It was one of those dark days during the medieval Inquisitions.
A group of Inquisitors were looking at a man who was strapped to a chair.
He’d not only been accused of heresy, but his captors also believed this guy had been
dabbling in the dark arts, what they referred to as “maleficium.”
The captive sat with his head in his hands, sobbing, pleading to the Inquisitors.
He was well aware that even though he’d confessed to a crime he hadn’t committed,
he was due for another round of torture.
This time he was expected to give the names of the witches he’d allegedly been working
with.
There were no witches, of course, but what’s a man supposed to do when he is presented
with one of most monstrous torture devices ever created.
Today we’re going to talk about three devices in one show.
The reason for that is because their application was quite similar in that they were designed
to crush or mutilate a part of the body in order to extract a confession or information.
The other reason is it’s thought they were all used during the Inquisitions.
When many of you hear the word “inquisition” the thing that likely springs to mind is a
bunch of barbaric Spanish Roman Catholics in the Late Middle Ages investigating anyone
accused of not practicing their religion, whether they were pagans or folks belonging
to another religion.
It’s true that many Jewish people in Spain were brutally tortured and killed, and even
if they did convert, life was often still very difficult for those people.
Those “conversos” still met with suspicion and experienced discrimination.
Muslims were also persecuted, killed, or just kicked out of Spain.
Under Tomás de Torquemada, Spain’s Grand Inquisitor, many hundreds of accused heretics
were burned at the stake.
During the late 15th century and early 16th century it was a bad time not to be Roman
Catholic, and as you’ll soon see, being burned at the stake was sometimes just a blood-stained
cherry on top of a very ugly cake.
The Spanish Inquisition was a monster with very long tentacles, so wherever Spain had
interests abroad, there was bloodshed in the name of the Catholic Church.
We don’t want you to think it was only people inside Spain that suffered.
That’s far from the truth.
Then there was the Portuguese Inquisition and the Roman Inquisition and prior to that
the Medieval Inquisitions, and those went back to the 12th century and spanned much
of Europe.
The torture and executions and persecutions only really stopped in the 19th century, so
when we are talking about the Inquisition, well, it’s complicated.
Anyone deemed non-Catholic could have been a target, and that included so-called witches
and even scientists.
You might recall the fact that the brilliant scientist Galileo Galilei got on the wrong
side of the Catholic Church.
This “father of modern physics” was accused of heresy by the Inquisitors, but he kept
his head and his knees and accepted a life sentence of house arrest.
He was never tortured like some unlucky heretics, but he was threatened with torture.
We are telling you all this because when we’re talking about brutality handed down by those
inquisitive Catholics, it went on for centuries, often behind closed doors, and the inquisitors
used all kinds of ways to hurt people.
How many people were tortured or executed or both is a matter of mystery since historians
can’t agree.
Some say as many as 30,000 people were executed during the Spanish Inquisitions alone, while
others put the number much higher, others lower.
How many people died at the hands of inquisitors from the 12th to the 19th century is a bigger
mystery.
Maybe it was hundreds of thousands, but some historians would disagree.
So, that brings us to today’s torture devices.
As you know from some of our other punishment shows, there is a chance that some torture
devices sitting in museums today weren’t even used, or not used often.
Stories of how other unusual torture devices were used could have been greatly exaggerated
by people who talked about them a century or two after they were supposedly employed
for the last time.
Ok, so in terms of crappy things that can happen to you in this life, having your head
slowly crushed has to be in the top five.
You might have seen what the first stages of such an act looks like if you’ve ever
seen the movie, “Casino.”
A scene in that film shows a man’s head being crushed in a vise, something that was
based on fact.
Apparently, in real life the mobster named Anthony Spilotro actually did that until the
man’s eye popped out.
The guy soon talked, so the torture wasn’t taken to it messy conclusion.
He did, however, have his throat cut after being set on fire.
That would have been quite a fitting way to die at the hands of Catholic interrogators.
During the Inquisition the instrument used to crush a head was slightly different, in
that the head would be placed under a kind of dome-shaped lid.
The chin would be supported on something below, so the head was held firm.
Through the top of the helmet a screwed iron bar would then be twisted which would drive
itself into the skull of the victim.
You can only imagine how much pain this would cause.
Once the skull was pierced, another twist or two and it would be game over.
According to some sources we found, the torturer would often only twist enough to cause unbearable
pain, and that was about the time the person wearing the helmet would give up his allies
– if indeed he had any.
It’s likely he’d tell you anything at that point, so anyone tortured would later
have to confess again when he was in better shape.
There were variations of the head crusher.
One of them we found doesn’t have a part that pierces the skull, so the top part is
just like a regular helmet.
The more turns of the screw in this case would no doubt crush the jaw first and ruin a perfectly
good set of teeth.
Eyes would likely roll and if the screw was turned more then the entire head would be
crushed.
The victim’s brain would ooze out of the helmet like melting strawberry ice scream.
Yep, that sounds about as grim as you can get, even compared to a lot of other punishments
we’ve mentioned in the series.
If the torturer put on the breaks before everything was crushed, it’s highly unlikely that person
would make any kind of recovery.
With their jaw in pieces and their eyes missing, life wouldn’t have been much fun.
We actually found one website that told us one of these machines actually had a trough
attached to it to collect the eyes when they burst out.
But did it happen like this?
Were these stories the work of Protestant propagandists that came later or are they
creations of imaginative people that have only ever seen photos of the devices online?
That’s the million dollar question.
We can find plenty of sources stating the torture happened this way, but they don’t
supply any evidence such as written accounts or even sketches.
One thing we do know is that the devices exist today, most of which are in museums.
Still, the iron maiden can be found in museums and not many serious historians think that
diabolical contraption was ever used on anyone.
Then again, people back then were pulled apart on racks.
They were sawn in half from the groin up and they were flayed alive, so it’s not unthinkable
that the head crusher was used.
You can find other devices in museums that kind of did the same thing.
One of those is what’s called the “skull splitter.”
The skull splitter looks kind of like a metal halo filled with spikes.
This would be put on the person’s head and then a key would tighten the halo.
The spikes would start crushing the skull and if the key was turned more the top of
the head would be crushed.
Again, we can find plenty of sources that state such a contraption was used during the
Middle Ages to extract information or execute a person, but we can’t find the original
source of the information.
Still, during that period there was such a thing as an Inquisitor advice manual which
told inquisitors the best ways to torture someone.
Rather than talk about crushing heads, though, it focuses on advice about how to interrogate
really tricky prisoners.
There’s even stuff in there about the cost of rope that was used to tie up a person about
to be burned at the stake.
Here’s a snippet from the manual, something that sounds similar to what authorities do
these days: “Be sitting there.
Have a huge stack of documents in front of you.
And as the person is answering questions, flip through the documents as if you have
more information than this person could dream of.
And every so often, shake your head as if you can't believe what they're saying.”
That’s quite enlightening information, but after an exhaustive search, we couldn’t
find anything about head crushing.
After a bit of a deeper dive into this it seems that such grizzly torture instruments
were not used very often, but for sure the person being interrogated would know what
was going to happen to them if they didn’t spill the beans.
Can you imagine how’d feel walking into an interrogation room and seeing a head crusher
sitting on a desk?
It’s very likely these instruments were mostly used to scare people rather than crush
heads.
When people were sitting in front of the instrument of torture this part of the interrogation
was called, “in conspectus tormentorum.”
A loose translation of that could be, “tormented by what’s in front of you.”
The inquisitors kept notes of their deeds, and it seems for the most part the torture
employed was hanging people up from ropes or stretching them on the rack.
There are records of what people said when they were stretched, such as this, “Oh God,
Oh God, there’s no mercy.
Oh God, help me, help me.”
Yep, they actually took the minutes of the torture.
In conclusion, it doesn’t take a great leap of faith to believe the head crusher might
have been pulled out now and again for certain people.
This brings us to the device known as the knee splitter, something that looks like the
gaping mouth of a monster.
Again, it’s highly likely the inquisitors would have done something like waterboarding
a person – yep, they did that – before they started splitting knees.
Unlike the head crusher, the knee splitter wouldn’t have caused a quick death.
The victim might have died later from blood loss, but the crushing of some bones would
not lead directly to the grave.
What would happen is a person’s knees were placed inside the jaws of the device and then
a handle would be turned so the jaws closed on the knees.
If the inquisitors were happy with the confession someone gave them, perhaps they would relieve
the victim of his or her agony and the knees would stay in one piece.
If those jaws closed all the way, well, the knees would be completely crushed, and the
person would never walk again.
This device was said to have manifold applications, so arms or feet or hands could have been the
body part of choice.
Some sources explain that this device may have come into existence in Germany in the
year 1530, but yet again after upturning a lot of stones, we struggled to find historical
records of when the knee splitter was used.
If it was used, then we guess it was only on special occasions.
Most of the time a heretic or a relapsed heretic would have not met with such creative torture,
but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have ended up being burned at the stake.
Lastly, we come to the breast ripper, a similar device that caused disfigurement, but this
time used only on women.
Those women might have been accused of aborting a baby or cheating on their husband.
Sometimes called “The Spider”, it’s thought the instrument was used in Germany
in the 15th century.
Inquisitors may also have used the breast ripper on women accused of witchcraft, or
heresy, or perhaps even blasphemy.
Sometimes the claws on the device would be heated up until they were glowing red, which
would inflict much more pain and damage.
The result would be total mutilation of the accused’s breasts.
Yet again, finding evidence of when such an apparatus was used isn’t easy at all.
The instruments certainly existed, and they were likely used, especially during the witch
hunts.
There’s plenty of evidence of so-called witches being tortured on areas of their bodies
they don’t usually show to anyone but their lovers.
You might know the name King James from the bible he sponsored, but the man also wrote
an absolutely crazy book called, “Daemonologie, in Forme of a Dialogue.”
This was basically an absurd treatise on demons and witchcraft.
James was obsessed with witches and he seemed to take great pleasure in ruthlessly torturing
those accused of dancing with the devil.
When he was King of Scotland and not yet King of both Scotland, England and Ireland, James
was there for the North Berwick witch trials.
Many times, he oversaw the torture of accused female witches and sometimes the dreaded breast
rippers were used, among other nasty things.
Now you need to watch this, “"Bloody Mary" Mary I of England.”
Or, have a look at this, “Why Did The King Of England Execute His Wives?”