 bc wanted to make an example out of him as a warning to others who might think about corrupting the courts it's said that judge was flayed from head to toe and then his skin was used to make a chair as the tale goes anyone appointed from then on as a judge would have to spend some time sitting in that chair so they would know what would happen if they were corrupt you can see this horrific spectacle in the paintings the arrest of sesames and flaying of sesame's then there's the story of cyrus the great it's written that his wife became quite unhappy with one of her eunuchs so unhappy in fact that she ordered that he be killed three times this is called the triple death it said first his eyes were pulled from his head but then he was nursed back to health his second death was being flayed but again he was nursed so he wouldn't die we imagine he couldn't have been completely flayed as that resulted in certain death when he was better then he was crucified and the job was done we should say however that there are many versions of this tale we'll stick with this one for now so with these two executions in mind could there really be anything worse well now we have to look at the story of a man called mithridates he was a young persian soldier who was put to death in 401 bc it said this man accidentally killed cyrus the younger the rebel who was intending to kill his older brother arses so he could inherit the throne thousands of men were killed behind cyrus as this culminated in the battle of kunaxa cyrus's army got the upper hand after charging artaxerxes army all was going well the throne was in his sights cyrus then went to attack his brother's personal bodyguard and then oops out of nowhere a javelin just hit him and killed him on the spot this was a huge setback for the rebels and they all retreated their future king was dead it was over we know this because the story was recorded by the greek biographer plutarch in his essay the life of artaxerxes another greek writer called catecius told plutarch the fate of the man that accidentally killed cyrus with that javelin as you know his name was mithridates it's understandable that some people were perhaps a bit miffed with mithridates only the severest of punishments would do and that's where scafism comes in this is how plutarch describes the very unusual kind of death penalty we will paraphrase as his language is a bit dated now so two boats of equal size were put on top of each other and nailed together it kind of made a floating coffin holes were made in the boat so that the prisoner could be fastened in them with his hands feet and head sticking out so far so good he was floating and his head was protruding he was getting rather hot he was left there with the hot sun shining on his face his body was baking hot inside the floating tomb then they force-fed mithridates milk and honey and in good size portions too they also covered his face with the stuff soon his honey-covered face was covered in flies that were feasting on him and the honey he was then force-fed more and more until his belly was distended and he had produced quite the pile of excrement at this point as plutarch said creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption and the rottenness of the excrement these things entered mithridates bowels while his flesh was slowly being eaten too from the outside this slow devouring by insects and vermin it said lasted 17 days at that point poor young mithridates with the bad javelin shot was eaten alive there was another description of this by a 12th century byzantine chronicler called jonas zanares it's really the same story but he embellished the tale somewhat this is the conclusion word for word in translation 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 the wretched man moreover his belly distended as it is with milk and honey throws off liquid excrements and these putrefying breed swarms of worms intestinal and of all sorts thus the victim lying in the boats his flesh rotting away in his own filth and devoured by worms dies a lingering and horrible death but is that it just one case of scaphism throughout history well it seems like the one case everyone talks about is the one we just described although most sources call scaphism an ancient form of punishment as if it happened time and again we did find an excerpt from a book called the history of christian martyrdom and that book it's written that a bishop called marcus in 363 a.d destroyed a pagan temple and then erected a church this didn't go down well with the roman emperor julian the apostate it's written that as punishment he took marcus and hung him up in a basket and left in there to be feasted on by insects but this seems like a case of dying in the hot sun rather than hardcore scafism there's actually quite the debate about scafism on the wiki talk page with some editors questioning the veracity of plutarch and asking for other sources plutarch did indeed write that account of scaphism but some historians believe he may have done so to demonize the persians and make his own culture look better we'll never really know what happened to mithridates but right now that's the prevailing story perhaps he was the only man to ever get the full dose of scaphism or maybe old plutarch was an ancient publisher of fake news try and put yourself in this position for a moment you're a king in 9th century medieval england and you've been attacked and overrun by rather fearsome viking hordes who've made the trip to kill and pillage in that order you've been told you're gonna be executed and so you wait in some kind of tent wondering how that's gonna play out what usually happens on your home turf is offenders go to the chopping block you think okay it'll be quick and painless i'll say my prayers and that'll be that i'm a martyr heaven will be good to me but you underestimate the brutal creativity of your foes you soon find out you're gonna have your ribs and lungs pulled through your back to be turned into a kind of winged creature damn that's gonna be rough you think and that's the blood eagle in short but we'll add a bit more to the description of this nasty viking execution procedure first the person is laid on their chest with their back facing the air perhaps if the victim hadn't been told what was going to happen they might have thought they were going to lose their head as was the custom in anglo-saxon england we can't be sure if they were told or not because there's nothing in viking literature that tells us so we also presume they were held down by a few people or tied down these bits are missing in the old texts so the person is lying in their front waiting this form of execution was a kind of ritual so no doubt it would have happened in a special place and would have been observed by a lot of viking men the naked victim is then approached by an executioner with a very sharp knife or something bigger like an axe in some cases he might have an eagle carved into his skin this was merely an aperitif with that knife he then tears through the flesh in the man's back with so much power that he actually severs the ribs those ribs are pulled and stretched outward like wings the piece de resistance is when the man's lungs are pulled through his back and wrapped over the rib wings this procedure was supposed to give more of an impression of bird's wings hence the blood eagle it sounds too bad to be true so how do we know this actually happened well during the viking age they had poets as many old cultures did back then this was called scaldic poetry these poems would become parts of sagas stories which detail things such as viking invasions the legends of great kings bloody battles etc some of these stories have survived and they've been translated there's a story called the orknayaga saga and this details the exploits of a guy named harald the first fairhair which is said to have been the first king of norway he is credited with being the ruler when the vikings took over the northern isles of orknei and shetland if you don't know where they are and we don't expect most of you will they're north of scotland but sets of islands not on the mainland if you didn't know a group of islands is called an archipelago see we're not just about describing blood and gore the saga details life on these islands some scholars might question if what's written actually went down because the saga was written many years after king herald was around it was written in the 13th century but the vikings were there since the 9th century word of mouth might have passed down the details anyway to cut a short story even shorter one of herald's warrior sons named half then longleg was executed because he'd been involved in power struggles that had killed a member of viking nobility and another 60 men he'd done this with his brother that brother was banished from orkney but the mastermind of the operation didn't get so lucky the son of the slain nobleman got his revenge and demanded the blood eagle be performed on half then longleg as a sacrifice to the god odin this is how it's been translated earl einar went up to halfdan and cut the blood eagle on his back in the fashion that he thrust his sword into his chest by the backbone and severed all the ribs down to the loins and then pulled out the lungs and that was halfdan's death that's case 1 case 2 involves a formidable viking warrior named ivor the boneless who's said to have been the son of the norse hero ragnar lothbrok why boneless you might ask and historians have wondered the same thing some think he wasn't actually boneless but that his manhood didn't work very well what he lacked physically he made up for in brains because it said he was an outstanding tactician in battle this was a time when the vikings were taking over large parts of anglo-saxon england and it's detailed in the saga called the tale of regnar's sons it depicts what went down with the 9th century king ayla of northumbria that's northern england king ayla learns about an upcoming invasion by the great ragnar lothbrok there are different accounts of what he got up to and how he died but one such account spoiler alert if you haven't finished watching the show vikings plug your ears now is he's captured by king ayla and thrown into a snake pit there he perishes ivor the boneless is too clever to invade northern england when the army there is so strong he bides his time in fact he stays in england but asks king ayla for something called a war guild which is a kind of compensation for a man's life in this case his father's he tells ayla that all he wants is an ox's hide and he'll only take the land that he can stretch the hide around in modern parley and zela might have thought what an idiot but smart ivor cut the hide in a very thin string and stretched that around a large area he said this will be a new city and that city is supposed to be york in northern england ivar proceeds to get all the chieftains in that region on his side he now has a powerful army and so decides it's time to attack the rest of england and get revenge on ayla many of the northern english pledge allegiance to ivor because they respect him which sounds a bit like norse propaganda this all ended with ayla being captured in ivar becoming the king of north eastern england his brothers basically go on a pilgrimage rampaging in england and all over europe ayla meanwhile is about to get the dreaded blood eagle treatment and in an 11th century poem this is how it went down in translation and ivar the one who dwelt at york has ayla's back cut with an eagle that's a rather family-friendly description of events because we have another description too if your bloodlust wasn't satiated it went like this they caused the bloody eagle to be carved on the back of ayla and they cut away all of the ribs from the spine and then they ripped out his lungs okay so did all this actually happen well who knows because any historian that tells you that it's the truth or not the truth can't really be sure either they weren't there some scholars say that norse poets like modern poets were cryptic used symbolism and so weren't always literal saying that in the 12th century a danish poet named saxo grammaticus also wrote about the people being cut apart and turned into an eagle so there definitely seems to be a theme shared in those dark days in that account the vikings took the ritual a step further and poured salt into the open body some say it might have happened and others seem to think that a lot has been lost in the translation over the years you see the writers of sagas wrote that stuff hundreds of years after the fact as you know yourself things tend to get exaggerated over the passage of time what starts as some guy pushing another in a train station can by the end of the week be a bloody brawl where someone lost teeth in an eye a hero might also emerge from the mayhem did those stories of viking violence get embellished since people admired them and so stretched the ferocity of the vikings or were they accurate we just don't know but it's a fact that the blood eagle was talked about a bit scholars are still in disagreement today but in the interests of this show we won't ask you to let the facts get in the way of a good tale french philosopher michel foucault starts his book discipline and punish the birth of the prison with a chapter about an unfortunate frenchman named robert francois damiens damiens had tried and failed to assassinate king louis xv and for it he was severely punished he was burned with molten wax and lead and had boiling oil poured into his open wounds he was then quartered by horses pulling at his limbs and then his torso was burned at the stake some of the crowd cheered but one commentator wrote i was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as i heard his piercing shrieks half of his body having been torn from him things slowly changed regarding the harshness of punishments but today we'll look back at the brutal past in this episode of the infographic show the worst punishments in the history of mankind we should explain that this list is in no particular order of nastiness because you'll see that all these punishments meted out are barbaric to the nth degree it would be hard to say which is the worst as they are all incredibly horrific we'll let you decide which punishment you think is the most heinous we will also add that some of you might believe that prolonged agony such as solitary confinement for 20 years might actually be worse than excruciating pain that lasts a few seconds or minutes before death but we'll focus more on barbaric acts today the rack we'll start with one punishment you have all probably heard of the rack was a fairly simple device consisting of a rectangular frame and a series of levers pulleys and ropes there are different versions of the rack dating from antiquity to middle ages europe the idea was to stretch the prisoner by the joints until the muscles were torn and the joints popped eventually all the joints would be dislocated hanged drawn and quartered this is close to what happened to damien's but was better known as a very gruesome form of execution in middle ages england when someone had committed high treason aka treason against the state the prisoner would be hanged until almost dead then he would be taken down and disemboweled while still alive and also have his manhood cut from his body he would then be chopped into pieces and often his head was chopped off and hung someplace where the public could see it the punishment was abolished in england in 1870 judah's chair also known as dany's chair or judas cradle it's not known exactly when this was used but there are sketches of it in existence and it also is on display in some museums this gruesome device was a chair with a sharp pointed pyramid shape on the seat of the chair websites writing about medieval history tell us people would be sat atop this spike and lowered by ropes which was extremely painful as it entered the orifice but sometimes they would be dragged down on it with the use of weights while application of oil would make things worse they would die slowly as they were further lowered or perhaps die even more slowly from infection this could take hours or days according to two sources we found some sources say it was used during the spanish inquisition but other sources refute that boiling again we turn to england and this time to the 1500s it said the often harassable king henry viii made this a form of capital punishment but it seems to also have been popular at some point in time all around europe and asia as you can guess the torture and usually the eventual death was a result of someone being boiled alive in a large cauldron or kettle full of water oil or tar the catherine wheel also known as the breaking wheel it's thought this simple method of bodily destruction was used mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries and europe and parts of asia the french writer voltaire writes about the punishment in a book published in the 18th century prisoners were tied and splayed on a large wooden wheel the executioner would then take a heavy object sometimes an iron cudgel and break the person on the wheel until the body was completely almost in pieces sometimes however it would take a few days for the victims to die from their injuries the head crusher this should be self-explanatory imagine a metal dish strapped to your skull and a metal plate under your chin you can't move as it is all secured the dish can be lowered using a large screw that can be turned as it lowers it breaks the bones in your head and eventually crushes the skull we can't find too many reliable sources telling us when this was used but again it's thought it was a contraption of the middle ages history.com tells us it was a real thing and it appears in a book called the big book of pain torture and punishment through history flaying if you've seen game of thrones you'll be familiar with this punishment the torture comprises of cutting off all of a person's skin although it's said in china sometimes it was just the facial skin sometimes the person may have been burned first to make the cutting easier or just perhaps to add more nastiness it was around as late as the 18th century and michel foucault discusses it in gory detail in the book we mentioned discipline and punish it said the english did it to thieves in the 13th century but such punishment happened all over the world throughout the ages it said that the chinese emperor hongwoo ordered the flaying of 5 000 women in 1357 although a book called skin and bones puts the date at 1396 death by a thousand cuts sticking with china in a similar period comes this brutal torture also known as linchi a book called death by a thousand cuts says it was a common form of punishment in china in the 14th century but was around in the country for many centuries the prisoner's entire body would be sliced but it would take a long time to die as you would expect from small slices but nothing was spared from the knife and eventually this would kill the unfortunate victim however while this form of punishment became infamous outside of china some historians tell us that it wasn't as prolonged as some people originally said and that some of those cuts actually meant dismemberment making death arrive faster sawing looking at sketches of this from the 15th century it is in some ways the most barbaric as it's so basic a person is hanged upside down from some gallows with their legs forming a v-shape two men would then take a large saw and cut the man in half from his groin area he would apparently live through much of this according to one source we can find this was only infrequently used in medieval europe and in china where sawing horizontally through the middle was an alternative looking around the web sawing took all kinds of forms all over the world during many centuries in any case people were sought apart but the method may have taken many forms rats you might be thinking right now what on earth was wrong with people in the past that enacted or even endorsed such behavior because humans understand pain so well were we not blessed with a built-in morality if you haven't already thought that perhaps you will in a second as death by rats really takes the biscuit it was apparently used in medieval europe and china some sources tell us that starved rats are poured into a box with a naked prisoner and they slowly eat the person other sources say the belly of the person is first partially opened so the rats can get at the insides it's written about in a 1931 book called merrily i go to hell reminiscences of a bishop's daughter another book called the dictionary of torture tells us that this happened in germany yet another book tells us that in china the rat would be trapped on a victim's stomach under a metal pot this pot would be heated until the rat had no other choice than to try and gnaw its way through the person's body we can't say what the outcome of this would be and perhaps it's not so plausible that a rat could eat its way through a body some of the sources that say that was the case don't offer evidence of it happening that way back by popular demand we bring you another show on unimaginable punishments authorities have meted out on criminals and people deemed a threat to government rulership or even religion while crushing people's heads in medieval vices certainly doesn't happen anymore the world is still home to some barbaric punishments today even in the most developed countries you have things such as waterboarding or the brainwreck of being imprisoned in isolation caning which still happens in some countries has been called beyond excruciating while being stoned to death we can imagine must be an awful way to go in 2008 reports emerged about a 13 year old somalian girl that had been buried up to her neck and stoned to death by 50 men her crime reporting a rape today we'll explore more insane meanness in this episode of the infographic show worst punishments in the history of mankind part two number 10 the brazen bull also known as the sicilian bull this brutal punishment was around in ancient greece how do we know the greek historian theodorus sicilus wrote about it in one of his many history books that covered various cultures of the time he writes that a bull would be fashioned out of bronze to almost the same size as a real bull there was a door in the side of the thing through which people who were given the death penalty would be shoved a fire was then lit under the bull and the person was roasted to death it's even said that the bull was designed in a way so that the screams would be emitted to onlookers if this sounds bad well by the end of the show you might be thinking it wasn't such a bad way to die after all number 9 iron maiden you might have already heard of the name if you're into heavy metal music the band got their name from a torture device like many contraptions of torture historians dispute when and how it was used but you can certainly find iron maidens in museums today it's thought that the first of them was a 14th century germanic invention but throughout the following centuries many historians would write about these devilish things they kind of look like an egyptian mummy but the inside of the door is festooned with spikes when it's closed the person in the casket is impaled as we said some historians write that these things may not have been used or used often but they certainly existed others write that they were talked about a lot in the 18th and 19th centuries to show how barbaric people used to be and how much better they were in their era number 8 crucifixion we probably should have included this in the first show as it is a terrible way to die as you'll know from reading christian history crucifixion involved tying or nailing a naked person to a wooden beam the person would then be left to die slowly that's how jesus christ ended up what you might not know is that there were many ways to crucify a person perhaps a good scenario was being nailed to a tree but much worse was being impaled on a spike and left to die even in ancient history some people thought this was too much with roman philosopher cicero calling it a most cruel and disgusting punishment if you didn't die of shock or sepsis or dehydration then the animals around might feast on you you might also not know that it wasn't just popular in ancient times the japanese crucified people in the 16th century the burmese in the 19th century and in some parts of the middle east crucifixion is still a legal punishment number 7 spanish donkey this is a donkey no man or woman would ever want to ride if you saw our first show the way someone would be tortured is similar to that of the judas cradle prisoners would be sat on what looks like a triangular shaped block of wood this wood might have nails on the ridge they would be lowered down onto the sharpened ridge and sometimes pulled down by weights which would cause excruciating pain some sources say this could result in the person being cut apart and dying others say it just crippled a person the french called it the chevalet or horse a history channel documentary says such a device was used during the american civil war to torture confederate prisoners these prisoners would pass out from pain and sometimes be disabled for life number six breast ripper these awful things look like two pronged forks similar to the fangs of a snake except they were made from iron featured in the book victims and values a history and a theory of suffering it said they would be heated up and then used to rip off a woman's breasts as a punishment this would cause severe scarring and the loss of breasts but the infection that ensued would often kill the woman the website medieval times at castles writes this instrument was mostly reserved for women accused of conducting a miscarriage or those accused of adultery there are some reports that isis used a similar instrument on a female victim in 2014 except they called it the biter the biter was used according to reports because some women were accused of not wearing the correct dress number five crocodile shears men of course did not escape such barbaric punishments related to their manhood crocodile sheers were iron tubes with teeth on the inside they would be heated up and clamped on a man's penis as if it was the mouth of a crocodile this would result in castration but again in those days such a punishment often meant a slow death from infection medieval times and castles writes the crocodile sheers had a very specific purpose to mutilate those who attempted to assassinate the king one other writer tells us after ripping off the penis they would rip off other things like your fingers or toes attempting to or actually killing a king regicide was considered the worst of the worst and so of course it warranted a punishment which would prevent any man from ever trying it again it could have been worse you could have gotten the iron comb this was a heavy comb with sharp spikes run over the flesh until there wasn't much of you left people often got combed and then if that didn't finish them they lost their heads number four the chinese torture chair okay so this is another piece of horror apparatus that may have been used only to scare the living daylights out of a populace jigsaw from the saw franchise would have been envious of this chair had he been real of course we actually found one of them on a museum website with the present owner listed so they did exist the chair is made from wood with 12 steel blades in the arm back and foot rests and seat it's said in europe a chair was used although we refer to that simply as the iron chair this might have had 500 to 1500 spikes for the victims to sit on sometimes hot coals would be placed under the chair for added pain one historian writes the spikes did not penetrate vital organs and blood loss was minimized at least until the person was released from the chair we can't imagine the outcome was good once the prisoner was released number three chinese water torture you might be thinking what is this doing here among instruments that cause extreme physical pain well perhaps being sent crazy slowly might be even worse than losing a body part or two the torture consists of slowly dripping water on one part of the head and apparently after enough time this will become absolutely unbearable making the victim mad mythbusters tried it out to see if it indeed works and the person didn't last long at all after not even two hours he asked the experiment to stop complaining of claustrophobia and shoulder spasms and saying he was starting to crack up imagine days of this skeptics are not sure it would be so effective there's only one way to find out number two coffin torture the problem with this is the fact that it took you ages to die it was very popular in the middle ages and used to scare people away from committing crimes victims would be hung up from a beam or tree inside a kind of coffin a wooden prison with holes in it it would be so small that the person was bent into a painful position they were then just left there people might throw stuff at them prod them with sticks etc and they would stay there until they slowly died even after death they were left there until the birds had picked apart their flesh and there wasn't much of them left the lucky ones were allowed down alive if their crime wasn't so bad perhaps and finally number 1 scafism one of the more creative tortures that has ever existed this persian method of execution is like no other according to the book one bloody thing after another the world's gruesome history the victim was forced to eat a large amount of milk and honey so much he would throw up attracting ants and vermin he was also covered in honey apparently most of this honey would be smeared around the eyes nose mouth and genitals and also in the ears and the anus he would then be tied between two boats in a stagnant piece of shallow water where he would be feasted on by all manner of insects and four-legged scavengers one byzantine historian wrote moreover his belly distended as it is with milk and honey throws off liquid excrements and these putrefying breed swarms of worms intestinal and of all sorts thus the victim lying in the boats his flesh riding away in his own filth and devoured by worms dies a lingering and horrible death he is basically eaten from the inside out or he might be lucky to die sooner than that when it comes to cruel and unusual punishments you could say the romans took things to the extreme a persecuted christian or an unruly slave might just be executed by beheading and while that sounds like a tough kind of justice the romans might have thought it was merciful after all the worst offenders might suffer the humiliation and agony of crucifixion any sane person would have begged for beheading rather than be crucified other offenders could suffer perhaps an even worse fate and that was quite literally being thrown to the wolves or the lions or leopards or even being squashed by an elephant and then there's the punishment we'll talk about today and we'll let you decide where it stands in the ranking of roman executions first of all this show has nothing to do with the kind of firework you've heard of that goes by the name of the roman candle those fireworks that fill the air with an explosion of stars don't come from rome but were created on the other side of the world in china nonetheless the roman candle we're going to talk about today does relate to fire and a form of entertainment let us explain you might have heard of something called the great fire of rome and that's supposed to have happened in 64 a.d this destroyed large parts of rome and entire neighborhoods went up in flames nobody knows exactly how it started but it's generally thought strong winds carried the flames through the narrow streets lined with many timber dwellings the emperor at the time was a man named nero who has gone down in history as perhaps rome's most villainous character some roman historians wrote about how tyrannical and corrupt this man was as well as deranged at times past and present historians disagree as to the validity of just how crazy this man was and also what part he had in the fire some accounts of the fire come from roman historians who weren't actually there for the thing but those accounts are all that exist there's a possibility that nero actually had arsonists start the fire so he could rebuild parts of rome in his own image if he really was a tyrannical egomaniac that might make sense we had the saying nero fiddled while rome burned to kind of represent how this man was far from the flames while his people suffered violence weren't even invented back then but the phrase is just supposed to mean he was playing music and having a good time as rome went up in flames maybe the fire was an accident or maybe nero had it set or maybe some arsonists did it who weren't connected to anyone in power we really don't know but accounts tell us that nero blamed minorities for the fire and they included christians and jews some historians believe that nero just punished people accused of being the fire starters and only years later were said to be christians someone was used as a scapegoat for burning down most of rome and that could have been these minorities christian historians would certainly say it was people of their religion who were punished for the fire but again it's not all that clear the most talked about death was saint peter and some accounts have him being crucified he became a martyr by the hands of nero but this was written years after the fact saint paul and some accounts was beheaded for the fire and in one legend his head bounced three times and each time water erupted from the place it hit so these were allegedly two of nero's victims after the fire according to some stories we apologize for not being able to tell you exactly what happened but many things have been written and historians and theologians will disagree over the matters today some say christians were never even discussed by roman historians at the time while others say at the time of the fire it's not clear christians even thought of themselves as christians a roman historian named tacitus wrote about nero's wrath after the fire but again this was many years after the fact he wrote that a lot of christians were being rounded up and then interrogated after which some suffered the worst kind of death being covered in animal skins and then ripped apart by dogs was one of them that historian wrote nero fastened to guild and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on the christians who were hated for their abominations we might not have clarity as to exactly which people in groups were blamed tortured and executed after the fire but most agree nero did meter out some nasty punishments and finally we come to the roman candle it went down something like this a person is sentenced to death but nero wants the pain to last some time he also wants the spectacle to be a kind of entertainment so he came up with a plan to take a person and cover them with flammable material but not so flammable that the person would go up in flames very quickly some sources state that the feet would be lit first the person is tied to a stake and the event happens in an imperial garden where nero and his friends can spectate some years later tacitus described some of the executions like this those who confessed were first to be caught then those who were accused by informers those sentenced to death were also mocked they were torn to pieces by dogs after being disguised as wild beasts or they were crucified and set on fire at the end of the day as torches to illuminate the night the same account tells us that nero put on these light shows for people as he walked around the party dressed as a charioteer we are led to believe that this spectacle was not for the public good but for his own sick entertainment we might never know who started the fire or who was killed for it or even if nero did use people as torches there's a painting that depicts the event that was called an english nero's torches although that wasn't painted until 1876 it's the middle ages and times have been tough for a peasant like yourself drought and the subsequent poor harvest have devastated your people and widespread famine is around the corner to make matters worse taxes have been raised because your rulers are warring with other rulers you've had enough of watching on as your children starve but in the absence of twitter seeking social justice will mean rounding up real people and stating your case before you know it though you've been reported by someone and have quickly been suspended from peasant duties your interrogators aren't interested in malnourished kids and dying crops and as they stretch your body on the rack you admit to more than you ever did which was only get some folks together to talk about unfairness you've been branded a traitor treasonous and the worst is going to happen to you so there you are a brave warrior of social justice who only wanted some respite from the demands of high taxes during a very hard time for peasants it doesn't really matter that you didn't kill anyone or start a riot what matters is you've been accused of plotting and occupying the lord's manner movement having been stretched in the rack you admitted to being somewhat disgruntled about watching your children die in front of you and not being able to get your hands on that most cherished commodity bread you hardly started a peasant's revolt but a mere peasant get together to discuss the drawbacks of serfdom really got the nobility all hot and bothered they're all too familiar with peasant revolts of the past and any kind of insubordination will be dealt with seriously that meant a medley of tried and tested cruel and unusual punishments for you as you informed your torturers of your guilt and took a few other peeved peasants down with you you might be broken but you're not dead and the nobility wants to make an example of you what's on offer well as they would like to make an example of you they want to make your death a public spectacle maybe after seeing you scream the man in the street will think twice about complaining about being taxed into starvation the nobility have a brainstorming meeting and try to think of some especially gruesome punishment for you burned out the stake in full public view says one of the wealthy adjudicators so passe someone retorts burning is so 13th century come on guys let's try and think outside the box another man puts up his hand and looks like he might have a good answer he says hanged drawn and quartered but then we eviscerate him and stick his head on a pike he looks crestfallen when his boss replies gilbert you know very well we did that last month it's hardly original now isn't it okay i've got one says a guy right at the back without hardly looking up and with a mean glare in his eyes he says we make a box that looks a bit like a coffin but shaped like a human we fill this with spikes and when it's closed all those spikes impale them and maybe he'll leave some gaps where the blood will flow out you know it could look pretty cool the boss rubs his whiskers and thinks for a while yeah that might be sufficiently brutal i like the streams of blood thing very romanesque the scenario we've just outlined of course didn't happen and we don't need to tell you that people didn't speak like that back in the middle ages what is true about that conversation is that the iron maiden as well as being the name of a british heavy metal band who wrote songs with a name such as the number of the beast was indeed a box with spikes on the inside it looked something like the box an egyptian mummy would be kept in something called a sarcophagus you could still find iron maidens in museums today they captured the imagination like no other contraption simply because they look so barbaric any upset peasant who'd even heard about one of these would run to the hills if he thought the nobles were after him the burning question though is where and when were they used and on whom were they used this part has troubled historians for years but that hasn't stopped numerous websites just stating they were used and including no more information first of all we aren't doing a show today on something we've just made up or found on a dubious website that likes to say you won't believe what happened next iron maidens exist and they have been around for quite some time a few of them are now artifacts that people can take selfies with in museums at the same time google glass and t-mobile exist and no one uses them much either okay so the first time anyone mentioned an iron maiden being used much like the one we're talking about today was when a german philosopher by the name of johann philip steven keys talked about one he wrote that in 1515 a coin forger in nuremberg had gone to bed for eternity and won how did he know this he was writing in the late 18th century and no one seems to know how he knew about iron maidens well he also studied ancient history and stories have been passed down from ancient times regarding people being put to death in a rather uncomfortable box maybe the philosopher embellished those boxes in his account for good reason there are skeptics because after he wrote about those things people started making them in the 19th century making iron maidens was all the rage and that's why there are so many of them around today in museums if you're from the us you can see one for yourself in the san diego museum of man the earliest iteration of the iron maiden was actually made in nuremberg in 1802 after stephen key's account that one was destroyed in the second world war why would people start making them in the 19th century and not using them one of the reasons that kept popping up according to scholars was linked to propaganda if people in the 19th century were told this is how people were punished in the middle ages they would think wow we have it so good today hanging is like a slap on the wrist it's thought steven keys made the entire thing up and there was no coin forger who got punctured inside a spike spangled sarcophagus it seems other countries just ran with the lie and also used the iron maiden as a way to make people realize that the past was brutal and the present was just peachy perfect and humane so there you go in the middle ages and after there were methods of torture we find utterly repellent today and there were gruesome ways people were executed but the iron maiden was an invention of more civilized people who wanted to paint their predecessors on planet earth as savages it's the 16th century in england and you are the cook at the house of a nobleman that wealthy man has invited a lot of his friends around for dinner and you are responsible for preparing it the elite at this time are incredibly cautious when it comes to eating and often food tasters are employed on this night no one will do this frightening job 17 of the people who eat your food become violently ill and some of them die you are accused of putting something lethal in the food poisoning is viewed as the most heinous of crimes and so you are sentenced to death by boiling when that finally happens spectators will be nauseated and shocked by what they see even for this era boiling someone alive was seen as over the top the true story we've just told you involved a cook named richard roos and he was accused of trying to kill the man he worked for who was the bishop of rochester the bishop didn't end up eating the food but some of his guests did as well as some of the servants in the house this was the time of king henry viii and he was known to fear being poisoned like no one else which is likely why such a harsh sentence was passed down even in those days being boiled alive was stomach churning to most people that's why the english didn't do it much because so many elites feared their food being tainted often a food taster would be hired but that wasn't always because of poison back in those days the food cannot be refrigerated so eating something rotten was very possible in view of this just being a cook was quite a dangerous job in the case of roose he was tortured to extract a confession he was stretched on the rack so you might think he'd say anything after that he admitted that he put a certain white powder into the food but he said he thought it was some kind of laxative and that he'd done it as a prank yeah pranking goes back down the centuries he said he'd been given the package by a stranger some people thought the king himself could have been behind it seeing as the bishop was one of his critics in the end henry would order the bishop's death and it was the dreaded hanged drawn and quartered kind of execution some of the other people believed it was someone related to the king in some way who got that poison to the cook roos was likely a pawn in a game he knew nothing about and so the fact that he was boiled alive is sad to say the least the event was talked about for many years after shakespeare alluded to it writing what studied torments tyrant has for me what wheels racks fires what flaying boiling in leads or oils what old or newer torture must i receive so how did ruse's boiling go his execution happened in london on the 15th of april 1532 the chronicle of the gray friars of london described how the whole thing lasted about two hours first bruce was tied in chains and then he was hung up on a kind of scaffold above a large pot of boiling water he wasn't just sunk in and left there rather he was lowered into the pot on three occasions with the order to do that till he was dead bystanders said he roared mighty loud and some women who observed the event were sick to their stomachs in england this method of execution would only happen one more time again for poisoning in 1547 edward vi put an end to it prior to the english boiling people to death the romans had done the same to thousands of christians but on occasion oil was used or wax or even wine the roman emperor nero was particularly fond of handing out this kind of punishment in the 13th 14th and 15th centuries people were thrown into the kettle the cauldron and the pot for all kinds of things and it happened from scotland to france to germany and other parts of europe in the 14th century a nobleman in scotland named william ii sewell was boiled alive after he was accused of sorcery although there are other takes on what happened to him unlike some of the punishments we've talked about in our other videos there is plenty of written evidence that boiling happened and it happened quite a lot especially to people in the middle ages who'd been accused of being counterfeiters or coin forgers it's hardly a very creative way to kill someone and so you won't be surprised that boiling someone to death happened all over the world in 16th century japan an outlaw hero named ishikawa goemon went that way the stories of this man are part mythology seeing as he was said to be a ninja with devastating combat skills goemon had tried to assassinate a despotic warlord but he failed and his punishment was to be boiled to death with his son we can't vouch for the veracity of what happened next but the story goes that the son died first goemon stood for a while longer holding his son and then he died in asia there's also the case of a sikh martyr who was put to the pot when he refused to accept islam these executions all happened a long time ago and we'd like to think that in this day and age no one anywhere on this planet is being boiled to death although u.s intelligence in 2004 told us that two men in uzbekistan were killed this way for being enemies of the state human rights watch wrote that the men's injuries pointed to the fact that they had been boiled as for how this punishment might feel well you already know one man was recorded as howling in pain it won't be quick and it will take some time for the organs to boil if the water is already boiling as soon as the person is dumped into it their skin flesh and their fat will cook that won't kill them right away unless they go into shock what will kill them is when their heart liver brain stomach and everything else inside start to cook we know more about this because people have accidentally been boiled to death when they fell into boiling water in 1981 in the usa a man jumped into a hot spring to save a dog he was told not to go in and he shouted the shocked bystanders like hell i won't and he actually dived in he was pulled out and he was still conscious although he had sustained terrible injuries he told onlookers that was stupid how bad am i that was stupid thing i did he died the next day this just shows that a person can survive being boiled for some time so all in all even for this series of shows boiling is unbelievably brutal when it comes to terrible punishments back during the ancient world and the middle ages the ship represented the pinnacle of the military the ship was a sacred thing and as time went by it was those who ruled the waves that became the most powerful nations but during the age of discovery when ships were discovering new worlds and crossing vast oceans life was tough for sailors the age of discovery was also an era of mutiny when an aggrieved crew turned against their captain all hell could break loose and there was nowhere to hide that's why some particularly horrifying punishments were reserved for out of control sailors welcome to keel hauling our viewers have likely seen the movies that depict mutinies on ships or sailors that no longer follow commands for their transgression the punishment had to be quite severe because when you're in the middle of the ocean you just can't afford to let things slide on the other hand if a captain is too stern this might create a conspiracy to take him out and that's what we call mutiny maybe the most well-known of those was the mutiny on the bounty a captain had to be hard but fair lest he lose the respect of his crew the most common types of punishment then were not keel hauling which could be said to be the most severe form it was most likely that the offending sailor would receive some strokes of the cane or worse the whip he might simply be tied to the mast and left to think about what he'd done but let's say a sailor had been part of a mutiny and that mutiny had failed or what if the villains of the seas the pirates had wanted to come down hard on someone what was the worst thing they could do well they might be hanged but it was a particularly painful type of hanging because rather than being dropped the person would be pulled up while his head was on the noose he would be run up something called the yardum which was part of the timber cross section of the mast from where the sails are set there was a case of hanging by the yardam in 1860 that happened to the royal marine john dallinger on the hms 11. there was also cases where men were thrown overboard but in one infamous instance of this happening the men hadn't committed a crime the crime was against them it's now known as the zhong massacre and 130 slaves were thrown overboard a british ship and then there's the punishment you might have all heard of from reading books or watching movies about pirates and that's the ghastly treatment that involved having a man to walk the plank and into the ocean despite this being the most recognizable punishment in the era of pirates it's mostly a thing of fiction there have been some recorded instances such as a mutineer in the 18th century confessing that he had made his officers walk the plank while blindfolded but the details are sketchy on this and many believe that it never happened there are some instances that sound true and were reported in the newspapers of the day but walking the plank was certainly a rare thing to happen so now we come to keel hauling which definitely did happen and you might argue was a worse punishment than any of the above the keel of the ship is like the backbone of the ship it's the bottom part when someone is hauled under the keel this is called keel hauling that person might have been hauled with ropes from one side of the ship to the other or even worse dragged the entire length of the ship from what are called the bow and the stern as you can imagine this would be rather unpleasant to say the least you might think well if the operation was short enough at least you could hold your breath and make it to the other side you might then dry yourself off issue some apologies and be back to work that wasn't really the case though because being bashed up against the ship was a painful affair there was a good chance bones would be broken or a head injury could mean the person was pulled up dead it was actually quite an extreme form of punishment because the ships are generally not smooth on the surface of the hull the part of the ship that floats in the water these wooden ships hulls were covered in barnacles which are those ultra sharp crustaceans that stick to things we are sure some of you have experienced slipping on a rock and being cut by these razor sharp things now imagine your body being hauled against them with pressure the keel hold man would be shredded all over his body and he might come out looking like a victim of freddy krueger it was a fate worse than marooning which is when pirates just left people to die on a deserted island jokingly some pirates call this making someone the governor of an island back to keel hauling sometimes weight was placed on the man so the people pulling him had more control of the movement of his body there was an upside and a downside to this he might have actually missed all those sharp barnacles if he went low enough but he might also have drowned this punishment was rare to say the least but there have been depictions of it in paintings going back to ancient times and the middle ages there is this picture that was sketched sometime in the 15th or 16th century england it was discussed in 1880 in british parliament when one politician asked the secretary to add morality about an instance of keel hauling that had been reported in italian newspapers it allegedly happened on the hms alexandra but the navy denied it had ever happened there is also a well-known painting that's called the keel hauling of the ship's surgeon of admiral jan van ness the event happened on a stationary ship in front of many spectators but it seems the punishment was never supposed to kill the offender but only act as a warning to others who thought about not towing the line pun intended that expression is a reference from the navy historians have written that keel hauling did happen in the dutch navy they described as we have saying that the man was lowered on pulleys and ropes into the water and weights were attached to him he was then pulled back up the other side of the ship although it's also written that he might have been given some time to get his breath back and then it started again this was apparently much more severe in the winter when the water was freezing cold and severe injury could happen due to the man hitting his head it wasn't supposed to be a death sentence though in the case of this keel hauling it was under the command of a 17th century dutch admiral named yanyan savaness we just can't find any resource that tells us what the guilty surgeon had done to deserve this wicked treatment keel hauling is described in a book called a relation of two several voyages made into the east indies that was published in 1700 again it's the dutch that did it here's an excerpt from that book he that strikes an officer or master of the ship is without hopes of pardon to be thrown into the sea fastened by a rope with which he is thrown in on one side of the ship and drawn up again on the other and so three times together he is drawn around the keel of the ship in the doing of which if they should chance not to allow rope enough to let him sink below the keel the malefactor might have his brains knocked out it sounds like the lower the man sank the better his chances were of keeping his head intact and not being sliced by barnacles there are other cases of keel hauling that were described in the journal of dutch admiral named martin harpenchun trump in 1639 he described something similar to the above in the 18th century a piece of writing by an englishman said the english don't do it but the french do one instance is described when a french sailor went around the ship five times it was published in november of 1869 in a publication called onward magazine the person who witnessed this and wrote about it said the sailor had injuries of the most serious nature or death itself certain of being the result what we might call more progressive nations have over the years introduced less brutal forms of execution gone are the days of crucifixion being squashed to death and burning people at the stake but in some countries today you'll still find stoning and decapitation something most of us would call barbaric for that matter many advocates of human rights will tell you that taking someone's life for a crime is always barbaric and we should put an end to this bloody chapter in human history others might just tell you that capital punishment is a necessary evil but if you kill them then try to do it humanely that usually means death by lethal injection the most widespread mode of execution after the topic of today's show the firing squad okay so first let's talk a bit more about the methods of execution around the world we know we told you that people no longer get crucified but we should say that saudi arabia still has a kind of post-mortem form of crucifixion that means beheading someone say for practicing that age-old thing called witchcraft and then sowing the head to the body and crucifying the accused wrongdoer we could call this a modern iteration of a practice that goes back more than 2 000 years you can still be hanged and in countries such as india japan singapore syria and south korea it's still legal recourse for severe criminality you can also be strapped to a chair and be shocked to kingdom come but only in the philippines in the united states the former has never even used the no doubt dusty chair and the law regarding the death penalty is still under review there where in the u.s for most states it's a cruel and unusual punishment in the u.s if it is legal you'll have to request it the last time someone was electrified until death by the state without having a choice was in alabama in 2002 the last person that chose it was electrocuted in 2018 in tennessee his last words before the chair came to life was let's rock it's similar in the us for the gas chamber in seven states at the moment it's on the menu of dying options the last time someone was gassed to death in the usa was in 2010 but reading articles about how long and how painful this looked you can understand that many people in the u.s want it abolished completely so now we come to the firing squad what we mean by that of course is being shot to death in some nations this is simply called shooting in that you can take the squad part out of the equation and replace it with a singular person like a gangland execution this can be more or less someone walking up behind a prisoner and popping one off in the back of his head in the soviet era this kind of execution was sometimes referred to as getting nine grams of lead though it seems antiquated a shot to the back of the head is still performed in some nations in china this happens but is veiled in secrecy one u.s news report in 2018 described it like this after seeing a video surrounded by dozens of security personnel he's forced to kneel and is then shot in the back of the head just so you know according to amnesty international in 2018 the countries with the most executions from fifth to first were iraq with 52 plus vietnam with 85 plus saudi arabia with 142 iran with 253 plus and in first place china with 1 000 plus the usa was 7th with 25. death by firing squad might still happen in many nations too many to mention but like the usa it might be a secondary choice behind the default method of lethal injection saying that some inmates might think it's at least fast maybe the authorities don't like the blood and the public doesn't like the sound of it but news reports in 2018 told us that four tennessee death row inmates had requested the firing squad it's not legal there but the inmates filed a lawsuit saying under the eighth amendment they had the right to challenge electrocution right now in the us only three states still offer death by bullet as an option and they are mississippi oklahoma and utah as we said not all death by firing squads are the same you might have seen the movie about thailand's trigger man for many years called the last executioner which showed one man honing his trade over the years and for the prisoner's sake trying to get the job done quickly in thailand prisoners took a machine gun round to the back but the country has since adopted lethal injection but when we say squad we usually mean a group of people of course this might at least ensure that a few bullets secure a death but you can find many instances in which the prisoner did not die or at least needed quite a few more bullets these days it's unlikely that this would happen because men aren't just lined up against a wall and soldiers fire at random from a distance now it's a precision operation back in the bad old days indeed it might not be quick at all we're told the first types of firing squads could be found in ancient cultures but as guns weren't invented the weapon of choice was a crossbow the romans and vikings did this and we might consider that it was probably a godsend for the prisoner given that death might have come from being boiled alive or something even more grisly as seen in our shows on punishments of the past in europe once guns were invented you might find people being executed with a bullet and later the firing squad this was used quite a lot in the early 20th century sometimes for acts of treason or soldiers turning away from battle one of the most controversial cases is the brits in the first world war who ordered the execution by firing squad of 346 of its own soldiers and own imperial troops these men were put up against the wall and shot for matters of desertion and cowardice although it's now thought that they were not surprisingly suffering from ptsd and depression during the american civil war many enemies met with the firing squad but we can only find one case in which an american man was shot for desertion and that was in the second world war his name was eddie slovik and even though it said he was too scared to carry on fighting on a cold january morning in france in 1945 12 of his fellow soldiers fired 11 bullets into various parts of his body it took 15 minutes for him to die you might now be thinking hmm so one man must have had quite a poor shot or perhaps was a compassionate soul that's not the case at all the reason he was hit with only 11 bullets by 12 men was because during execution from firing squad one man is given blank rounds no one knows who gets the blank round and in the melee you can't really work out if you hit the prisoner the reasoning behind this is to diminish responsibility to let you off the hook if you like this way no one soldier knows if he actually had the blank the squad perhaps can at least sleep better at night with the plausible deniability life science tells us that these days the firing squad for inmates on death row is a little bit different the website rights of one execution the five executioners certified police officers who remain anonymous stood about 25 feet away and shot from behind a black curtain and threw a brick wall cut with a gun port or a special opening for the firearms the bullet that did the business fired from a 30 caliber winchester rifle was won through the heart no one knew who had delivered that fatal shot as again one of the guns fired blanks we say no one knew but you'll find people that don't believe that and say most marksmen will know if they had blanks because of the lack of recoil the prisoner in this case had chosen firing squad over lethal injection he explained why i like the firing squad it's so much easier and there's no mistakes he said in an interview sounding like an expert utah's menu of executions in the past had consisted of hanging and also mafia style garating so maybe in relative terms firing squad was a walk in the park does anyone ever survive the firing squad is probably what you want to know now well as we told you there are lots of cases in which a man took a hail of bullets and just wouldn't die but actually walk away as it's quite a tall order to evade death with a bunch of men firing at you and then firing at you some more when they see your ears twitch and then some more as you blow a blood bubble out of your mouth we can barely find a single case that's because if you survive all the rounds what would usually come up in the past was what we call the coup de grace the death blow which means a close-up bullet to the head there's one famous case of a man that went through all of that and eventually came out standing and that is the story of a mexican revolutionary called wenceslau mogel aka el fusilado that means the executed one in 1915 during the mexican revolution he was sentenced to death by firing squad and took nine bullets he wasn't quite dead though and it said an officer walked right up to him and shot him in the face he actually appeared on ripley's and so you can see what he looks like after some surgery it said he went on to live a full life but you can also see he literally took a few on the chin as his new face looks like it was modeled with putty by a child you can see the bullet hole under the eye and after seeing mr miguel you might wonder how he ever survived his ordeal we have summarized to you in our worst punishment series despicable things men have done to each other in the name of justice often a very disconcerting kind of justice many of the punishments we've discussed were used at different times in history and in different countries with each purveyor of pain putting its own spin on the punishment the chinese for instance flayed the flesh of an enemy's back in ancient times but might have just flayed a person's face as a stern telling off while a les majeste crime in 14th century europe could have gotten you flayed from head to toe then castrated and then beheaded for good measure yes these shows might be hard to stomach but we think the barbarity of the past shouldn't be ignored and so we'll start this series with a torture that's often said to be the worst kind of torture that has ever existed in recorded history we say that but it's hardly easy to invoke the superlative when you have people getting their skin peeled off after being boiled in a pot maybe burning at the stake was better than modern white torture at least it was over with quickly so we won't say what's the worst and certainly won't attempt to tell you what was the best but we'll start with rat torture only because it's so darn outlandish with this kind of official devilment we have to separate the myth from the truth or at least try and back up the truth with substantial facts what we can say with assuredness is that one kind of rat torture was perhaps the incidental kind of punishment that's because you can find in the tower of london something called the dungeon of the rats writers in the elizabethan period said what would happen is the prisoners would be kept in the dungeon and when the river thames rolled in the water would spill into the cell prisoners were less than fond of this time as the water would bring rats with it and those rats would occasionally gnaw on the prisoner's flesh we assume the guards knew this was happening maybe this was better than being locked into a tiny cell called little ease because the prisoners in this place had to stay for a long time crouched in a painful position it could have been worse after a stint with the rats you might have gotten sent to the rack we're told in the 17th century though those bloodthirsty english elites cleaned up their act a little bit okay now it gets even worse we'll talk about the ultimate rat torture or perhaps the ultimate rat tortures the book the rise of the dutch republic a history volume 1 by john lothrop motley is considered a classic book in this book it's written that during the dutch revolt against the spanish habsburgs in the 16th and 17th centuries the master torturer and leader diedrich sunay was found of doing the worst kind of thing imaginable with a pack of vermin this man it said would take a bunch of starving rats and place them on the sliced belly of a prisoner they would be kept on the stomach with an upside down bowl so far so good it was probably slightly ticklish and maybe a rat took a chance bite now and then but then the fun started for sonae at least when hot coals were placed on top of the bowl this not only burned the victim but made life inside that bowl unbearable for the rats hmm where to go when there is no escape we're told what would ensue is the rats trying to burrow into the man's stomach to escape the heat we're not sure though how far the rats got or if this was a torture until death or if it was only a way of extracting information from a prisoner you can be sure the prisoner didn't hold much back if that was the case the website the torture museum which is hardly a barrel of laughs tells us this this method was very effective in terms of interrogation and the offender would feel a powerful combination of disgust fear and pain often he would confess without waiting for the rodents to dig their holes a similar kind of torture appeared in season two of game of thrones but the pottery bowl was replaced with a metal bucket we're also told in many parts of medieval europe you might have found something similar but the rats would be placed in a cage on a prisoner's stomach and the opening in the belly would not be easy enough for the rats to start eating away at the insides the problem with this is we cannot find any sources citing historical examples of when this happened but if you consider that europeans back then had head crushers breaking wheels knee splitters and the utterly horrific judas cradle it doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to believe someone might have said at one point in the past something similar to hey everett how about we make a load of hungry rats eat his insides you might have heard his coworker reply oh jeffrey that's a great idea do you know where we can find a small cage in a bag of rats as you well know if you want to find creative kinds of tortures just read about ancient rome oh the things they did with animals there imagine being sentenced to death by being sat on by an elephant and to make it worse in front of a cheering crowd or what about being sewn into a donkey but we're also told that emperor nero was particularly fond of having animals burrow into people some sources tell us that an animal such as a cat a dog a small one we presume or indeed a rat or rats would be placed in a cauldron that cauldron was heated until the crazed animal would do anything to get out unfortunately for some people the only way out was a person's stomach that was placed next to an opening in the pot we're told by other sources that there was another roman spin on rat torture and this was simply emptying lots of starved rats into a barrel where a man was waiting the ravenous rats would get to work and the more blood and flesh that came off the easier it was to eat him when the rats were full more starving rats would be poured into the barrel we imagine this would go on until there was nothing left of the poor man the torture museum tells us that later in india there was a similar interrogation technique in which a man would be forced to wear rat pants these were pants with lots of space in the groin area but not much down the legs the hungry rats would feast on the crown jewels until the suspect was willing to talk while such torture we would like to hope is a thing of the past it said that rat torture was actually a thing not that long ago during brazil's military dictatorship days from 1964 to 1985 it said scores of people or dissidents were subjected to horrific torture while the tractors often seem to have a knack at making folks disappear we're told in brazil in those days they were also brutally tortured the strange thing is the guardian wrote in 2014 that many of these brazilian military men went to the uk to learn better torture techniques but what they learned there was that psychological torture works best because it can make a prisoner slowly spill more beans but this wasn't anywhere near as gruesome as the torture we've so far talked about in that the torturer would use rats or snakes or even crocodiles just to scare prisoners we guess just being covered in rats or having a croc for a cellmate is scary enough maybe those brits were onto something today's punishment is perhaps the best known of the nastiest ways people were put to death in the past there's arguably no better known case than the wannabe kingslayer damian who in 1757 in france after failing to assassinate king louis xv was punished to the extreme the author of the rights of man thomas paine later wrote about this terrible cruelty as did french philosopher michel foucault who said such a grim spectacle of violence was a turning point in how we punished people damian was first made to wear feet crushing boots then he had his hand that held the knife that tried to kill the king dipped in molten lead after which he was cut open and had hot oil poured into his wounds he then had his limbs tied to horses and they were ripped off slowly and with some effort finally apparently still breathing his torso was burned at the stake after hearing that you might agree that humanity has come some way and as we said the case of damian disgusted a lot of people at the time it was barbaric to the extreme and while stories differ as to how damian died was it at the stake or when his last limb was pulled off even the most avid viewer of executions in those days was muttering something along the lines of hmm i think that might have been just a little bit too much it was a fact that those who tried to kill a king known as regicide would get the worst kind of punishments still what happened to damian sickened some people to such an extent that as fucor points out in his book discipline and punish they were asking for reform here's what an italian author and adventurer who saw the execution said we had the courage to watch the dreadful sight for four hours i was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as i heard his piercing shrieks half of his body having been torn from him prior to his death damia at least hadn't lost his sense of irony apparently stating la joni serra which most translate as the day will be hard but it could also be it's gonna be a rough day you might not disagree with daniel here if getting your feet crushed hand melted having red hot pincers tear holes in you and having hot oil poured into your wounds isn't punishment enough being ripped apart certainly could be called icing on the cake it's actually written that the horses didn't do the job properly and someone had to go in there with a knife to cut the stubborn tendons it was no doubt a pretty rough day but we might now ask how many other ill-starred people in this world have had a similarly bad day if the french went over the top in the middle of the 18th century their neighbors and often mortal enemies the british had been giving people bad days for a long time in fact it said it was the brits that came up with the punishment we now call hanged drawn and quartered it's called that because the way these brits would do it is pull or draw the man to a place where he would usually be hanged but only until the point of death not actual death the drawing part was all about pulling the criminal through the crowd so they could jeer and feel the fear this kind of punishment was reserved for people who had committed high treason people called traitors of the state now for the end part quartering not all such executions were exactly the same but usually a traitor would have his manhood removed with a knife his insides ripped out evisceration and then either chopped into four pieces or such as what happened to damion his four limbs pulled apart by horses for good measure what was left was sometimes burned at the stake other times there was no burning but the torso or head would be left hanging from the london bridge just as a reminder to anyone else who might go against the state also sometimes the four limbs would be sent to four corners of the country you'll find some people calling this the very worst execution in history but let's face it if you've seen all our shows on terrible punishments it's hard to pick a top spot the worst part of course was that it's often not over quickly and just like with damion prisoners might survive a lot of the cutting tearing burning and at times might even have something left when almost limbless we're told that in england and many other places in europe the purveyors of justice would decide how long it lasted if they took pity on someone they would strangle or hang them until dead and then do the nasty work on the other hand they also knew how to keep someone alive throughout the worst of it if a prisoner was really fortunate they might accidentally kill him while hanging him which is something we'll discuss later another famous example of this torturous execution was that of william wallace the scottish warrior knight you might have seen the movie braveheart but remember that when hollywood does history you could say the interpretation is so loose it barely gets the countries right wallace fought the law and the law won he was convicted of treason in 1305 although famously he said how can i be a traitor if i am not a subject of england wallace had led the fight for scottish independence against the english and king edward the first on august 23rd of that year wallace was stripped naked and dragged through the streets of london by a horse no doubt the locals were shouting for joy as the accused scottish miscreant was dragged along it said he was then hanged but taken down still alive and very much conscious he then had his willy chopped off after which the executioners ripped out his guts those insides were then burned while a dying wallace was made to watch the operation he was then cut into four and had his head chopped off which might have been a great relief his head was dipped in tar and stuck on a pike on london bridge for all to see not the kind of sight you'll see these days during a spin on the london eye but this was the brutal past and the laws were there for the most part as a deterrent the harsher the punishment the less people would break the law rehabilitation didn't really exist back then many people just in britain met this fate but as we said some got off with less of a painful experience under queen elizabeth the first it said that many catholic priests were sentenced to being hanged drawn and quartered this might have been the golden era of art poetry the likes of william shakespeare but lizzie wasn't keen on some of those pesky catholics those accused of being part of a catholic polish plot lost their limbs this also happened in 1681 to the archbishop of armagh called oliver plunkett under the reign of charles ii spies sometimes went that way too as did some folks accused of being sympathetic to revolutions the obscene punishment was supposed to keep people frightened or meek but as is often the case such extreme behavior can cause people to go against the state it's also said that during those difficult centuries many of the people loved a good execution with sometimes many thousands of people filling the streets and sometimes even trying to rip bits of the corpse off for themselves so they had a trophy many years later it said there were some cases of hanging drawing and quartering in the american war of independence with both sides calling their enemy a traitor we can't possibly go through all of the cases as there are so many but some historians agree that the first was in england in 1283 a bunch of scottish rebels as we said went that way some time later as did a few people who had joined the peasants revolt in 1381. the 16th century was a good year for hanging drawing and quartering but not long into the 17th century a bunch of guys tried and failed to blow up british parliament that is the famous story of guy fox in the gunpowder plot still today some brits get together on november 5th and burn an effigy of fox in a bonfire as we said the plot failed and fox was caught and tortured he and other plotters were sentenced to die in a horrible way in 1606 first they were to be drawn backwards through town their heads taking a beating then as the judge said they would be put to death halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both that meant the not quite killing part where they're hanged their genitalia was then to be removed and then burnt right in front of their eyes next the men were to be opened up and their bowels pulled out but this time the executioner was also asked to rip out the men's hearts it's written that the most famous plotter fox actually got off lucky because his rope was set incorrectly and when they hanged him his neck broke as we said you can see effigies kind of dolls meant to look like humans of guy fox being burned every year in the uk we could now go on about uprisings in britain's and downfalls of so-called traders but we think you now get the picture regarding how this operation went as we've said come the latter part of the 18th century and some people were starting to ask if this punishment wasn't a tad on the inhumane side america would call it a cruel and inhumane punishment and by and large more developing countries started to turn more towards deprivation or prison than deterrence with a spectacle of violence in britain some sources say a man called david tyree was the last man to receive the punishment in 1782. he got the full monty after being accused and convicted of spying for the french this is written about that day he was sentenced to be drawn to the place of execution and there hanged by the neck cut down alive and his entrails and privy member cut from his body and burned him his sight his head to be cut off and his body to be divided into four quarters and disposed of at the king's pleasure apparently 100 000 brits turned out fathers mothers sons and daughters to cheer this on nonetheless utter brutality was falling out of fashion as europe was becoming much more reasoned and enlightened in the 19th century brit said enough is enough let's perhaps leave the evisceration in manhood mangling out of it and just draw folks through the streets and then hang them until dead or chop off their heads this happened in 1803 and the victim was called edward despard his sentence was commuted from the former hang draw in quarter to the latter just draw and kill quickly he was a high-ranking soldier who had said was stationed in honduras during the days of the empire he was seen by some of the ruling class as troublesome as he gave some rights to slaves and espoused an unusual idea of the time of racial equality he married a black woman and then really upset some of the ruling brits when it said he treated blacks the same as whites he was in charge at the time but then because of his appalling kindness and humanity he was sent back to england and then later accused of being involved in a plot to kill the king the largest gathering for a long time turned up for the drawing and execution 20 000 people in all it was fast and compared to the past not so horrendous an era was over and never again would the public get to see someone butchered in the streets while screaming in agony no longer would heads be decorating london bridge and filling stomachs with hot coals or oil would never again be a la mode in the chambers of justice it's another new day and another addition to our worst punishment series this time we're bringing you something definitely not for the squeamish so if you've got a weak constitution or recently ate maybe click over on another one of our videos for those of you brave enough though stay tuned for this episode of the infographic show worst punishments sawing in half people have been thinking up ingenious ways to kill each other for well for as long as there's been people around sometimes though humanity turns murder into something of an art form and particularly gifted artists have been looking to outdo each other for millennia as they invent ever more creative ways of killing people the saw was first invented sometime around the 31st century bc making it one of humanity's oldest tools while history is unsure of when the saw was then turned into the nefarious purpose of torture and execution our expert team of historians here at the infographic show have deduced that it happened approximately five minutes after its invention and as proof they quote the terrible nature of man itself which we gotta admit is pretty compelling proof whatever the case the saw has a rich history of being used as both a torture and execution device with the aim being to prolong the suffering of an individual as long as possible it would after all be easier to simply chop someone's limbs or head off but far less entertaining one of the earliest and verified accounts of execution via sawing occurred during the reign of darius ii in ancient persia darius ii's half sister and wife because that's how they got down in those days was well known to be the real power behind the throne and after being slighted by the siblings of her daughter-in-law she ordered them killed the first sibling to be killed was sawn in half likely while hanging upside down if you thought that execution via saw was something reserved for ancient antiquity though then you should know that as late as 1848 during the hungarian revolution thousands of women children and old men were mutilated roasted over fires and sawn to pieces the torture of sawing comes in a few different varieties and the technique varies with the aims sometimes song is used as a form of punishment and not necessarily an outright execution thieves liars and other minor offenders in some ancient cultures would have hands or feet sawn off or perhaps entire limbs this was meant not just to punish and deter crime but to serve as a very visual warning to everybody else if you were thinking about shoplifting a candy bar but happened to see a guy with a limbs on off you'd probably think twice about nicking that precious sweet punishments varied but criminals could expect to have finger sawn off individually or perhaps the entire hand or foot for more serious offenses the leg or arm might be sewn off though perhaps just below the elbow or knee or the entire limb may be amputated depending on the severity of the crime you've probably heard of the expression paying your eight pounds of flesh well in this case it was taken quite literally while those who are convicted to punishment via suffering were not meant to die from the experience or at least from the blood loss as many would die from infection afterwards sawing with intent to kill was far more common in that case the executioners faced a particular dilemma in that the human body is rather floppy especially if your victim is screaming and flailing around in agony to resolve the problem many cultures got rather inventive about the act if you've seen our other episodes on punishments and torture then you already know that the ancient chinese were rather clever about coming up with ways to maim and mutilate and when faced with the problem of sawing a floppy human victim in half they put their best minds to the task the obvious solution of course would be to simply saw a person along the midsection and this proved to be quite popular not just in china but around the world lumberers in particular were fond of tying a victim to a tree and then sawing through the victim and into the tree itself victims could also be tied to upright wooden poles and then sawed right through the middle another technique would be to tie a person down to the ground and then saw them in half using a two-person saw with heavy weights on top of the blade to force the blade to bite down into the flesh but all of these methods quickly became boring and repetitive and while it was satisfying to watch someone sawn in half horizontally the real prize was to saw a person vertically for many years this holy grail of execution by saw eluded mankind's best scientists and engineers until two separate solutions were drawn up in the far east and in europe in china executioners came up with a clever idea of sandwiching a person between two boards which could then be pressed together via a system of gears at the top and bottom the individual would thus be slightly crushed between the two boards and flail and scream as they might the task of sawing through their body was made relatively easy in europe and the middle east victims were strung up and hung upside down literally turning the world of torture by saw on its head a person would be tied to two poles with each foot fastened to a pull and the hands fastened at the bottom of those poles this kept the victim firmly in place as the executioners moved the saw between the legs and began to saw downwards while techniques varied leading death by saw researchers were quick to discover that of the two methods of death by sawing vertical and horizontal the vertical sawing ensured that a victim remained alive the longest this was because when you sought an individual horizontally they would often die from massive blood loss relatively quickly however when you flipped them upside down the blood would rush to the head and ensure a victim remained alive and conscious for much longer than normal victims killed in this way would stay alive even as the saw reached chest level and there was of course the added satisfaction of watching a victim's blood and guts fall down onto their faces as they screamed in agony it was quality family entertainment yet some curious mind wondered what if you sought a person vertically but from the top down well given the general reluctance by victims to rudely refuse to keep their heads still a style similar to that employed by the chinese was necessary and so victims had their heads strapped to a pole or plank and the sawing would commence from the victims right to left unfortunately for all involved and to the surprise of absolutely nobody this technique resulted in pretty quick death since the brain is extremely allergic to being sawed into still sometimes the technique may be handed out as a mercy sure you're gonna be executed by sawing in half but hey you're getting a real bone toss to you here because you're gonna get sod from the top down incredibly victims still complained that this was cruel and unusual punishment honestly there's just no pleasing some people throughout history there have been several fans of sawing in half caligula the infamous and very crazy roman empire in 48d was fond of having people sawn in half while he ate considering the suffering as an appetizer to dinner next time we're out at a restaurant we know what we're ordering before the main course thanks to the fact that caligula was stark raving mad there was no shortage of sawing victims either as he was particularly good at making enemies while declaring himself god replacing the heads of the statues of gods with his own and generally doing as he pleased with anyone's wife or daughter in his vicinity fourteen hundred years later in 1450 a.d the ottoman empire resurrected the sawing craze under the patronage of muhammad the conqueror likely very annoyed with the fact that his next door neighbor vlad had cemented a special place in history with the amazing nickname of vlad the impaler muhammad stood in his palace determined to get a cool nickname of his own muhammad the strangler nah sounds too creepy muhammad the disemboweler kind of cool but also far too barbaric and not fitting of royalty muhammad the tsar hmm now there's something muhammad got his chance to put this new nickname to the test when his armies conquered constantinople in 1453 a.d muhammad gave his army a three-day pass to do as they pleased with the citizens of the conquered city and for three bloody days soldiers exercised every imaginable cruelty on the population sawing people in half though was featured prominently and muhammad decided that vlad may have his impaling but he'd get his sawing years later when his army conquered another small city 500 prisoners were sent to constantinople where they were each sawn in two a year before that though 400 christian knights had surrendered to the ottoman forces under the promise that they would have their lives spared muhammad agreed then immediately changed his mind and had each man sawn in half yet despite his best efforts muhammad the tsar would never really stick probably because it's a pretty dumb nickname and instead he'd have to make do with the conqueror instead sawing in half has been a mainstay of human history since its invention but thankfully the practice seems to have gone out of style during the 19th century sadly humanity now has to face a future where we'll never get to experience the delight of sawing people in half with the great variety of different saws modern technology has developed we'll never get to see someone sawn in half by a bandsaw for instance or a chainsaw and what about a water saw a device that shoots water at such high pressure it can cut directly into the heart of steel we bet ancient torturers are right now shedding tears that they never got to see that one actually happen yet as we're well aware humanity is absolutely terrible so keep your chin up because odds are that eventually civilization will collapse into itself and we'll all be getting sawed in half by the angry robots that rule us all today's installment of incredibly nasty punishments that humans inflicted on other humans is one we're sure most of you if not all have heard of and is probably the most famous form of brutal punishment in history crucifixion it's the method by which christians believed their messiah jesus christ was killed and today miniature crosses are worn around their necks carried around in pockets and fall off the walls in movies about demonically possessed people since christianity has spread into countries across the world this instrument of cruel torture has become a household item but crucifixion has a long and complex history beside being the cause of christ's agony and today we'll cover all the bases the origins of the word excruciating a word we often use to talk about the feeling of extreme pain is derived from the latin words for cross and crucify this method of execution was supposed to cause what we might call excruciating pain it was also supposed to be slow and since people were often crucified where the public could see it was believed that it would act as a deterrent and cause people to think twice about committing a crime themselves after seeing the anguish of the victim it was also meant to be humiliating we've all seen images of people on crosses with their lower regions tastefully covered by a scrap of cloth but this was likely never the case in real life you were hung up with everything hanging out crucifixion was a warning to all a karmic retribution written by the state this is what you get when you mess with us there were many different kinds of punishment that could be described as a type of crucifixion sometimes impalement is said to be a form of crucifixion though if a person found themselves impaled on a spike they didn't live very long due to punctured organs and blood loss so it isn't quite the same as what we normally think of as a crucifixion in other cases a person might be fastened to something with rope and then left for days until they die again a similar fate but missing that key component of a cross-shaped implement crucifixion's origins date back long before jesus of nazareth was crucified the persians had been crucifying wrongdoers as early as 400 bc and there's evidence that the assyrians and babylonians may have been putting people up on crosses hundreds of years before that the ancient greeks though were less interested in crucifixion preferring methods like letting the condemned drink poison but the historian herodotus does mention at least one instance he wrote that after capturing a persian general the army nailed him to a plank and hung him up alexander the great is the one man responsible for exporting crucifixion from persia and spreading it to the western world and in fact he crucified thousands of his enemies it wouldn't be too long until the romans got their hands on it and they're the ones who really perfected it but they didn't often crucify their own this terrible method of killing was usually reserved for foreigners and christian outsiders although some slaves and soldiers that had disgraced themselves may have also been crucified a person that had been crucified would often die within just a few hours there were many ways that a person might die such as asphyxiation from being strung up in a way that prevented proper breathing they might also have been grievously injured from beatings prior to being hung up on the cross and simply die from their injuries once they were up there but some people managed to hold on for a few days roman soldiers were told to guard the sites where people were crucified and if that person lasted too long they might just break the person's legs to prevent from being able to stand up straight leading to asphyxiation or they might just simply drive a spear through the person's heart if you wanted to know what it might be like just imagine this you're laid out and have your hands tied and then nailed to two sides of a cross this not only causes immense pain but you lose feeling in those hands as well from severed nerves your feet would then be nailed to the bottom part of the beam but in such a way so that the knees were slightly bent this means you could push yourself up a little bit to relieve some pressure off your upper body but remember sometimes soldiers will then break your leg bones to make it even more painful and harder to support yourself once this initial support was lost your arms would be pulled gradually from their sockets the weight of your own body would cause expansion of the chest and lungs and with no way to push yourself up to relieve this it quickly leads to asphyxiation you essentially choke yourself to death the heart would also suffer from this weight and you might even die from heart failure before your lungs gave out no matter what killed you first it was an agonizing way to die on some crosses support might have been given in the form of a foot rest extending the time it would take for you to die sometimes taking as long as a few days so how do we know any of this existed the simple answer is the romans recorded it and many historians were quite detailed about it some of the writers expressed that crucifixion was cruel and a crime against humanity the roman statesman and philosopher cicero who was around for a lot of crucifixions wrote that it was a most cruel and disgusting punishment it was all the rage with the masses though and it's thought that after spartacus led a slave revolt thousands of his followers met their end on the cross spartacus himself though died in battle before he had his chance to go up on the cross which was probably a preferable way to go the thing that a person was crucified on wasn't always a cross though sometimes it was just a pole and that was called a krook's simplex then there was a version with the cross beam attached to the top and a t-shape and this was called the krus kamisa the one most of you know and that became a symbol for christianity was called the crooks emisa despite it being used on reportedly thousands of people archaeologists have only unearthed one skeleton of a man that was crucified by the romans around the time of jesus he met his end in the first century and after some disagreements between archaeologists it was agreed that his legs were affixed together with one nail his hands were tied and not nailed though and he likely died from asphyxiation another matter that's often debated is whether or not the victim had to carry the cross on their own back to the execution site this is highly unlikely because the person often had to walk a considerable distance to the site we know this because the romans wrote about at least one such site the entire cross usually weighed around 300 pounds so lugging that much weight in bare feet over a long distance would likely have qualified some of those condemned men for today's world's strongest man competitions it's now thought that they might have just carried the crossbeam which could have weighed around a hundred pounds but even that wouldn't have been easy but did crucifixion always result in death no and in fact there are written accounts of people who actually survived the first century romano jewish historian titus flavius josephus wrote this i saw many captives crucified and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance i was very sorry at this in my mind and went with tears in my eyes to titus and told him of them so he immediately commanded them to be taken down and to have the greatest care taken of them in order to their recovery yet two of them died under the physician's hands while the third recovered the problem is he didn't write about what form of crucifixion the men had endured it might have been a kind which didn't bring on a quick death so maybe they were some of the lucky ones who got a foot rest maybe they were merely tied up and not nailed directly to the cross and we're assuming they weren't stabbed in the heart by a spear we will never know for sure though but more often than not no mercy was shown since no roman wanted to be killed by an unhappy slave one way to ensure that that didn't happen was to threaten them with the possibility of crucifixion thanks to the roman historian tacitus we know about one slave who killed his master a revered roman senator as punishment the slave was to be killed by crucifixion but the romans wanted to make an example of this case and crucified an additional 400 of the murdered man's slaves many of whom were women and children the reasoning was that the slaves should have protected their master and because they allowed the murder to happen they too were complicit and had to be punished severely this they said would inspire other slaves to help out if such a thing should happen again tacitus wrote about this case in a book called the annals and described the statement from the senator which of us will be rescued by his domestics who even with the dread of punishment before them regard not our dangers not all people were that hardcore back then but tacitus wrote that many people protested the killing of women and children they weren't listened to and the executions went ahead a mob gathered and protested again but the guards were called in and the mob was subdued sounds like things haven't changed much since then you have the grotesque case of a 13 year old girl who was crucified a couple of hundred years later her name was eulalia of barcelona during the persecution of christians she was tortured 13 times first she was rolled in a barrel full of spikes and shards of glass and then she was flogged for good measure if that wasn't enough her now ripped flesh was combed no not with a plastic comb but with an instrument made of iron with sharp teeth we won't go into the whole ordeal but it was followed by her being crucified and then decapitated centuries later the japanese introduced crucifixion and famously in 1597 26 christians were crucified in the 1860s a young japanese man was crucified with his legs spread eagle and there's actually a photograph of this the caption describes it as the servant sokichi crucified at the age of 25 for killing niki sasuro son of his master nuiski in the village of kiso again killing masters was a crime to be made an example of in the early 19th century a missionary working in burma said it happened there here's what he wrote and we have to warn you it's quite grim four or five persons after being nailed through their hands and feet to a scaffold had first their tongues cut out then their mouths slid open from ear to ear then their ears cut off and finally their bellies ripped open over a century later an australian man named herbert james ringer edwards was crucified he was a prisoner of war and had been building the infamous railway from thailand to burma under the japanese he and some other guys had been caught killing cattle for food the japanese soldier strung him up with fencing wire to a tree and beat him and then left him to die but others snuck the man food and after 63 hours he was taken down he lived to the ripe old age of 86 but two others that had been strung up with him did not survive today in saudi arabia a form of crucifixion is still practiced although there the person is first executed by decapitation and then their dead body is hung up on a beam amnesty international wrote the body with the separated head sewn back on is hung from or against the pole in public to act as a deterrent the year is 1626 and a husband and wife were sleeping peacefully in their warm bed oblivious to the fact that an exceptionally cruel and completely unhinged thief was about to change their lives forever the sleeping couple who'd enjoyed comfort and wealth all their lives were in for a terrible shock they were about to be confronted by a man who was not only going to take all their valuables but was going to introduce them to one of the most evil devices known to man it's known as the choke pair but we think its alternate name is more fitting given the pain it inflicted on its victims and that name is the pair of anguish and today dear viewers you're going to see just how horrifying this small contraption must have been to those that wore it let's get back to the sleeping couple they were awakened by the thief whose intention was not to silently rob the pair and make off into the night but to wake them and demand to know where they were hiding their most valuable belongings to do this he needed to get them to talk but he never had much success chopping off fingers and smacking people around the face it was his good fortune then that he had recently been introduced to a new method of ensuring cooperation a while back he'd met a fellow thief in a tavern a thief who said he'd always had a 100 success rate in extracting information from his victims the man explained that to get people to talk it wasn't good enough to just beat them up a bit what was required was a device so brutal the very thought of it would get people talking in seconds if they didn't immediately talk the solution was simple start the device at notch1 the man explained that no one absolutely no one could endure notch 2. so the thief woke up the couple and told them in no uncertain terms they needed to take him to the stash of jewels he knew they had hidden not surprisingly the husband said there was no stash just take what you see and please leave us in peace he told the robber after uttering those words the thief pulled something out of a bag the man and his wife had no idea what they were looking at it looked like a pair a pair made from metal connected to some kind of key the thief calmly explained to them and we should say with some amount of relish that in a minute or two one of them would be trying on the device the woman screamed just thinking about that which helped the thief make his decision regarding who would first experience his dear pair of anguish we won't explain what happened next your imagination should be able to come up with the rest of that story if you can't just see how that thief might have gotten the information he wanted you'll soon find out the pair of anguish wasn't something to be taken lightly it was sometimes only used as a gag but if that screw was ever turned a few times the results could literally be jaw-dropping the question is did that ever happen was it ever used in a hollywood horror kind of way some folks think yes others think no first we need to talk about the earliest recorded uses of this terrible pair some of the contraptions are sitting in museums today but the evidence of their use is still somewhat scant still we have some evidence to work with there's a book that was written in 1639 by a french author named f de calvi the book in english is translated as general inventory of the history of thieves in this book the writer states that the pair was invented by a well-known thief named gushru de palioli the writer explains that palioli used the device when robbing wealthy parisians although calvi doesn't say that the victims had their jaws broken apart only that it was used as a very scary type of gag there's more evidence of this device being used for robberies but outside of france in the 1811 book dictionary of the vulgar tongue it's written that the pair was used to extort people in holland another book written at the end of the 19th century called the brewers dictionary of phrase and fable also included a passage describing how dutch criminals would put the pair in a victim's mouth and then demand a certain amount of money what's frightening is that the book explains that on some devices the key was detachable so if the criminal wanted he could leave the pair in the victim's mouth without the key it was very hard or impossible to remove and that's why cash could be extorted such a torture instrument may have made its way around the u.s sometime during the 19th century but that's debatable a detective working in boston at the end of the 1800s admitted that pairs as gags had been used in the u.s but he noted that they weren't quite as cruel as the gags that had been used in europe the detective wrote that the american pair was far less marvelous and dangerous than the pair of palioli the us pair of anguish was likely comparable to a pool ball or a sock okay now for something more gruesome it's said that during medieval times the pair was used to extract confessions from people accused of being witches in this case most of the people who faced the pair were women it doesn't take a genius to figure out how else such an instrument could have been used to cause immense pain and even death the human body has a number of orifices other than the mouth and it's those places where the pear was sometimes inserted or at least that's the tail that's been told once the key was turned the petals opened and the woman would suffer unimaginably often the petals would have spikes attached to them to cause extensive internal damage we know this because of the artifacts that you can find today in torture museums those artifacts are very much real but as you'll see they're also questionable men it seems might also suffer from similar torture except the orifice of choice in their case was the entrance in the backside the outcome of torture was similar immense pain internal damage and heavy blood loss possibly death this is what we hear about the pair of anguish when visiting certain museums although in the 2014 book the pair of anguish torture truth and dark medievalism the writer states that there's no proof this ever happened he goes as far to say that some of the devices still around today are actually built after medieval times so like some other torture devices we've talked about in the past such as the iron maiden they may have been created for the scare factor only to show more modern people how brutish and backward people were in the past nonetheless during our research we found sources stating that the pairs were used on blasphemers or even liars and in those cases the mouth was the place the torture took place the same sources say that if a woman purposefully miscarried she might also face the pair but the location it was to be inserted was her vagina as for a man if he was accused of being homosexual he might have been brutalized by the pair but the location was his anus there seems to be little doubt that the pair of anguish was used by thieves in europe but if they were ever employed by torturers in medieval times it's up for debate it's highly likely that the french thief we talked about had his very own pair of anguish and there's little doubt that some dutch criminals used them but historians these days argue that the pairs expanding in men and women's lower orifices in the middle ages was possibly an invention of propagandists writing in the 19th century about the terrible past one historian writes that the surviving devices you can currently find around the world would not have been sturdy enough to cause any internal damage we've talked about although he admits that they could have certainly expanded an orifice and caused a certain degree of discomfort during your time viewing videos from the infographic show you may have come across some of the worst punishments humans have ever devised torture has been used throughout history to punish criminals make enemies talk or just for fun by insane despots but what if you were sentenced to death using a form of punishment that was quick watched by thousands and even may have made you a household name we're talking about the guillotine join us as we explore the gruesome and fascinating machine that was the favorite form of punishment in france for nearly 200 years and whether you agree with this form of punishment or not just try not to lose your head and keep calm the guillotine is probably best known for its work during the french revolution it struck fear in the hearts of the innocent and guilty citizens across france and it was a time of unrest and those sentenced to death rarely had trials but beheading and even beheading machines were not new to the world at the time of the french revolution beheading as a punishment happened throughout history and across the world it can be traced back to ancient greek and roman times however beheading wasn't for everyone it started out as an honorable death that was reserved for nobles and persons of importance if you were someone of lower status you were most likely going to be getting the axe as your beheading device but those with real prestige were decapitated by a sword you had to be really important to get the sword either way the result was the same beheading was not just a eurocentric punishment either seppuku which is a ritual decapitation by samurai sword was practiced in japan from the 15th to the 19th century regardless if you were a samurai roman soldier or english crusader decapitation was always an option as a punishment in england beheading gained popularity during medieval times it was used to execute rival rulers soldiers and traders but traders were not high status so they were not worthy of just your normal beheading instead they were dragged through the streets by horse to the location of their execution hung within inches of their death disemboweled and then finally beheaded some traders were lucky enough to have all four limbs tied to a different horse and then torn apart when the horses ran in different directions luckily the traitor was already dead and when torn apart most of the time before the guillotine became fashionable and sped up the beheading process there were other machines created to achieve this goal a machine called the planck was used in germany during the middle ages and england had a similar device with a sliding axe known as the halifax gibbet it would seem that germany and england both beat france to the cut eventually france moved into the beheading machine business the idea for the guillotine and its namesake was dr joseph ignis guilleton he was an anatomy professor and politician in paris when he came up with this famous idea he lobbied before the national assembly in 1789 for equality and capital punishment the idea of equality of life was on the minds of everyone during the french revolution dr kiyotan just took the discussion one step further to the equality of death he argued that it was unfair for common criminals to be tortured as capital punishment while more noble law breakers were given swift and quick justice some wealthy felons could even tip their executioners to make sure they received a quick death dr guiton argued that if france was going to be truly egalitarian then those principles should be extended to capital punishment as well all criminals regardless of class should be beheaded he declared his solution was a beheading machine that ensured everyone received a quick and compassionate death he explained that the mechanism falls like lightning the head flies off the blood spurts and the man no longer exists as far as punishments go everyone is going to have the same experience josef ignaciotan may have come up with the idea of using a beheading machine for executions but he was by no means an inventor or engineer instead a man by the name of antoine louis created and built the first beheading machine in france louis tested his machine on animals and when the new contraption could cleanly sever the heads off of sheep and calves he moved to human trials first louis tested his beheading machine on the corpses of dead women and children and was largely successful however with dead human male necks the cuts never seemed clean and this prompted louis to go through several redesign phases to overcome the annoying obstacles of thicker necks and denser bones of males louis increased the height from which the blade dropped and the blade was redesigned into a sloping triangular shape this did the trick and louise machine could now sever the head of a fully grown male corpse with accuracy and ease it is amazing what you can do when you've got a good head on your shoulders the machine that louis made was originally named after its creator the name louis or louis setz did not stick however after people associated the machine with the great doctor who came up with the idea of equality for punishment and execution much to the lament of dr joseph ignis guilton the beheading machine was renamed the guillotine but the french people also took to calling the machine the widow and the national razor the guillotine design was simple yet effective it consisted of two upright wooden beams with a cross beam at the top which the rope the blade was connected to was attached heavy weights were placed on the back side of the blade to ensure the blade picked up enough speed to cut cleanly through the neck of the guillotine's victims the first victim of the device was nicolas jacques peltier who was executed in 1792 he was a criminal who had been sentenced to death for robbing and murdering parisian citizens a guillotine was erected in plastogram outside of hotel de ville in paris veltier was paraded into the plaza and walked onto the platform where an enthusiastic and interested crowd awaited his execution imagine for a moment you are in the crowd just waiting around to see the next public execution instead of your usual gallows a 14 foot high wooden machine with a razor-sharp blade hanging from its top sits in the middle of the plaza what the heck's that you might be asking the person next to you but no one knows because it's the first time a contraption like this has been used in france you watch as the scoundrel nicolas jacques partier is walked up to the platform and secured so his head rests at the base of the wooden tower of death then the executioner approaches instead of wielding an axe or a sword he walks empty-handed over to a lever he pauses for a moment and then pulls the shining blade falls like lightning and cuts straight through the criminal's neck peltier's decapitated head falls into a wicker basket as hired hands throw sawdust onto the blood-covered wooden boards the crowd erupts in applause the guillotine had caught on as the main form of execution for all convicted felons in the country of france more devices were built and capital punishment by guillotine became almost as popular as egalitarianism during the french revolution at dinner parties people had model guillotines in their parlors with decapitated effigies of enemies and politicians for holidays and birthdays children received toy guillotines to decapitate their dolls or a mice they got running around the house poets and songwriters began to write and sing about the wonderful machine that was bringing swift justice to all who were condemned at all of the public executions vendors were selling souvenirs to commemorate the time families spent together watching the executions by the famed guillotine if you planned right or knew someone important you could even get a spot at a nearby restaurant called cabaret de la guillotine some people even attended the guillotine executions on a daily basis it was reported that a group of somber taboo women called the tricoteus would sit on the scaffold and knit socks hats and scarves between beheadings even those being executed joined in the excitement there were accounts of people walking to their death making sarcastic jokes and dancing their way up the steps to the guillotine not only were the executions by guillotine popular and widely attended but the guillotine operators were revered as celebrities during the french revolution guillotine operators were judged by fans on how quickly and precisely they could behead their victims the more beheadings the more admired the executioner was in the hearts of onlookers the guillotine executioner profession became a family affair such as with the samson family fathers and sons served as state executioners for multiple generations and were responsible for decapitating king louis xvi and marie antoinette between the 1790s and the 1840s the family was responsible for decapitating thousands of individuals using the guillotine and could go almost as quick as he'd be heading a minute it was said that the names of executioners were chanted for all to hear and the clothing of executioners inspired the latest fashion trends across france it was rumored over the centuries that when the head was cut off a victim it was still conscious and could even move and speak there is some truth to these claims but not much the brain uses around 20 of all oxygen taken in by a human body once oxygen stops being supplied to the brain such as when the head is separated from the heart and lungs the brain shuts down however there's a small window of time where oxygen and blood that's present in the brain can still be used the rumors of decapitated heads still being conscious gained public attention when in 1793 an executioner's assistant slapped the face of the decapitated head of charlotte corday she was charged and sentenced to execution for the murder of her husband the onlookers claimed to see her cheeks flush and turn red with anger this story led doctors and enthusiasts to ask decapitated heads to blink speak or show signs of consciousness spoiler alert no severed heads showed any sign of consciousness the experiments with decapitated heads were put to a stop in the 20th century however studies on rats found that brain activity in the decapitated head may continue for up to four seconds after the head is separated from the body much to the dismay of guillotine enthusiasts all things must come to an end slowly capital punishment dwindled during the 20th century however there was a brief resurgence of the guillotine during the nazi regime during the 1930s 20 guillotines were ordered to be placed in cities across germany according to nazi records the guillotines were used to execute over 16 000 people between 1933 and 1945. after world war ii the guillotine was still used in france until 1977 for capital punishment the last person to be executed by the guillotine was a convicted murderer named amida jandubi a few years later in 1981 france abolished capital punishment altogether before his death guitar became incredibly distraught with how the device he had envisioned and helped create became a symbol of death and terror across europe github tried to disassociate his name from the beginning machine and his family petitioned the french government to change its name but neither were successful there were many forms of torture and punishment more painful than the guillotine but few can claim such swift and numerous deaths as the national razor the guillotine struck fear awe and excitement into the hearts of the people during and after the french revolution no other form of capital punishment was met with such pomp and circumstance as the guillotine people tended to lose their minds over guillotine executions just remember if you ever find yourself at the wrong end of a guillotine you may still have four seconds to make a face before your decapitated head loses consciousness if you've lost your head over this vid then why not check out another awesome fit from your favorite youtube channel and click this video over here or perhaps you prefer this one here instead either way click one because with the infographic show you just can't lose

Channel: The Infographics Show

Views: 7,488,343

Keywords: brazen bull, catherine wheel, choke pear, crucifixion, drawn and quartered, guillotine, infographics, iron maiden, keelhauling, punishments, roman candle, sawing in half, scaphism, the blood eagle, the infographics show, torture, worst, worst punishments, worst punishments in the history of mankind

Id: ux0GtcUZqCQ

Length: 125min 12sec (7512 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021