In its simplest form, execution should just be a way to get rid of criminals so they can’t hurt anyone else. Killers, rapists, and liars have all been put to death in different times and places. But communities have also put people to death for their views and for standing up to the social order.
People have also been put to death for relatively small crimes like theft or adultery. People who want to put people to death don’t always have fair reasons. People have often put people to death as a form of payback to hurt and torture them mentally. During the past, rulers added these extra parts to killings to make them more interesting.
Not only were these horrible things done to make people laugh at the convict’s cost, but they were also meant to send a message that was very important. Executions were bloody examples of what would happen if people didn’t follow the rules. Because of these reasons, some legal deaths were made to be as long, painful, and slow as possible.
They tortured the person for a long time. So when they finally killed them, it was a relief. The following list shows 12 of the cruellest death sentences ever given.
Crucifixion. It comes from the Latin word for a cross that is hung from a gallows. Crucifixion was used as a way to kill people by other cultures as well like the Greeks, the Carthaginians, and later Japan and Islam.
It is most often linked with the Romans. The cruel and painful death of the victim on the cross is what makes it such a well-known form of justice. This is also where the word excruciating comes from. There were different kinds of crucifixes. One of the first types was the crux simplex which had a single straight pole that the victim was tied to.
But most crucifixes had something called a cross beam. Cross beams in the crux emisser, the cross that represents Christ, were set up to form a T-shape. Cross beams in the crux commissa were a little below the top of the vertical pole. In some cases, the body was laid out in an X while in others it was upside down.
But they were all based on the same idea. To slowly kill the person by smothering them with their own body weight. Because the person was on a cross, their arms had to support their weight. To take a breath, the victim would have to pull their bodies up with their arms, which would quickly get tiring and put a lot of stress on their heart and lungs.
In the end, they would die of suffocation, tiredness, or heart failure. How fast death came depends on how healthy the person was. A sick and old person would probably die quickly, but it might take a few days for young healthy people to die. If you break the victim’s legs, they might die faster.
Crosses had a foot rest, also called a supra padanium, where the feet could rest, giving the upper body a break. But if the legs were broken, they couldn’t rest on it, so they would suffocate more quickly. Another way to make a victim use the supanium was to nail their feet to it. Or if that didn’t work, to the cross itself.
The body of Janan, who had been crucified, was found in a tomb in Jerusalem in 1968. The only body of a hanging victim that has been found in the archaeological record is that of Juhan. It is likely that the Romans put Jehoan to death on a cross after they besieged Jerusalem in 70 AD. According to the author Josephus, the Romans killed the Jewish rebels on the cross in a very cruel way because they were acting out of rage and hate.
There are marks on Jannan’s feet that show they were nailed to either side of his cross. This would have made his death take longer.
Longitude and transverse impalement. One of the oldest ways to kill someone was by impalement, which dates back to the second millennium BC. In two different ways, people intentionally drove a stick or pole into their bodies.
This was called longitudinal or transverse impalement. Longitudinal impalement went through the anus and came up near the head, through the chest or shoulder blades. Transverse impalement, on the other hand, went through the victim’s body from front to back or back to front. One of the first sins to be punished by impalement was a woman killing her husband for another man.
This is written in the code of Hammurabi, a Babylonian law book from around 1772 BC. In some parts of ancient Mesopotamia, cheating was punished by being pierced with a spear, even if no one was killed. to keep people in line. The punishment was also used in a very sneaky way.
In the Assyrian and Neoasyrian empires, it was common to pierce the troops and generals of fallen enemies in front of their own people. This was probably done to scare people away from rising up again. Such actions were a horrible way to show strength and tell those who had been beaten that they had been beaten so they would not forget. This is why kings like king Ashernael II wrote about the terrible things they did on the Nimrude reliefs in the 9th century BC.
Impalement was also used by the Ottomans, especially when the Greeks rose up against their Turkish masters in the late 18th century and early 19th century. It became normal in the villages to show the bodies of Greek rebels who had been stabbed to death to stop the villages from supporting future revolts.
No matter how terrible it was, impalement did send a strong message. The invading Turkish sultan was forced to leave after the bodies of thousands of Turks who had been stabbed to death were placed along the Danube in the 1640s on the orders of Vlad III, Prince of Wakia, also known as Vlad the Impaler.
In the meantime, Europeans who lived in Persia and Syria in the 17th and 18th centuries said that the type of crime that could lead to impalement didn’t happen very often. Aubry de la Motra, a Frenchman, said that in the 14 years he lived in the Persian Empire, he had only heard of 20 crooks being hanged and six highway robbers being put to death.
Alexander Russell who lived in Aleppo from 1740 to 1754 said that during that time there were only six public executions.
Gaunching. The act of gaunching was a specific type of impalement. The person wasn’t pushed directly into the stake or pole. Instead, they were dropped or thrown onto metal hooks or spikes.
In the beginning of the 18th century, French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort saw gaunching in the Levant. He talked about how the doomed were lifted up by a rope while he hung above a bed of sharp hooks. The executioner then let go of him, and the subject was stabbed several times at random. If a prisoner fell on the hooks in a certain way, the amount of time it took for him to die was very much up to chance.
But cutting their necks or cutting off their heads might ease their pain. One way to gaunch someone with a rope was to push them onto a hook that was attached to a gallows crossbar. In 1579, a German explorer named Hans Jakob von Buchenbach saw something similar happened in Turkey. Von Buchenbach wrote that “the poor man was put on a hook that was attached to a horizontal beam and stabbed him in the stomach.”
This is how he was left to hang upside down until he died. It was also possible to hang criminals and enemy forces from walls in a very public way in Algiers. This is how the condemned were put to death. They were thrown from the city walls onto hooks built into the walls below. During the 1720s, Thomas Shaw was the chaplain for the Levant Company in Algiers.
He wrote about how this type of gaunching was used. Shaw wrote: “The Moors and Arabs are thrown on the chingan or hooks that are fixed all over the walls below. Sometimes they break from one hook to another and hang there in the worst pain for 30 or 40 hours.”
Alexander Russell, who lived in Aleppo in the 1740s, heard of gaunching and said it wasn’t used very often because it was so cruel. This was also confirmed by people like Captain Henry Boyd, who was held captive in Algiers for 20 years. Boyd said that he had only heard of a few cases of gaunching during this time. One of them involved a Christian slave who had killed his master.
In the middle part of Europe, though, gaunching was often done during wartime. During the 30 years war, which was very bloody, many horrible things were done by both sides. In 1677, for example, a Hungarian general threw his caught Germans onto hooks built into the wall of his fortress as punishment for the horrible things the Germans had done to captured Hungarian troops.
Premature burial. Putting a living person in a grave before they died was called burial alive or premature burial. That’s where they would either be left to choke from lack of air or given an airway and left to die of thirst and the fear of being buried alive. In his book, Germania, Tacitus writes about one of the first times a live person was buried.
“If a Germanic group found out someone had done something dishonorable or embarrassing, they would tie them to a wicker hurdle and then push them face down into the mud. Then a lot of dirt was thrown on top of them until they were almost buried.”
Tacitus said this was because the Germans thought that crime should be made public, but bad reputation should be kept secret. Later generations really believed this because crimes that were punished by being buried too soon were very well known. In Bavaria in the 1300s, people who were found guilty of raping a girl under the Schwaben Spiegel law were buried alive. So were those who killed babies. The Berlin city book says that 10 women were buried alive for this act between 1412 and 1447.
Edoard Ozenbugan, a lawyer and travel writer, wrote about the death of one of these women in Ensisheim in 1570 in his book history of Germany. “The body of the woman was buried between two rows of thorns. A reed filled bowl was put over her face so she could breathe after being buried. The killer then jumped three times on her chest and covered her with dirt.”
But in other parts of Europe, women who were guilty of not so horrible acts were at risk of being buried before their time. In Denmark in the 1400s, Queen Margaret I said that women who had been unfaithful should be buried alive. A 13-year-old girl and a female cook were found guilty of killing their master and were buried alive under the gallows in Augsburg, Germany in 1505.
A 12-year-old boy had been killed for the same crime. In Nuremberg, Germany, some types of theft were punished by being buried before their time. However, in 1515, this was seen as too harsh of a punishment, and drowning was added to the laws instead.
In a Europe split by religious conflict, heretics also ran the risk of being buried alive. Anne Utenhovven, an Anabaptist heretic, was buried alive at Vilvorde in Belgium in 1597 because she refused to change her views. Utenhovven was buried with his legs up. As the grave filled up, she was given more time to change her mind, but she refused. She tried one last time when only her head was left. After he failed, Utenhovven was buried alive in the ground. Because her death caused so much trouble, heresy was changed from a crime to a fine or being sent away.
Imurement. Its name comes from the Latin words, in murus, wall. It means in the wall or walling in. A person who was locked up couldn’t expect to die quickly because suffocation wasn’t usually a risk. Instead, they would be left to starve or become dehydrated and die.
The most well-known case of death by immurement was the case of the vestal virgins. If a woman broke her promise to be chaste, it was seen as betraying Rome and was punishable by death. The guilty vestal would be stripped of her robes and flogged. She would then be dressed as a corpse and taken in a closed litter to join the funeral parade. People who were grieving for the vestal would go with the parade outside of Rome to the Campus Sceleratus, also known as the evil fields.
This was the Vestal’s grave, which had a couch, a lamp, and some food for her. The woman who was going to die would climb a ladder into the tomb after the Pontifex Maximus praised her to the gods. Once inside, the tomb was sealed so that no one could find the opening. People thought that the goddess Vesta would free a vestal from her crypt if she was innocent.
Sadly, people who were enslaved in other countries did not even have this small bit of hope. A traveler named M. Hume Griffiths, who lived in Persia from 1900 to 1903, writes about how the people there locked up criminals. “The victim is put into the half-built up stake, and if the executioner is kind, he will quickly cement it up to the face, and the person dies quickly.”
In some cases, though, a small amount of air is let through the bricks. This makes the torture very painful for a long time. It has been heard that men who are blocked up in this way groan and call for water after 3 days. Hajj Muhammad Meswi, a local cobbler, was put behind bars in Marrakesh in 1903 for killing 36 women. This was one of the last times people were imprisoned.
Meswi had lied to get the women to come to his house, then drugged them, stole their things, and killed and buried them under his shop and yard. At first, the court sentenced him to death by crucifixion. But when foreign leaders spoke out against it, the sentence was changed. He was beaten every day until he was finally locked up on June 11th. He begged for forgiveness for 2 days straight.
Flaying alive. Another very old way to kill someone is to flay or skin them alive. The victim’s hands and feet were tied together so they couldn’t move. After that, the killer would cut the skin with a sharp knife and pull it away from the muscles. People often flayed the face first while the subject was still awake to cause them the most pain.
To make the penalty even worse, the person doing the killing could boil the victim for a few minutes first. This would soften the skin and make it easier to tear off. Nerves and muscles were also left open after the operation. This hurt a lot and it also left the victim’s body open to harm. So if the pain shock didn’t kill them, they would die from blood loss, being too cold, or an infection if they lived long enough.
Flaying was done in many societies. Hypatia of Alexandria was a female philosopher who was killed with potsherds by an angry group of Christians. The Aztecs and the Assyrians both beat their enemies with clubs. The Assyrians like to show off their defeated enemy rulers by skinning prisoners of war. The Aztecs, on the other hand, would flay prisoners of war while they were still living.
The skin of someone who has been flayed could be used as a warning and a barrier. In Hadstock, Essex, England, a story says that in the Middle Ages, Christians hung the skin of a Danish raider to the church door as a warning to other unbelievers who might try to attack. It turned out that the story was true. When the door was fixed, pieces of skin from a person were found under the nails.
China used a form of flaying called lingchi, which means death by a thousand cuts from 900 AD until it was banned in 1905. Only people who were guilty of crime were given this long death sentence. One of these people was Liu Jin, a royal eunuch who lived in the 1600s. There was a strong group of eunuchs in the Ming dynasty called the eight tigers. Liu Jin was their leader. Because he was living a wild life, the emperor started to ignore imperial business. Liu Jin essentially led a coup and started making laws in the emperor’s place. But when the emperor found out what was going on, he had Liu Jin arrested and sent to Lingchi. The former court employee was given 1,000 cuts every day for 3 days. Liu Jin only made it to the second day, which is just long enough to get 300 to 400 cuts.
Boiling alive. People may not have been boiled alive as often as some other ways of killing them as a punishment for their crimes. It did however have a short but unpleasant time on England’s law books in the 1600s and it was sometimes used as a form of revenge and fear in Asia.
You could use oil, water, lead or even hot wax. The victim was either put into the liquid and heated or they waited for the liquid to reach the right temperature and then lowered the victim into it from above. If the temperature was lowered just right, the victim would stay alive and hurt until the fat on top of them was killed, which would let big holes open up in their veins and arteries.
In 1531, the English government made boiling a legal way to put someone to death. Henry VIII gave the sentence after the Bishop of Rochester and his family almost died from poisoning by Richard Rouse, the bishop’s cook. Rouse put deadly yeast into a pot of porridge, which sickened 17 people and killed two.
The fact that a cook was found guilty of poisoning in such a well-known home caused concern in the business. To send a strong message of hopelessness, Rouse had to be shut down. Rouse’s death in 1532 was described by the Chronicle of the Gray Friars of London: “This year was a cook boiled in a cauldron in Smithfield for he would have poisoned the bishop or Rochester Fisher with his many servants and he was locked in a chain and pulled up and down with a gibbet many times until he was dead.”
The show did not go over well with the crowd. Some women passed out from excitement at seeing and hearing Rouse’s pain, while others were just bored and said they would rather behead him. This may be why after Margaret Davy was put to death for poisoning again in 1542, Henry’s son Edward VI finally got rid of boiling from the law books in 1547.
The brazen bull. Diodorus Siculus says that the bronze bull was made by Perilaus, an Athens metalsmith in 560 BC. Perilaus built the machine for Phalaris who was the ruler of the city of Acragas in Sicily. For this reason, Perilaus made something very nasty for Phalaris to use to kill his enemies. Phalaris was known for being very cruel.
In line with its name, the brazen bull was a hollow metal dish shaped like a bull. The doomed were pushed inside through a hole in the bull’s belly and then surrounded by bars. Once the target was safe, a fire was lit under the bull to heat the metal and cook the poor person.
“Pipes fitted to the bull’s mouth converted the sounds of the victim’s agonized screams into the tenderest, most melodious, most pathetic of bellowings,” as Perilaus described them when he was pitching the bull to Phalaris. Phalaris thought that Perilaus should show him what the bull could do. He may have been shocked to find someone with an even sicker mind than his own. So he put the poor metal worker inside his device and told them to start fires. As soon as the scared Perilaus showed that the bull did indeed bellow melodiously and pathetically, Phalaris freed the metal worker and then threw him off a cliff to kill him.
Phalaris used the bull in Acragas. People said that when the body was opened up after being killed, it showed only bones which were so neatly deboned that they gleamed. People say that these bones were turned into bracelets and sold in Acragas’ stores. But in 570 AD, Telemachus got rid of Phalaris and had the beaten tyrant thrown into the bull’s stomach, which meant that he was killed.
But this wasn’t the last time in history that the brazen bull was used as a way to kill someone. The bull helped turn early Christian saints into murderers more than anything else. Emperor Domitian told the bishop of Pergamon, St. Antipas, to be roasted alive in the stomach of a bull. This made him the first Christian victim in Asia Minor.
Hanged, drawn, and quartered. To punish people for disloyalty in England, hanging, drawing, and quartering started to take shape in the 1300s. A historian from the time, Matthew of Paris, wrote about how William de Mariscoco and an unnamed accomplice were put to death as part of a plan to kill Henry III. The two guys were dragged over hurdles to where they would be hanged. After he died, Mariscoco was gutted and cut into quarters and his partner was killed.
Henry’s son, Edward III, gave more details about this horrible rite. He was furious when Dafydd ap Gruffydd, a Welsh nobleman, called himself prince of Wales and fought against the English crown to try to get Wales back on its own. As soon as ap Gruffydd was caught, Edward thought of a good way to punish the stubborn prince. First, he made a new rule called high treason. ap Gruffydd was found guilty of this crime and given the death penalty.
The way that person died perfectly showed how angry Edward was because he rebelled. ap Gruffydd was going to be pulled to where he would be killed. After that, he would be hanged for killing English lords at Easter for lying to the king. He would be killed and gutted while still alive and his body would be cut into four parts and put on show. In this way, Dafydd ap Gruffydd was the first nobleman to be hanged, drawn, and cut in half.
The 1351 Treason Act made hanging, drawing, and quartering the only legal ways to punish treason, at least for men. Women were saved the punishment because it involved taking off their clothes, so they were burned instead. It wasn’t just against the king to be a traitor. If you killed your boss or your husband, that was small treason and got you the same punishment as high treason.
Most of the time, the victim was still living when they were gutted. Major General Thomas Harrison, who signed the death order for Charles I, hit the person who was going to kill him as he was cutting him open. Others tried to avoid the worst by making sure they were hanged. In 1606, Guy Fawkes broke his own neck when he jumped from the gallows to his death. People who felt sorry for the doomed person would often pull on their legs to help them move before they were killed.
Since the late 1700s, the punishment for hanging, drawing, and quartering has changed. Now, body abuse happens after the person has died. After the Chartist Newport rising in 1839, the last person who was sentenced to it had their term changed to transportation, and in 1870, the penalty was taken off the books.
The breaking wheel. From ancient times until the 1800s, the wheel, also called the breaking wheel, was a common way to punish people in Europe. According to a story, it all started with Saint Katherine of Alexandria, who refused to give up her Christian faith and was killed on a wheel in 305 AD. By the Middle Ages, people who were broken on the wheel were not as well known as Christian saints. They were more than likely killers of some kind.
There were two possible ways to punish them. A person could be broken on the wheel or by the wheel. Some criminals were killed by driving a wagon over them in Frankish times, which is where the first form may have come from. Back in the Middle Ages, it meant breaking the criminal’s body with a single wheel.
In the 1400s, the blood court of Zurich had rules that said the sentenced person had to be put belly down on a board. The wheel was then slammed down twice on each leg and arm. The ninth blow hit him in the back. The broken body was then looped through the wheel’s spokes and hammered to a pole. The subject was then left to die while this pole was put up.
To be broken on the wheel, a criminal’s limbs had to be tied to the wheel and then hit with a cudgel. There was more doubt about the punishment in France because the wheel turned. But the number and order of the hits were not chosen at random. At punishment, the court decided what they were. If mercy was thought to be right, the executioner would string up a criminal after one or two hits to kill them. On the other hand, one hit to the neck or chest would kill them. In France, this blow to the chest was called the coup de grâce, which means the blow of mercy.
In the worst situations, arms were broken from the bottom up, which was sure to make the pain last. After being found guilty of 544 killings, German bandit Peter Niers was tortured for 2 days and hit 42 times on the wheel before being cut in half while still alive. Most criminals though were left on the wheel to die after being hit with a cudgel. They would finally die of shock, dehydration, or attacks by animals. Most didn’t make it past 3 days.
Scaphism. The word scaphism comes from the Greek word scaphe which means anything scooped out. This word refers to the hollow where the unlucky victim was trapped while they died. The other name for scaphism is the boats which comes from the fact that this hollow trap was made by sticking two boats together.
Even though it started in Persia, scaphism was known by its Greek name because Plutarch wrote the first and most complete account of it in his life of Artaxerxes. Mithridates was killed. He was a young soldier in King Artaxerxes II’s army. His brother Cyrus the Younger had contested his right to the throne. At the battle of Cunaxa in 401 BC, Cyrus was killed by a dart fired by Mithridates. This ended the fight between the two brothers. Artaxerxes gave the young man a lot of money as a reward. But he made one condition. Everyone had to believe that Artaxerxes had killed his brother. This way, he could keep his power. Even though Mithridates agreed, he couldn’t help bragging that he had killed Cyrus because he was a traitor. Artaxerxes put him to death by scaphism.
Plutarch describes how “two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other were acquired and Mithridates was placed inside with his head, hands, and feet outside the boat. The executioner then offered him food and if he refuses to eat it, they forced him to do it by pricking his eyes.”
Once this was done, Mithridates was drenched in milk and honey, which was poured not only into his mouth, but all over his face. He was then kept with his face continually turned towards the sun, so that it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle on it. Mithridates was left in the boats to die. He continued to be fed.
Meanwhile, his wooden shell began to fill with what those that eat and drink must needs do. By now, the sweet sticky coating on his body, plus the excrement collecting in the boats was attracting more insects. They began to feed upon him and reproduce out of the corruption and rottenness of the excrement. When the top boat was taken off once Mithridates was dead, Plutarch described how they find his flesh devoured and swarms of such noisome creatures preying upon. In this way, Mithridates after suffering for 17 days at last expired.
The blood eagle. In Scandinavian Scaldic poetry and sagas, the blood eagle was a way of killing someone as part of a ritual. The Orkneyinga Saga and Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla are the only two versions that we know of. Both were written at least 200 years after the events they talk about, which has made experts argue about whether or not they are real proof that the blood eagle was based on facts.
Prince Halfdan Haleg was the first person to die from the blood eagle. Einar’s father had been killed by Halfdan. So Einar got even. There is a small difference between the two stories because Einar orders the killing in one and does it himself in the other. Both though talk about what the blood eagle did. The killer cut the victim’s ribs off from his spine while he was on his knees with his back to them after making wings out of the lungs. The killer cut them out through the hole.
Ivar the Boneless was also said to have killed King Aella of Northumbria in this way. Ragnar Lodbrok, Ivar’s father, partially based on real events, was killed by Aella in 867 AD. Ivar and his brothers attacked England to get back at the English. They took the city of York and arrested Aella. They then caused the blood eagle to be carved on the back of a cut away all of the ribs from the spine and then ripped out his lungs.
But because Ragnar Lodbrok and his death are partly mythical and there isn’t much evidence for them, some experts think that these stories aren’t true. Some people think that they are not true reports, but rather made up stories meant to entertain rather than teach, influenced by stories of Christian martyrdom that the Norsemen were hearing at the time.
Alfred Smyth who used to teach ancient history at the University of Kent in the UK thought that the blood eagle was a real way to kill people. He said that blódörn which means blood eagle is an old Norse word that comes from before Christianity. The things that Smyth believed could also be proof for them. The Vikings built the Stora Hammars stones on the Swedish island of Gotland. One of them, Stora Hammars I, shows what looks like a guy about to be cut open from behind while an eagle flies above him. Is this a picture of the blood eagle or a metaphor for something else? There will no doubt be more arguments about whether this particular painful death was real or made up.
