It’s the end of June 1462, and the Ottoman army is met with an eerie silence as it marches
into the town of Târgoviște in Romania.
Someone has been there before them.
His name is Vlad Dracula.
The Ottomans move cautiously through the streets, wondering all the time where the people are.
There are no kids playing, no men hard at work, just empty houses, and the odd wandering
dog.
And then they see it, a sight so chilling it almost brings them to their knees.
Before them stands “a forest of the impaled.”
For hundreds of feet, around 20,000 people are impaled on stakes.
Not only the men but the women and children, too.
One man has to look away as he sees a woman and her infant impaled on the same stake…a
bird has made a nest where their guts used to be.
This is unforgivable.
What we just described to you was written by the Byzantine Greek chronicler, Laonikos
Chalkokondyles, and was part of the ten books he wrote known as “The Histories”.
It described the diabolical nature of the man we know today as Vlad the Impaler, certainly
not the only man in history fond of impaling his enemies, but perhaps the best known for
this hideous form of execution.
Today we’ll talk about impaling throughout history, and we’ll also explain how it was
done and why it was done.
The why-part may surprise some of you.
You can read many old texts that were written in parts of Europe that describe Vlad’s
utter brutality, but historians tell us to be cautious in regard to what we believe because
some stories may have been exaggerated.
Still, not many people disagree that Vlad was as described, “a demented psychopath,
a sadist, a gruesome murderer, a masochist.”
He certainly tortured people and he certainly impaled people, but as some people point out,
he did so to put the fear of God in his enemies and retain order among his people.
He might not have actually nailed turbans to men’s heads or executed women for being
lazy.
Maybe not all the legends that are written about Vlad the Impaler were true, but there’s
no doubt he impaled a lot of people during his reign.
He wasn’t the first person to do it, either, and people did it for a long time after Vlad
took his last breath.
In fact, folks were impaled not so long ago, but let’s now go back in time to ancient
history.
If you look at something called the “Code of Hammurabi”, an ancient Babylonian law
book that dates back to around 1772 BC, you’ll see that impalement was the sentence handed
down to a woman who’d killed a man for another man.
Law number 153 states this, “If a woman brings about the death of her husband for
the sake of another man, they shall impale her.”
We found other texts relating to laws in the ancient Near East that talk about impaling.
It seems in some areas all a woman had to do was cheat on her husband and she could
get impaled, while prisoners of war or people who were accused of certain sins could also
face the same fate.
Later in time, it happened during the Neo-Assyrian empire.
We know this from statues and carvings that depict impaling.
There are some descriptions, too.
Over eight hundred years before Christ was born a Neo-Assyrian named King Ashurnasirpal
II wrote this about his handiwork: “I cut off their hands, I burned them with
fire, a pile of the living men and of heads over against the city gate I set up, men I
impaled on stakes, the city I destroyed and devastated, I turned it into mounds and ruin
heaps, the young men and the maidens in the fire I burned.”
The reason a King might do this of course was to instill terror in people.
Seeing a bunch of people being impaled on stakes acted as a deterrent to anyone thinking
about becoming a rebel.
Centuries later, Darius The Great, the King of Persia, was said to have impaled 3000 Babylonians
when he conquered Babylon.
In an inscription this is how he explained what he did to a rebel:
“I cut off his nose and ears and tongue and put out one eye.
He was kept bound at my palace entrance, all the people saw him.
Afterward, I impaled him at Ecbatana and the men who were his foremost followers, those
at Ecbatana within the fortress I flayed and hung out their hides, stuffed with straw.”
Ok, so it seems to have happened a lot in ancient times.
It is also referenced in the bible, although some translations use hanging and others use
impalement, so there are disagreements there.
As for those torture-loving ancient Romans, while they seemed to derive enjoyment from
the whole gamut of creative punishments there is little written about implement in ancient
Roman texts.
It seems to have happened from time to time, but the Romans preferred crucifixion to impalement,
a punishment that could last a lot longer.
Let’s remember, while impalement was horrific, once that stake is driven through the body
the victim will usually die very quickly.
Well, in most cases.
As you’ll see, impalement could be a slow process at times.
Now let’s talk about, “Transversal impalement”, something we haven’t touched on yet.
There are quite a few mentions of this in old German texts from the later Middle Ages.
Similar to some Assyrian laws from ancient times, it seems if a woman in parts of Germany
was accused of killing her own child she could be impaled.
What was different from the Assyrian way of doing it is rather than the person was mounted
on a stake, a stake was driven through the victim.
There’s evidence dating back to the 14th century that tells us a woman and a man accused
of adultery could be impaled this way.
They would be tied together and placed on the ground or in a grave and a stake would
be driven through both of them, a kind of symbolic execution as it meant the cheaters
would stay together forever.
In 1340, there exists a German law code that says the husband of the woman who has cheated
on him with another man can make a choice.
That is, collect some cash as compensation or have the couple tied down.
He is then handed the hammer with which he’ll drive the stake through his wife and her lover.
Staying with Germany, laws were written in the 1500s that stated if a woman killed her
own child the usual punishment would be drowning, but in some cases, she might be buried alive
and a stake would be driven right through her heart.
It seems around the same time this punishment was also sometimes reserved for women accused
of being witches.
Transversal impalement was certainly no walk in the park for the victim, but we think longitudinal
impalement was worse.
As described, the former is having a stake pushed through a person’s middle, mostly
their chest.
The latter is having the stake pushed through the length of a person’s body.
How exact this was we can’t be sure, but in some cases, the perfect longitudinal impalement
would be if the stake entered the anus and came out through the chest.
Yep, a stake through the heart would beat that any day of the week.
As you know, this punishment often happened to rebels or prisoners of war.
It was a statement used by Vlad the Impaler more than anyone else, but it happened all
across Europe.
One thing it was used for was when a person defected to another army or collaborated with
an enemy, possibly the worst crime in the eyes of the country you were fighting for.
There are instances of it happening a few times when local people just provided food
for soldiers.
Those locals were captured by the other side and accused of helping the enemy.
Only the most extreme punishment was handed down to them.
In western Europe, it was the Germans that seemed to be particularly fixated on this
form of punishment.
Not only did they do it to rebels, but they also impaled people who’d been accused of
robbery.
One book it’s mentioned in doesn’t say what kind of robbery, but it’s likely the
victims had been accused of stealing from the state.
Impalement might also happen to people who’d been accused of committing the very worst
kind of crimes against one’s own community.
Let’s take murderers for instance.
They might have been beheaded or even had their bodies broken on the wheel, but some
lawmakers saw this as getting off lightly, especially when they were serial killers.
We might take the case of a man named Pavel Vašanský.
He was a prolific highway robber in the 1500s who worked in today’s Czech Republic.
He not only stole cash and valuables from the people he robbed, but he often killed
them in the process.
When he was arrested, he confessed to 124 murders, which made him a very active killer.
His punishment was definitely commensurate to his crime...if he actually committed those
crimes.
Police work back then was somewhat sketchy.
First, they cut off his limbs.
Then, while he was still breathing, they took a pair of red hot pincers and removed his
nipples.
Only then was he impaled on a stake.
For good measure, they set him on fire.
We should say that in those days when you admitted to a number of murders you weren’t
doing so in the name of a plea deal.
You were more often than not tortured before you admitted your guilt.
We found another case, this time in Germany, that involved a man that went by the name
of Puschpeter.
He killed 30 people, and some of those were pregnant women.
He’d done this because he wanted the unborn babies.
He thought if he ate them, he would gain the power of invisibility.
Such were the times.
People were quite superstitious.
We guess Puschpeter found out the hard way that his invisibility medicine didn’t quite
work.
There is a legend about this man which involves him telling off his executioner for not doing
the impalement correctly.
According to this legend, he told the executioner to take him down and do it again, this time
hitting the right spot.
Is that true?
According to the book, “History of the German people at the close of the middle ages”,
they first took off one of his hands with red hot pincers and then dragged him through
the town, but there’s no mention of the botched execution.
What’s interesting is that book recounts many crimes and punishments in Germany in
the mid to late 1500s and it seems lots of people were executed for civil crimes, but
they were usually beheaded or hanged.
The book explains that the authorities only tortured people who’d been accused of the
worst kind of crimes.
The torture itself was weighed against the strength of a person.
If the person looked tough, the torture was more brutal.
The torture was not recorded, but the confession was.
After that, the torture stopped.
The accused was never asked about the torture again and only had to confirm in court his
confession.
We told you police work was sketchy in those days.
Ok, back to impalement and the last times it was employed as a punishment.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, people were impaled throughout the Ottoman Empire.
The punishment was again seen as the worst of the worst and only reserved for the worst
kind of criminal.
It didn’t happen often, but when it did it was usually highway robbers who were laid
on the stake.
Apparently the last time the Ottomans impaled highway robbers was in the 1830s, so when
you consider it was happening in 1772 BC, impalement was a punishment with legs.
It also happened to Christians who’d been accused of speaking against Islam or having
a love affair with a Muslim woman.
According to the writer Jean de Thévenot, the man could convert to Islam and get out
of impalement.
In the early 19th century the Ottoman government also did this to Greek bandits that had become
rebels.
They’d be taken to a place where the entire village or town could see and impaled there
as a message to anyone else thinking about rebelling.
Even if you were accused of giving food to a rebel or offering one shelter, you might
also be impaled.
It gets worse.
Sometimes those rebels would have parts chopped off them before being impaled.
They might also be flayed beforehand.
On occasions, the person would be impaled and then held over a fire and roasted to death.
The Greek War of Independence then broke out in 1821, and during that war, a lot of Greeks
found themselves on the wrong end of a stake.
Around 65 Greeks were impaled during the Constantinople massacre, something which was a retaliation
for the war breaking out.
It happened to 30 more Greeks on the island of Zakynthos.
In various parts of Greece, even women, older people, and monks were impaled from time to
time during this bloody war.
We’ve talked about this next method of impalement before, so we’ll make it short.
This is a method known as bamboo torture.
It’s simple.
Bamboo is hard as hell and grows very, very fast.
Tie a man over a shoot and he will slowly be impaled on it.
There are records of this happening in Thailand, India, and where the Japanese held prisoners
of war in the Pacific.
This might not seem so brutal, but what would be better, being thrown onto the stake, or
having one slowly work its way through your body?
Two other slow methods of impalement, both around in the 18th century, involved the use
of hooks.
One of them, sometimes called “cengela”, was very slow and very painful.
A man would be fastened to a hook that was placed right below his rib cage.
The hook would then be pulled up until it pulled open his chest.
This was used by the Ottomans and it was also a punishment for rebel slaves in Dutch Suriname.
A name for this punishment is “hanged by the ribs.”
Yet another form of impalement happened from time to time in Algeria in the 18th century.
It was simple, painful, slow.
Hooks were fixed into city walls and men were thrust upon those hooks, howling out in pain
for everyone to see.
Now check out Worst Punishments: The Upright Jerker, or have a look at this...