You’re strapped to a table in some deep, dark dungeon in the bowels of a castle.
There’s a skeleton handcuffed to the wall and a table full of nasty-looking equipment
next to you. Who knows what crime you committed, but whatever it was,
it upset the King enough that he sentenced you to death. Bummer.
The thing is… You don’t know exactly how you’re being put to death.
Maybe they’ll torture you for a bit and then hang you—the classic. Maybe your fate is leaning
over the headsman’s block and waiting for the axe to come down. Maybe, if you’re unlucky,
you’ll be drowned for your sins. But no. What’s going to happen to you is much, much worse.
The door to the dungeon opens, and the executioner enters. He takes a long blade and slices open your
shirt, then takes a piece of charcoal and draws a dotted line from the bottom of your ribcage
to just above your pelvis, right across the stomach. You know what’s going to happen now,
and you start pleading for mercy. Pleading that he’ll at least kill you quickly.
He just smiles a black-toothed grin and picks two instruments from his torture table: A rusty,
serrated blade and a long, gnarled hook. Before you can blubber out another protest,
he plunges in the knife at the top of the dotted line and starts cutting…
Disembowelment. It’s an excruciating and humiliating death, considered by many to
be one of the worst punishments in the history of mankind. While we often think of animal slaughter
when we think of disembowelment, it’s been used on humans for millennia. Not to be confused with
dismemberment - the cutting off of a victim’s limbs - disembowelment is cutting open the
victim’s body and ripping out their organs. Yeah, it’s going to be that kind of episode.
In most cases, the victim is kept fully conscious during the disembowelment. After watching their
intestines being removed, the victim will eventually pass out from blood loss. Some
forms of disembowelment involve decapitation and removal of the heart and lungs, like cattle for
slaughter. This may seem shocking, but believe us, we’re only getting started - Because when
you hear about the sheer number of brutally creative variations on disembowelment that
twisted humans have come up with over the years, we guarantee it’ll turn your stomach.
Just be grateful that your stomach’s still in your body.
You may be wondering: Where did human beings get the idea to start ripping people’s guts
out? Obviously, it’s been a fixture of animal butchery since we’ve been eating meat. Still,
disembowelment has been intertwined with the punishment of humans in mythology for
thousands of years - So much so that it’s often a choice favored by actual Gods. Take
the Ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole the gift of fire from the
gods on behalf of humanity - And Zeus, King of the Greek Gods, wasn’t happy about that.
As punishment, he had Prometheus lashed to a rock, where an eagle would turn up daily,
chew through his body, and eat his liver. His liver would then grow back so the
eagle could return the next day and eat it again. Thousands of years later, in Christian mythology,
some tellings of the death of Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the Romans for silver,
report that his intestines spilled out of his body upon his hanging.
This isn’t the only time Ancient Romans and disembowelment have crossed over,
either. Around 303 A.D., Erasmus of Formiae, who would also be known as Saint Elmo,
was executed in the Roman Province of Illyria. St. Elmo was brutally tortured by Emperor Diocletian
and Maximian before his disembowelment, and his intestines were wound around a windlass.
It’s fitting that St. Elmo is considered the patron saint of intestinal disorders,
women in labor, and sailors, all thanks to the fact he was disemboweled.
So if your gut ever hurts so bad you feel like you need to pray, St. Elmo feels your pain!
But let’s not dog pile on the Romans - the ancient world was chock full of cultures who
were all too eager to rip each other’s organs. Take, for example, the Vikings,
who refined war and overseas looting and pillaging into a savage art form. Should it surprise anyone
that they had a punishment that involved ripping people’s lungs from their backs, too?
While sources were split on whether the practice was widespread or more a fixture of legend,
the Blood Eagle torture involved pushing the victim down onto their knees and slashing open
the skin of their back. The torturer would then break the victim’s ribs from behind and pull
out the lungs so they dangled against the back like a pair of bloody eagle’s wings. Fans of the
TV show Hannibal and the horror movie Midsommar will have already seen this in horrific action,
but now you get the pleasure of knowing real human beings may have experienced that!
Okay, let’s move on before the trauma of that sets in and give you some fresh new trauma to
replace it. Feel free to become a member of the channel to help pay for all our therapy bills!
Not to be left out in any conversations about brutal and creative punishments, the Aztecs
also had their own frightening variation of disembowelment punishments. Nezahualcoyotl was
the ruler of the Mesoamerican city-state known as Texcoco, he was also a warrior,
philosopher, poet, and not a big fan of homosexuality. In a code of law he wrote,
a particularly gruesome punishment was given to people engaging in homosexual intercourse.
Those in the passive role of the act would have their intestines ripped out before having their
empty body cavities stuffed with ash and, as the icing on this sadistic cake, being
cremated. Those who took the more active role in the act wouldn’t be disemboweled - They’d just be
suffocated in a big pile of ash. Yeah, it seems to us that Nezahualcoyotl was a real ash-hole.
But we’d be cheating the Aztecs out of most of the gory glory if we didn’t mention the much more
infamous way that the Aztecs ripped organs out of people: During their truly horrific human
sacrifice rituals. You see, while the Aztecs sacrificed many of their own to their various
deities, they also had a habit of sacrificing enemies they captured during wars. Unlike most
warrior cultures, Aztec Warriors who killed their enemies were seen as sloppy and undignified - the
true honor was in bagging them alive so they could be sacrificed atop the many Aztec pyramids.
But what exactly did these sacrificial ceremonies entail? Being in this video
should probably give you a clue, but in many of their rituals the victims
would be dragged to the top of the Aztec pyramids while they were still alive.
Once they were placed on the altar at the top of they pyramid the high priest would
cut out their hearts with a sacrificial dagger. In some of the more ostentatious ceremonies,
thousands of people would have their hearts ripped out in single sittings. Say what you
will about the Aztecs, but they were undeniably efficient folks when it came to organ removal.
However, the best-known example of disembowelment as punishment comes from medieval England’s answer
for treason. So, how did the British flavor of disembowelment play out? Let’s take a look.
In 1241, the son of an English nobleman, William Marise, was convicted of piracy.
As all ships sail in the king's name, piracy was considered an act against a monarch and,
therefore, an act against God’s established order. He would be executed in 1242, becoming
the first known person to be punished by hanging, drawing, and quartering.
Marise, or anyone else who is also condemned to hanging, drawing, and quartering,
would first be dragged to the execution site by horse. Despite the order in the name,
the “drawing” part comes first. Sometimes, they might even be given a lashing as they were
dragged. It would be the first bit of agony they would experience prior to the official execution.
According to author Richard Clark, who wrote “Capital Punishment in Britain,” it would probably
be “a good three-hour drag.” All while crowds would jeer and throw garbage at the condemned.
It really brought the community together before tearing the victim’s body apart.
Then, they would tie a rope around the victim’s neck to pull them off the ground. Marise would
helplessly hang there, thrashing in some futile attempt to free himself. They would
wait until he fell unconscious before lowering him back down. After all that,
it would be time for the part we’ve all been waiting for: The brutal public disembowelment.
By this point the condemned criminal was dead, so the quartering was just a publicity stunt.
Executioners would carve up the body and sever the limbs before parboiling them in
a blend of spices. Yummy. This was meant to help preserve the flesh before they took the
mutilated parts on tour around whatever town the poor sap had been executed in.
A much more famous figure than Marise met their end as a result of this execution method. His
name might sound familiar, especially if your home happens to be in Scotland.
If you’ve ever seen Braveheart, you’re already familiar with Scottish rebel
William Wallace. But there’s one thing the movie got wrong:
his execution. He wasn’t beheaded like he was in the film. Or at least, he wasn’t just beheaded.
In reality, William Wallace was hanged, drawn, and quartered on the same day as his trial. After
being captured in Glasgow, he would be brought to London weeks before his execution. On August 5,
1305, he was dragged naked behind a horse to where he’d be executed, Smithfield, as onlookers jeered.
He was hanged and emasculated. They would burn his testes and penis in front of him out of spite.
They then disemboweled him, tore out his heart, and quartered his lifeless body. His body parts
were sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Perth, and Stirling to be put on display. Meanwhile,
his head would be dipped in tar and placed on a spike on London Bridge. They also have no record
of him yelling “Freedom!” In actuality, he was probably yelling, “AAAAAH! AAAAAAH! AAAAAAAH!”
We can understand why the movie directors decided not to show how he actually died,
especially if they want to sidestep a NC-17 rating. But,
next time you watch Braveheart, remember how gruesome his actual execution was.
When it came to quartering the victim, this was sometimes accomplished by tying each limb to a
different horse. The horses would be sent running in different directions to rip the
victim’s body apart. After the execution, the corpse would be displayed in various locations,
like London Bridge or Westminster Hall. The bodies acted as a warning to England’s population as
to why you shouldn’t betray the monarchy and what consequences you might face if you did.
Another famous person who learned this the very hard way was a certain Guy Fawkes. Fawkes was at
the center of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, one of the most infamous unsuccessful treason attempts
in history - So much so that it’s still celebrated every November 5th in England
to this day. Fawkes and a group of radical English Catholics attempted to assassinate King James I,
who persecuted Catholics in a bid to promote Protestantism. They had
plotted to blow up Parliament’s House of Lords, but everything went wrong,
and the plot didn’t succeed. Instead, all of the conspirators were caught and killed.
Fawkes was sentenced to hanging, drawing, and quartering. On January 31st, 1606,
they would carry out his sentence in Westminster. But, as what felt like
a final act of rebellion from Fawkes, he would die when his neck was broken as he was hanged.
Some say he had deliberately jumped to break his neck, wanting to avoid the more horrific
part of his sentence. While this meant that his entrails would not be publicly removed,
they did still quarter him. His body parts were displayed in all four corners of the kingdom.
If you think we’re picking on England here, don’t worry; the rest of Europe
was still getting its disembowelment on well after the Roman Empire collapsed.
In the Netherlands, on July 10th, 1584, Willem I the Silent, Prince of Orange,
was assassinated by Balthasar Gérard. Gérard had carried out the assassination to receive
the 25,000 crowns that King Philip II of Spain offered to whoever could kill
the prince. Willem I had been advocating for Dutch independence from the King of Spain and,
in 1568, led the Netherlands in a revolt against what he saw as a Spanish occupation.
Gérard went to the Prinsenhof, the royal palace in Delft, at noon on July 10th to
speak with Willem. He was turned away when Willem was still at lunch. Gérard
would head back to the inn to grab his pistols before returning. By then, Willem had finished
lunch and was headed to the stairs to his second-floor chamber. Hiding behind a pillar,
Gérard jumped out and shot twice. He hit Willem in the chest at close range, killing him instantly.
When Gérard tried to flee, he was chased by soldiers and servants. They caught him as he was
trying to climb a wall to escape the royal palace compound. He was captured, tortured, and sentenced
to death. In order to make an example of him, he was brutally executed on July 14th, 1584. They
burned off his right hand with a red-hot iron. They tore his flesh from his bones with pincers in
six different places, and he was then quartered and disemboweled while he was still alive.
They tore out his heart, threw it in his face, and then beheaded him. The Aztecs would have
been proud. Thankfully, disembowelment as punishment is relegated to the distant past.
It’s a dark shadow on the history books, never forgotten but thankfully left behind.
Oh, wait, what’s that? There are actually a scary number of disembowelments still
occurring in the last century? Well… I suppose we better buckle up and look into those, too.
During World War II, Romania was under the rule of Ion Antonescu,
a fascist dictator who rose to power in 1940. At the time,
the Romanian capital of Bucharest had a large Jewish population, which grew as refugees fled
to the city in hopes of finding safety. By 1941, 100,000 Jewish people lived in the capital.
Bucharest was also home to an antisemitic, nationalist, and fascist paramilitary
organization called the Iron Guard, staffed by so-called “Legionnaires.” Horia Sima,
the Iron Guard’s leader, held significant political power in 1941, working as the vice
president of the council of ministers. He and Antonescu would butt heads over
many issues regarding how to run the country, particularly on confiscating Jewish property.
The Iron Guard wanted to take it all immediately,
while Antonescu wanted to implement a far more gradual process. This disagreement
developed into the Iron Guard becoming skeptical of Antonescu’s commitment to the fascist cause,
leading to them starting to plan a coup. They spread propaganda that connected Antonescu to the
Jewish people since his stepmother and ex-wife were Jewish. Antonescu, seeing that his power
was being undermined, fought back and weakened the Iron Guard’s power within the government.
In time, a rebellion would erupt, with the Iron Guard storming the government. Meanwhile,
the Legionnaires began a pogrom, a massacre of a particular ethnic group,
against the Jewish people within the country. They stormed Jewish homes and synagogues;
neighborhoods were set on fire. Jews were slaughtered at random and tortured.
One of the most horrific incidents of the pogrom involved disembowelment. The
Legionnaires took 15 Jews to a local slaughterhouse to be shot. However,
five of them, including a five-year-old girl, were hung on meathooks while they were still
alive. The Legionnaires gutted them and hung their entrails around their necks,
labeling their bodies as “kosher,” referencing the Jewish ritual slaughter, shehita.
The 40s were a horrific time for the human race, where many things previously thought
impossible - from the pogroms to the holocaust to the mass devastation of
atomic weaponry - were enacted on innocent people in the name of authority or war. And
we’d love to tell you that was the cutoff when disembowelment as a punishment was
stamped out once and for all, but our tales go on in increasingly nightmarish ways.
During the Vietnam War, there have been accounts of the Viet Cong sometimes using
disembowelment as a twisted form of psychological warfare to coerce and
intimidate rural peasants. The former head of Saigon’s Central Intelligence Agency,
Peer De Silva, stated that possibly since 1963, the Viet Cong used disembowelment
and other types of mutilation to intimidate those under their control.
However, no one really knows to what extent this punishment was used. Although there are detailed
accounts of civilians being disemboweled, it appears that it was used quite arbitrarily,
and there are no actual records of it being sanctioned by the government in Hanoi. Still,
these stories of military brutality are echoed by ones that came later during the First Liberian
Civil War in the 1980s. There are many harrowing accounts of warlords disemboweling children’s
parents in front of them to break their minds and desensitize them to work as child soldiers.
But it still doesn’t stop there - Disembowelment has slithered its way into the 21st century, being
practiced by a number of different authorities, and it’s just as horrifying as ever. There have
been multiple reports of the People’s Republic of China committing atrocities involving forced organ
harvesting against various captured minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs,
Tibetans, Muslims, and Christians. While the PRC has categorically denied these claims, a number of
human rights watchdogs have requested permission to send in independent inspectors to confirm or
deny claims that organs are being taken out of political prisoners for transplant and sale.
Continuing on the quote unquote legacy of the practice, multiple criminal and terroristic
groups use forms of disembowelment as a way to punish and intimidate their enemies. In
addition to their many other horrific crimes, there have been reports of ISIS
members disemboweling prisoners and harvesting their organs. The same can be said of some of
the extremely brutal Mexican drug cartels, whose cut-throat industry forces them to ever
more violent practices to stay on top. In 2011, a woman in Mexico who had decried the actions of
the cartel on social media was hog-tied and disemboweled with a knife before being hung
upside down as a message to other people who’d dare to speak up against their illegal activities.
As long as people act and treat each other like animals, disembowelment will
likely endure. And it isn’t even always the people in power that are doing it - In 2022,
a New York City man attacked and disemboweled his roommate
in the aftermath of a heated argument. Some really, really, really bad habits die hard…
If you liked this video, check out “Eaten Alive (Scaphism) – Worst Punishments in
History of Mankind” and “White Room Torture - Worst Punishments in the History of Mankind.”