Civilization has improved the types of execution, but as for ingenuity and originality, then our ancestors will give us a hundred points ahead. The Roman emperor Tiberius came up with the following type of torture-execution: with the intention of giving people drunk with wine, they, drunk and helpless, bandaged their limbs, and they were exhausted from the retention of urine. Another emperor, Gaius Caligula, used sawing a person with a saw. When the cattle, which were used to feed wild animals for gladiatorial spectacles, became more expensive, Caligula ordered to feed the animals with criminals from prisons, without examining the measure of their guilt.
It looks like the Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible was "having fun". One of his favorite types of execution is to sew a convict into a bearskin (it was called “sheathe a bear”) and then hound him with dogs. So the Novgorod bishop Leonid was executed. Sometimes bears were set on people (naturally, in this case, they were not "sheathed with bears"). Ivan the Terrible generally loved all kinds of non-standard executions and executions with "humor." I have already said that he hung a nobleman by the name of Ovtsyn on the same crossbar with a sheep.
But he once ordered several monks to be tied to a barrel of gunpowder and blown up - let, they say, they, like angels, immediately fly to heaven.
Doctor Elisha Bombelius was executed by order of the tsar as follows: they twisted his arms out of the joints, dislocated his legs, cut his back with wire whips, then tied him to a wooden post and made a fire under it, finally, half-dead was taken in a sleigh to prison, where he died from his wounds.
The head of the foreign order (Minister of Foreign Affairs, in modern terms), Ivan Mikhailovich Viskovaty, was tied to a post by Grozny's order, and then the tsar's associates approached the convict and each cut a piece of meat from his body. One of the guardsmen, Ivan Reutov, “unsuccessfully” cut off a piece, as a result of which Viskovaty died. Then Grozny accused Reutov of doing it on purpose in order to reduce Viskovaty's torment and ordered him to be executed. But Reutov saved himself from execution, having managed to fall ill with the plague and die.
Other types of exotic executions used by Grozny include the alternate pouring of boiling water and cold water on a convict; this is how the treasurer Nikita Funikov-Kurtsev was executed. Contemporaries say that at the end of July 1570, when mass executions took place on Red Square in Moscow, the tsar ordered many to “cut out belts from living skin, and completely remove the skin from others, and he determined to each of his courtiers when he should die, and for each he appointed a different kind of death: for some he ordered to cut off the right and left arm and leg, and then only the head, while for others to cut off the stomach, and then cut off the arms, legs, head."
Grozny loved "combined" types of execution. During executions in Novgorod, the tsar ordered people to be set on fire with a special combustible compound ("fire"), then scorched and exhausted, they were tied to a sled and let the horses gallop. Bodies dragged across the frozen ground, leaving bloody streaks. Then they were thrown into the Volkhov River from the bridge. Together with these unfortunates, their wives and children were taken to the river. Women tied their hands to their feet back, tied their children to them, and also threw them into the cold river. And there, the oprichniks floated in boats, who finished off those who surfaced with gaffs and axes.
Another type of execution used under Ivan the Terrible is boiling in liquid. It was used mainly in relation to state traitors. The sentenced person was put into a cauldron filled with oil, wine or water, his hands were put into rings specially mounted in the cauldron, and the cauldron was set on fire, gradually heating the liquid to a boil. In medieval Germany, counterfeiters were dealt with in a similar way.
Promotional video:
Another type of punishment for them, according to the so-called. Lubeck law, was the removal of hair from the head along with the skin.
Although Grozny strove for originality in inventing methods of execution, in a number of cases he had predecessors, although perhaps he did not always know about this. For example, with regard to cutting off pieces of meat from the body, this was the case with a certain young Philologist, who betrayed his teacher Cicero. The widow of Quintus (Cicero's brother), having received the right to punish the Philologist, forced him to cut off pieces of meat from his own body, fry and eat them! Peeling off the skin from a living person has long been practiced in the Middle East - this is how the Azerbaijani poet of the 14th century Nasimi was executed.
Another type of exotic execution-torture is described by Adam Olearius in his travel notes about Muscovy of the 17th century. “The victim is tied to the back of a strong person, standing straight on his feet and leaning his hands on a special device, similar to a tall, human-sized bench, and in this position they inflict 200 or 300 blows with a whip, mainly on the back. The blows begin to strike below the nape and go from top to bottom. The executioner strikes with such skill that each time he tears off a piece of meat corresponding to the thickness of the whip. Those subjected to torture mostly die. A similar penalty was also used in the 19th century, under Nicholas I, when the death penalty did not formally exist.
The Marquis de Custine in the book "La Russie en 1839" (in Russian translation - "Nicholas Russia") testifies: "The death penalty does not exist in Russia (it was abolished by Empress Elizabeth. - AL.), Except in cases of high treason. However, some criminals need to be sent to the next world. In such cases, in order to reconcile the mildness of laws with the cruelty of morals, they act as follows: when a criminal is sentenced to more than a hundred blows of the whip, the executioner, understanding what such a sentence means, out of a sense of philanthropy, kills the condemned with a third or fourth blow. Some types of exotic executions have survived to this day. For example, in Iran in October 1987, three people were executed by being thrown off a cliff. They were offered this type of death to choose from. The alternatives were beheading or being crushed to death. The unfortunate ones chose to jump down.