Today’s installment of incredibly nasty punishments that humans inflicted on other
humans is one we are 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 believe their messiah, Jesus Christ, was killed and
today miniature crosses are worn around necks, carried around in pockets, and fall off walls
in movies about demonically possessed people.
Since Christianity spread into countries across the world to the other, this instrument of
cruel torture has become a household item.
But crucifixion has a long and complex history besides 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
to 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 died.
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 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 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 want to know what it might be like just imagine this.
You are 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 of your upper
body.
But remember, sometimes soldiers would 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 leads quickly 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 a person was crucified on wasn’t always a cross though, sometimes it was just
a pole and that was called, “crux simplex.”
Then there was a version with the cross beam attached to the top in a T-shape and this
was called the “crux commissa.”
The one most of you know, and that became a symbol for Christianity, was called the
“crux immissa.”
Despite it being used on reportedly thousands of people, archeologists 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 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 is 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 Romans wrote about at least one such site.
The entire cross usually weighed around 300 pounds (135 kg), 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 strongest man competition.
It's now thought that they might have carried just the crossbeam, which could have weighed
around 100 pounds (45 kg).
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 must have been of 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 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 that 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 a statement
from a 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, and 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.
Then you have the grotesque case of a thirteen 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 thirteen times.
First she was rolled in 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 through 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 see (The caption describes it as, “The servant Sokichi, crucified
at the age of 25 for killing Nikisasuro, son of his master Nuiske 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 is what he wrote and we have to warn you that 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 slit 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 soldiers strung him up with fencing wire to a tree and beat him, and then 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 a pole in public to act as a deterrent.”
Did you find this topic as fascinating as we did?
We know you like dark, interesting topics so go watch “The Brazen Bull - the Worst
Punishment in the History of Mankind” right now.
And don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe for more great content.