The human mind has long been capable of dreaming up new and terrible ways to punish
alleged transgressors, villains, witches, and anyone else who was unlucky enough to
be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Throughout the ages some extremely brutal
methods of torture and execution have come and gone. So sit back and watch on
as we look at history’s 20 most brutal executions that humanity has witnessed.
Balthasar Gerard was the leader of the Dutch revolt, who assassinated King William III of
England in 1584. For his crimes, he was put on trial and later executed in an extremely gruesome
manner. Aside from the standard beheading, his hands were burned off, his feet were crushed,
he was disemboweled alive, quartered, and his heart was ripped out and thrown at his face.
In 1734, a Ming dynasty poet named Gao Qi was criticized
for his political satire and was therefore accused of being involved
in a "rebellion conspiracy." He was sentenced to be executed by being chopped into eight parts.
After being cut in two at the waist, he remained alive long enough to write with his own blood,
this Chinese character 慘, which translates to "horrible.” He wrote it 7 times before dying.
After hearing this, the Emperor abolished this form of execution.
The drownings at Nantes River during the French Revolution was nicknamed as “The
National Bathtub.” More than 4000 suspected royalist sympathizers which included women,
children, Catholic priests and nuns were shipped off in boats and executed by being thrown into
the river. At first, the perpetrators carried out the drownings at night to avoid suspicion,
but the dozens of floating bodies in the following days gave them away.
Jacopo de' Pazzi was the head of the noble Pazzi family in Florence. In 1478 he conspired with
some of his family members to overthrow the Medici family, who were the rulers of Florence. After a
failed coup attempt, he was dragged from his home and hanged for the conspiracy. After being buried,
his body was dug up, thrown in a ditch, dragged around and propped on his front door, where his
head was mockingly used as a door knocker. After that, his body was thrown into a river,
where it was retrieved by children, hung from a tree, flogged, and thrown back into the river.
When Peter I of Portugal was still a prince, he fell in love with his wife's maid, Inês
de Castro. After his wife died, his father, King Afonso IV, desired him to remarry but not to Inês.
Pedro refused; so, the King had Inês killed. Shortly after, King Afonso died and later
when Pedro became the king, he conducted a public trial of the men who murdered Ines.
After finding them guilty of her murder, King Pedro ripped their hearts out with his own hands,
because of what they had done to his own heart.
Ibrahim II was the Emir of Ifriqiya. He gained the reputation of being not only a tyrant, but he was
also a homicidal sadist. He took great pleasure in cruelty and killing and often conducted executions
personally. Once upon discovering during a dinner that a napkin had been mislaid,
he ordered execution of 300 of his palace servants. He executed eight brothers and his
own son on a vague suspicion. He had several of his wives executed by strangulation, immurement,
dismemberment and other means. He ordered the execution of every one of his daughters upon
birth. When he learned that sixteen of his daughters had escaped death and had grown to
adulthood, he invited them to a reception, greeted them kindly, and then beheaded all of them.
Saint Lawrence was executed on a giant grill for distributing Roman Church’s treasure to
the poor people of Rome. While he was being executed he screamed "I'm well done. Turn me
over!" From this St. Lawrence derives his patronage of cooks, chefs, and comedians.
In 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the USA for conspiring to pass
atomic secrets to Russia. Ethel Rosenberg's execution however did not go smoothly.
After she was given three electric shocks, attendants removed the strapping
only to have doctors determine that Ethel's heart was still beating. Two more electric
shocks were applied, and eyewitnesses reported that smoke rose from her head.
A woman named Edith Thompson was ordered to be executed by hanging in 1923 for the murder of
her husband. When the gallow’s trapdoor opened and she fell, the sudden impact of the noose
caused her to suffer a massive vaginal hemorrhage, which was later speculated to have been a fetus.
After this, all women who were executed by hanging were made to wear special canvas knickers
to prevent such things from occurring again. Mansur al-Hallaj was an early Persian mystic
who was condemned for heresy on account of his ecstatic utterances of "I am the Truth," or "I
am God.” In fact, he kept repeating "I am the Truth" as they kept cutting his arms,
legs, tongue, and finally his head. He was smiling, even as they chopped off his head.
When the Russian Imperial Romanov Family was executed in 1918, their daughters Tatiana,
Anastasia, and Maria survived the initial gunfire because they had over 1.3 kilograms (2.9 pounds)
of diamonds sewn into their clothing, which the bullets ricocheted off.
They were subsequently killed with bayonets. In the 13th century, Frederick II of Germany
fed two men lavishly at dinner. He then sent one to bed, and the other out to hunt.
Hours later, he had them both disemboweled to see who had digested his food better.
Consort Qi was a Chinese concubine who bore the Emperor a son whom he seemed
to favor over his son from his queen. Enraged by this, the empress proceeded to torture Qi,
chopped her limbs off, gouged her eyes out, cut off all of her facial features, forced her to
drink a potion that made her mute, threw her into a latrine and then locked her in a pigsty
until she died. She called her a “human swine.” Mongols were highly superstitious and believed
that spilling royal blood would lead to great disaster. They instead found creative ways of
executing any royals they captured, including sewing up their orifices, drowning them in
molten metal or having horses trample them. After the battle of Carrhae in 53 B.C.,
the Parthians took the Roman commander, Marcus Licinius Crassus, and allegedly poured molten gold
down his throat because of his renowned greed. Vikings used a form of torture called the "blood
eagle," where they would draw an eagle with outstretched wings on the victim's back, cut out
the shape, cut the ribs from the body, and pull the lungs out onto the "wings." It was said to
produce a bird-like fluttering as the victim died.
After Spartacus was defeated, commander of the Roman forces, Crassus, crucified 6,000 of the surviving rebels and lined the road with them with
a crucifixion every 100 feet for over 100 miles. In 1323, founders of the Aztec Empire, the Mexica,
asked the King of Culhuacan for his daughter, to which the King of Culhuacan agreed. The
Mexica then sacrificed her and flayed her skin, and invited the King of Culhuacan to a feast,
during which a Mexica priest came out wearing her flayed skin.
Italian military officer, Marco Bragadin was gruesomely killed, by the Ottoman Forces, in
1571. He was first dragged around, with sacks of stone, on his back. He was then tied to a chair,
and hoisted up a Turkish flagship. He was then tied to a column, and flayed alive. Then his
skin was stuffed, and redressed in his military clothes, and was made to ride, on an ox around
town. Finally, he was tied naked, to a column in the town square, and flayed again until he died.
After trying to assassinate the king, Robert-François Damiens was sentenced
to be executed, by having his skin ripped with pliers, have molten led and sulfur poured onto
his ripped skin, and then be dismembered, by four horses pulling on his arms and legs.
On hearing this, Damiens replied, "Well, it's going to be a tough day."
Several texts recount with extreme precision, all the horror of his execution in 1757.
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