Rome, 1556.
Pomponio Algerio died about 15 minutes after he’d been placed in a vat of boiling oil.
All he’d said to get himself in trouble was, “No Christian should restrict himself
to any particular Church.”
In the same year over in England, a blind woman named Joan Waste was lowered over a
fire, which engulfed her when the rope snapped.
She’d had the audacity to say bread was always just bread and wine always wine, and
never the body and blood of Christ.
That same year, also in England, John Hullier went to die in the flames, as were John Forman,
and Bartholomew Green.
Green was burned along with a priest, three tradesmen, and two women.
What did these people all have in common?
The answer is they were accused of being heretics.
Another thing they had in common is prior to their death they were very likely all asked
the same thing, or thereabouts.
The question was, “Do you recant?”
They may have been asked that question with a devilish-looking fork strapped to them,
and that’s what we’ll look into today.
Before we get to the contraption, you need to know one thing.
Many, many people just in Europe were tortured and executed after being accused of heresy.
With that in mind, the punishments were certainly diverse over the centuries.
In fact, if you look at the Spanish Inquisition alone, it’s really hard to find an agreement
regarding how many people were executed for not believing in the established faith of
the Catholic Church.
You might hear 3,000, or you might hear 30,000.
Some scholars would have you think it was in the millions from the 13th to the 19th
century.
The people we mentioned were executed for their belief in Protestantism, but a death
sentence for heresy happened many times prior to the Reformation.
For instance, the Italian mathematician and astrologist named Cecco d'Ascoli was burned
in 1327 for writing a horoscope of Jesus Christ, among other things that annoyed the church.
Then you had the witch hunts, which happened all across Europe and beyond.
Many witches were tortured into a confession, and possibly some of them were forced to wear
a Heretic’s fork.
It didn’t matter which branch of Christianity they had upset.
In fact, some academics now write that both churches tried to prove how much better they
were than the other at weeding out witches.
If you look at Germany, which was witchhunt central for a long time, just in the Southwest
of the country from 1561 to 1670 there were about 480 separate witch trials.
The Protestants killed 702 people accused of being witches and the Catholics executed
2,527, according to one historian anyway.
So, as for who might have worn the device over the centuries, well, take your pick.
It could have been a Catholic, a Protestant, a Muslim, a Jew, someone accused of having
funny ideas as to how the universe worked, or it could have been some innocent person
whose neighbor said they saw them flying on a broomstick.
Let’s stick with the Catholic Church for now.
A lot has been said about the brutality of the inquisitions, and no one in their right
mind is going to argue any different.
But some people will say that the number of executions has been exaggerated and others
might say extreme torture wasn’t as common as one might think.
Take for instance the historian Agostino Borromeo.
In 2004, he released a book which stated that out of the 125,000 people who faced a tribunal
in Spain for suspected heresy, only one percent of them were actually executed.
He also wrote that alleged heretics were given the chance to recant their belief, but in
many cases that happened during a period of torture.
This was regulated torture, supposed to last no more than 15 minutes and in the presence
of a doctor.
Let’s now imagine someone was in this position, being asked to admit they had committed heretical
acts or held heretical beliefs.
Maybe they didn’t immediately do that, even after 15 minutes of torture.
In some cases, they might have been sent back to their cell to think about things.
This is where the Heretics Fork comes in, or at least that’s what some writers have
said.
We’ll get to the issue of historical validity soon.
It consisted of a leather collar that was wrapped around a person’s neck.
On the collar were the words, “I renounce.”
Two sharp two-pronged forks were attached to the collar.
One of them pointed against the jaw and the other against the sternum.
This would feel very unpleasant, and any sudden movement could result in the neck being pierced.
The person would be unable to eat or sleep, all the time being forced to look upwards.
This of course was part of the deal, since upwards was where heaven was.
You can only imagine what a few hours attached to one of those things would have felt like,
possibly bad enough to make someone admit they put demonic curses on cats.
The question is, were any alleged witches or others accused of heresy ever tortured
in this way?
We found plenty of sources that said indeed they were.
Some websites said it was the go-to torture during interrogations, and others said the
condemned would wear the device after they had been found guilty as well.
This was a way to keep them quiet prior to their date with the stake.
Nonetheless, unlike many other forms of torture that happened throughout the centuries, recorded
instances of the Heretic’s Fork are hard to come by.
This is problematic for us at the Infographics Show.
If they were used as often as has been made out, someone would have written about it.
You see, the church kept records of the people it accused of heresy.
There were rules, too.
Torture was used to get a confession, but when that person stood up in court, they had
to admit their guilt again, this time while not being tortured.
It sounds like a rigged game, but the need for a second confession while not in pain
was seen as being progressive.
There was another rule, which stated torture should only be used one time when trying to
get a confession.
The inquisitors got around this by “suspending” a torture session and then starting it again
the next day.
If a Heretic’s Fork was ever worn, it would have been in between these sessions.
We just can’t find any instances of this happening.
If you go to Amsterdam and visit the “Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments” you can
see a Heretic’s Fork and read about how it was once used, but if one ever actually
was, is still debatable.
You can also go online and buy a “Blacksmith hand forged Heretics Fork” but rather than
being used to torture someone in 1556, they were knocked up in someone’s garage in 2016.
Remember that not all horrifying instruments of torture you’ll find in museums were used,
with the Iron Maiden arguably being the most famous of fictional torture devices.
We think it’s the same with all the Heretic’s Forks you’ll find in the world today; they
are likely works of fiction.
You can find plenty of websites that say something like this, “Historians who have studied
the contraption today believe that it was the sleep deprivation that would cause anyone
to confess to any sort of crime.”
Still, those websites don’t point to the source of this information.
We found other websites that told us this device was “commonly used” during the
inquisitions, but we guess not so commonly used that any of the websites can point to
a reliable historical resource.
We are not saying they definitely weren’t used, just that we can’t find the hard evidence.
Still, when you consider there’s ample evidence that people in the past were stretched on
racks, boiled alive, broken on wheels, mutilated, crushed, pulled apart by the limbs, it doesn’t
take a stretch of the imagination to think that someone accused of heresy once wore a
spiked collar.