It is recorded that many thousands of men, women, and children, with horses, jewels, arms, and domestic necessaries, were sacrificed when Attila, “the Scourge of God,” died, and were buried with him in the bed of a river, diverted temporarily from its course for the purpose, and similar formalities are observed in the African kingdoms mentioned, on any one event, but repeated annually as a “custom,” to keep the manes of the deceased in good humour by the polite remembrance implied by the observance.
But Christian Europe, in the Dark Ages, could vie with any race or century in the ingenuity and refined cruelty of capital punishment.
The preliminary tortures of the rack, the boots, the thumb-screws, the strappado, must have tended to make the recipient of these attentions desirous of death.
The noble Barons who harried each other, and revolted at brief intervals throughout their tumultous lives, pressed air, earth, fire, and water into their service for the purpose of execution.
Men were judicially pressed to death as late as the Titus Oates conspiracy, in the reign of Charles II. They were hanged in chains to starve; they were burned alive, half hanged, mutilated, and then burned; they were scorched with hot irons, their eyes seared out, their limbs plunged into molten lead or tar; they were spitted like cockchafers on stakes, they were drowned with unmerciful rapidity, or chained to stakes at low water to be more slowly suffocated by the rising tide; they were broken on the wheel, or torn apart by wild horses, while the axe for the noble kept up a perpetual refrain like the ticking of a clock.
The Inquisition, in the garb and under the name of religion, invented and applied more exquisite barbarities. To drive a man mad first and into a grave afterwards by the incessant trickling of a single drop of water was a torment worthy of Satan himself.
The thousands burned to death in Spain, France, England, China, India, Germany, attest the gusto with which the reverend brethren of the Holy Office snuffed in the flavour of roasting humanity, and were enraptured with the shrieks of the martyrs, as now-a-days we are when Capoul or Tamberlik rouses our enthusiasm with the ringing C in alt.
In those good old days men were slain for sneezing in improper places, for constructive disrespect, or for stealing a loaf, and the severity remained till within comparatively recent times.
Some of the middle-age methods still survive. In Naples, three years ago, of three women condemned for infanticide two were beheaded; the third, the principal culprit, was mazzolated, or knocked on the head with a trace, like an ox, her abdomen then slashed open, while the executioner executed a “pas de fascination” on the quivering trunk, spurting the blood out like a fountain.
In Spain, Spanish colonies, and the sister Republics who once owed allegiance to that haughty country, malefactors are garrotted, or strangled in an armchair with a steel cravat, which is jammed to the choking point by the dexterous twisting of a screw behind.