They Forced Her Onto the Spanish Donkey | The Wedge That Split Women in Half

“In 1629, a German noble woman named Anna Schwarz sits screaming in a torchlet chamber beneath Bamberg Castle. A wooden wedge just 8 in wide is slowly splitting her body in half from below. But here’s what makes your stomach turn. The executioner is taking notes, timing her, recording her survival duration like a scientist conducting an experiment.”

“This device was called the Spanish donkey. And what I’m about to reveal will shatter everything you think you know about medieval justice. Because this wasn’t about punishment. It was about profit. And the truth behind who ordered these executions and why has been deliberately hidden by historians for over 300 years.”

“By the end of this video, you’ll discover three things that will keep you awake tonight. First, why executioners called this device merciful compared to burning at the stake. Second, the Spanish queen who ordered it used on her own noble women and the financial scheme behind every sentence. And third, why this torture was engineered specifically for women’s anatomy and the horrifying medical precision that went into its design.”

“Picture Europe between 1400 and 1700. The Inquisition is in full swing. But here’s what they don’t teach you in history class. This wasn’t religious zealatry gone wrong. This was systematic, calculated, and incredibly profitable. The Spanish donkey emerged during Spain’s Inquisition in the late 15th century, then spread like a plague across Germany, France, and the Low Countries.”

“Official church records claim it was reserved for three crimes: heresy, adultery, and witchcraft. That’s the sanitized version you’ll find in textbooks. But imagine you’re a wealthy widow in 1620s Bavaria. You own land. You have gold. You refuse a marriage proposal from a church official’s nephew. Within a week, three witnesses who you’ve never met testify that they saw you dancing with demons at midnight.”

“You’re arrested. Your property is immediately held by the church. And your sentence to the Spanish donkey. Here’s what nobody tells you. The wooden construction wasn’t primitive. It was deliberate engineering genius. Metal would be too smooth, too quick. Wood splinters. Wood tears. Wood can be carved with ridges that maximize tissue damage while avoiding major arteries.”

“The device stood roughly 7 ft tall, shaped like a large saworse, but instead of a flat top beam, there was a single sharp wooden wedge angled at exactly 45°. The victim was stripped naked, hoisted above it, then slowly lowered until the wedge penetrated the paranium, the area between the genitals and anus. But that was just the beginning.”

“Because what I’m about to reveal isn’t just about physical torture. It’s about a system that weaponized pain for profit, that turned execution into entertainment, and that destroyed thousands of women whose only crime was having something that powerful men wanted. Don’t click away yet, because the engineering behind this device is where the true horror begins.”

“You need to understand something crucial. The Spanish donkey was designed by people who understood human anatomy better than most doctors of the era. And that knowledge made them monsters. In 1577, a Spanish Inquisition torturer named Pedro Ruiz compiled an instruction manual. Yes, an actual manual titled Mato’s Preciso deagacion. This document wasn’t discovered until 1889, hidden in Vatican archives. And even then, most of its contents weren’t translated into English until 1994. Here’s what it describes. The wedge angle must be 45°, not 40, not 50, exactly 45. Why? Because at 45°, the wedge splits through soft tissue and muscle, but deflects around the pelvic bone structure.”

“A sharper angle would penetrate too quickly. A wider angle wouldn’t penetrate deep enough. But here’s where it gets absolutely diabolical. The wood was deliberately left rough. Splinters would break off inside the body cavity as the victim’s weight pressed down. These splinters, some as long as 3 in, would pierce internal tissue, causing excruciating pain, but they were thin enough that they sealed small blood vessels as they penetrated.”

“This meant victims wouldn’t bleed out quickly. The torture could last for hours, sometimes days. Ruiz’s manual includes detailed notes on weight distribution. A woman weighing 120 lbs would naturally settle at a certain depth within 30 minutes. To accelerate the process, executioners would add weights to the victim’s ankles, but never more than 40 lb because that would cause fatal internal hemorrhaging too quickly. The goal wasn’t death.”

“The goal was confession. And after confession, the goal became spectacle. Imagine being in that torture chamber. You feel every splinter catching, every muscle tearing. You try to lift yourself with your arms, but your wrists are bound behind your back. You try to redistribute your weight, but the wedge is exactly wide enough that any movement drives it deeper into your body.”

“The average survival time, 4 to 6 hours. And here’s the detail that should make your blood run cold. Ruiz’s manual includes a chapter titled Signs of False Confession. It instructs executioners on how to determine if the victim is lying just to stop the pain and if so to continue the torture until a true confession is obtained.”

“But the real horror wasn’t the device itself. It wasn’t even the sadistic precision of its engineering. The real horror was who decided which women ended up on the Spanish donkey and why their names appeared on church execution lists. That’s what I’m about to expose next. Because when historians examine trial records from the 1600s, they discovered a pattern so obvious, so deliberate that it reveals the Spanish donkey wasn’t about justice at all.”

“It was about the greatest property theft scheme in European history. Pause for a moment. This next part requires you to abandon everything you think you know about witch trials and religious persecution. In 1998, historian Dr. of Friedrich Mursba analyzed 847 execution records from Bamberg and Wersburg between 1627 and 1632 just 5 years he cross referenced the victim’s names with property records tax documents and inheritance claims what he discovered made him physically ill 87% of Spanish donkey victims were women who owned property not women accused of property crimes women who owned land businesses or held significant assets. Let me paint you a picture of how this actually worked. Meet Margareta Herber. She owned 3 acres of farmland outside Bamberg and a successful textile workshop. In 1628, she’s accused of witchcraft by her late husband’s brother, the same brother who had tried to buy her land at half value two months earlier. The trial lasts one day.”

“Three witnesses testify. Two are local drunks who are paid in wine. The third is a church scribe who never met Margareta but swears he saw her communing with darkness. She’s sentenced to the Spanish donkey but hears the smoking gun. In Bamberg municipal records, there’s a property transfer document dated the same day as her arrest before her trial even began.”

“Her land is seized by the church pending resolution of heresy charges. The workshop inventory is sold at auction. The proceeds go to the court. Margareta survives 4 hours on the donkey before confessing to every accusation. She’s then burned at the stake. The property transfer becomes permanent. Her late husband’s brother purchases the land from the church at the original half value price he’d offered.”

“And this wasn’t an isolated case. Dr. Msbarker found this exact pattern repeated 739 times in those 5 years. Same structure, same financial beneficiaries, same execution method. But one woman broke the pattern. Her name was Catharina Hennot. She was the wealthiest woman in Cologne, owning four businesses and two mana houses.”

“In 1627, she’s accused of witchcraft. She survives 6 hours on the Spanish donkey without confessing. She’s removed from the device, still alive, and returned to her cell. Why? Because her adult son was a prominent lawyer who threatened to sue the church in civil court, which would require opening all financial records to public scrutiny, Katherina lived, her property was returned, and she spent the next 3 years documenting every Spanish donkey execution in Cologne, creating a ledger that matched victim names with property seizures. That ledger still exists in Cologne City archives. And what it reveals about the medical precision used to prolong suffering will make your skin crawl. Because the executioners weren’t working alone. They were working with physicians. Doctors who took oaths to heal were instead calculating exactly how much trauma a human body could endure before dying.”

“Welcome to the science of suffering. Imagine you’re a doctor in 1630. You’ve studied anatomy. You’ve taken an oath to preserve life and then the church offers you double your annual salary to attend executions and take notes. What would you do? In 1689, a physician named Dr. Yan Schulus published a medical text titled observations anatomically supposedly about surgical procedures.”

“But hidden in appendix 7, there are 23 pages describing Spanish donkey executions with clinical precision. This section wasn’t translated into English until 2003 when it was forensic pathologists were horrified. Here’s what Schulthus documented. The human body has a survival mechanism when impaled from below.”

“Muscles contract around the penetration point, creating pressure that slows bleeding. The wooden wedge exploits this by being wide enough that muscle contraction actually increases downward pressure, forcing the victim’s weight to drive the wedge deeper. But executioners discovered that if a victim was on the donkey for more than 2 hours, muscle fatigue would cause sudden descent, which could sever the femoral artery and cause death within minutes.”

“This was considered waste of the spectacle. So they developed a weight protocol. After 90 minutes, they’d add a 10 lb weight to each ankle. This prevented sudden muscle failure while maintaining constant downward pressure. The victim’s descent became gradual, predictable, prolonged. Schelius notes that with proper weight calibration, they could extend survival time to an average of 8 hours.”

“The longest recorded survival, 17 hours and 43 minutes. He documents this with almost proud precision. But here’s the detail that should haunt you. Schulthus describes anatomical observations that could only have been made during active torture. He notes the angle at which the wedge separates the pelvic floor muscles. He describes the sequential failure of tissue layers as weight increases.”

“He sketches the position of internal organs being displaced. This wasn’t post-mortem examination. He was watching women die and taking notes like he was studying plant specimens. The German medical board revoked his license in 1691, not for attending executions, but for publishing details that revealed church methods.”

“23 other physicians were named in subsequent investigations. Only one was prosecuted. But in 1689, something unprecedented happened. An executioner, a man who had personally operated the Spanish donkey for 18 years, broke his oath of silence. He walked into a monastery, demanded sanctuary, and handed the abbot a diary containing 847 entries.”

“Each entry detailed an execution, the victim’s name, the survival time, and the church officials who attended. But that’s not why this diary changed history. It changed history because of what else the executioner recorded. Something so shocking that when the diary was published, it triggered riots across Bavaria and forced the Pope himself to intervene.”

“Don’t click away now because what I’m about to reveal will make you question every institution of power that’s ever existed. I know this is getting dark, but if you’re still watching, you clearly understand that history’s brutal truths matter because what comes next exposes the ultimate corruption. The executioner’s name was Hans Schmidt.”

“For 18 years, he’d operated the Spanish donkey in Bamberg. He personally executed 312 women. And in 1689 at age 56, he walked away from a lucrative career to expose a secret that the church had protected for over a century. His diary, now preserved in Munich’s Bavarian State Library, contains entries like this. 17 June 1683. Victim Elsa Hoffman, age 44.”

“Crime, witchcraft. Survival time 5 hours 22 minutes. Weight added 35 lb. Church officials present. Bishop Ferner Canon fled. Canon New Decka wager placed 50 gilders. Winner Canon fled. Closest estimate 5 hours 30 minutes. Read that again. Wager placed. Church officials were betting on how long women would survive.”

“They turned executions into gambling entertainment. They’d place bets before the torture began, estimating survival times, and the winner would collect the pot. Schmidt’s diary documents 183 separate instances of betting between 1671 and 1688. The total amount wagered over 12,000 gilders, equivalent to roughly 23 million today.”

“But here’s what makes this absolutely unforgivable. Schmidt’s diary reveals that church officials would sometimes request adjustments during executions to influence their bets. If a bishop had waged the victim would survive 7 hours, but she was failing at 6 hours, they’d order weight removed to prolong survival.”

“If someone bet on a shorter time, they’d add weight to accelerate death. They were manipulating torture to win gambling debts. When Schmidt’s diary was published in 1690, riots erupted across Bavaria. Churches were vandalized. Three bishops fled to France. The Holy Roman Emperor demanded an investigation. In 1692, Pope Innocent Zir issued a paper bull officially banning the Spanish donkey.”

“Not because of the torture itself, but because the gambling scandal was destroying the church’s credibility across Europe. But here’s the truth that historians bury. The ban wasn’t enforced. Local jurisdictions continued using the device in secret for another 182 years. The last officially documented Spanish donkey execution occurred in 1874 in a rural Spanish village.”

“By then, it had been illegal for 182 years, but it was still happening. Schmidt’s diary documents exactly 847 Spanish donkey deaths in Bamberg alone between 1671 and 1689. Historians estimate that across Europe between 1490 and 1874, the total death toll was somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 women. But we’ll never know the real number because after the 1692 ban, churches systematically destroyed execution records.”

“The documents that survived only exist because people like Kathina Hennot and Hans Schmidt risked everything to preserve them. Today, the few remaining Spanish donkey devices are locked in museum storage, not on public display. The official reason too disturbing for general audiences. The real reason, their physical evidence of systematic femicide disguised as justice, and that truth is still too uncomfortable for institutions to acknowledge.”

“But the legacy of the Spanish donkey didn’t die in 1874. In 1948, when the United Nations drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 states, ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.’ That single sentence exists because of devices like the Spanish donkey.”

“The American Constitution’s 8th amendment, cruel and unusual punishment, was written by men who had studied inquisition, torture methods, and vowed never to allow them in the new world. modern international law, the Geneva Conventions, the entire framework of human rights that we take for granted today, all of it was built on the grave of women like Anna Schwarz, Margareta Herber, and the 847 documented victims in Hans Schmidt’s diary.”

“Their suffering wasn’t meaningless. It exposed the horrifying truth about what happens when institutions weaponize pain for profit and power. So, here’s my question for you, and I want you to really think about this before you answer in the comments. If you had lived in 1680s Bavaria and you knew what was happening, would you have spoken out, knowing that speaking out might put you on the Spanish donkey next? Because that’s the question every generation faces in different forms.”

“When do you risk everything to expose institutional evil? Think about it and let me know in the comments. If this video disturbed you as much as it disturbed me to research, you need to watch my next video about the Judas Cradle, another device that historians tried to erase from history. Click the link in the description.”

“Hit subscribe if you want more uncomfortable historical truths because I’m not done exposing the dark side of history that textbooks refuse to teach. I’ll see you in the next one.”