Impalement
Impalement, as a method of torture and execution, is the penetration of a human by an object such as a stake, pole, spear, or hook, often by the complete or partial perforation of the torso. It was particularly used in response to "crimes against the state" and regarded across a number of cultures as a very harsh form of capital punishment and recorded in myth and art. Impalement was also used during times of war to suppress rebellions, punish traitors or collaborators, and punish breaches of military discipline.
Offenses where impalement was occasionally employed included contempt for the state's responsibility for safe roads and trade routes by committing highway robbery or grave robbery, violating state policies or monopolies, or subverting standards for trade. Offenders have also been impaled for a variety of cultural, sexual and religious reasons.
References to impalement in Babylonia and the Neo-Assyrian Empire are found as early as the 18th century BC.
Methods
Longitudinal impalement
Impaling an individual along the body length has been documented in several cases, and the merchant Jean de Thevenot provides an eyewitness account of this from 17th-century Egypt, in the case of a Jewish man condemned to death for the use of false weights:Survival time
The length of time which one managed to survive upon the stake is reported as quite varied, from a few seconds or minutes to a few hours or 1 to 3 days. The Dutch overlords at Batavia seem to have been particularly proficient in prolonging the lifetime of the impaled, one witnessing a man surviving 6 days on the stake, another hearing from local surgeons that some could survive 8 or more days. A critical determinant for survival length seems to be precisely how the stake was inserted: If it went into the "interior" parts, vital organs could easily be damaged, leading to a swift death. However, by letting the stake follow the spine, the impalement procedure would not damage the vital organs, and the person could survive for several days.Transversal impalement
Alternatively, the impalement could be transversely performed, as in the frontal-to-dorsal direction, that is, from front to back or vice versa.In the Holy Roman Empire, women who killed their newborn babies were placed in open graves, and stakes were hammered into their hearts, particularly if their cases contained any implications of witchcraft. A detailed description of an execution that was carried out in this manner comes from 17th-century Košice. The case of a woman who was to be executed for infanticide involved an executioner and two assistants. First, a grave some one-and-a-half ell deep was dug. The woman was then placed within it, her hands and feet were secured by driving nails through them. The executioner placed a small thorn bush upon her face. He then placed, and held vertically, a wooden stave on her heart in order to mark its location, while his assistants piled earth on the woman, keeping her head free of earth at the behest of the clerics, because to do otherwise would have quickened the death process. Once the earth had been piled upon her, the executioner used a pair of tongs to grab a rod made of iron, which had been made red hot. He positioned the glowing iron rod beside the wooden stave, and as one of his assistants hammered the rod in, the other assistant emptied a trough of earth upon the woman's head. It is said that a scream was heard, and the earth moved upwards for a moment, before it was all over.
Variations
Gaunching
, travelling on botanical research in the Levant 1700–1702, observed both ordinary longitudinal impalement, but also a method called "gaunching", in which the condemned is hoisted up by means of a rope over a bed of sharp metal hooks. He is then released, and depending on how the hooks enter his body, he may survive in impaled condition for a few days.Forty years earlier than de Tournefort, de Thévenot described much the same process, adding that it was seldom used because it was regarded as too cruel. Some 80 years prior to de Thevenot, in 1579, Hans Jacob Breuning von Buchenbach witnessed a variant of the gaunching ritual. A large iron hook was fixed on the horizontal cross-bar of the gallows and the individual was forced upon this hook, piercing him from the abdomen through his back, so that he hung from it, hands, feet and head downward. On top of the cross bar, the executioner situated himself and performed various torture on the impaled man below him.
Hooks in the city wall
While gaunching as de Tournefort describes involves the erection of a scaffold, it seems that in the city of Algiers, hooks were embedded in the city walls, and on occasion, people were thrown upon them from the battlements.Thomas Shaw, who was chaplain for the Levant Company stationed at Algiers during the 1720s, describes the various forms of executions practised as follows:
According to one source, these hooks in the wall as an execution method were introduced with the construction of the new city gate in 1573. Before that time, gaunching as described by de Tournefort was in use. As for the actual frequency of throwing persons on hooks in Algiers, Capt. Henry Boyde notes that in his own 20 years of captivity there, he knew of only one case where a Christian slave who had murdered his master had met that fate, and "not above" two or three Moors besides. Taken captive in 1596, the barber-surgeon William Davies relates something of the heights involved when thrown upon hooks : "Their ganshing is after this manner: he sitteth upon a wall, being five fathoms high, within two fathoms of the top of the wall; right under the place where he sits, is a strong iron hook fastened, being very sharp; then he is thrust off the wall upon this hook, with some part of his body, and there he hangeth, sometimes two or three days, before he dieth." Davies adds that "these deaths are very seldom", but that he had personally witnessed it.
Hanged by the ribs
A slightly variant way of executing people by means of impalement was to force an iron meat hook beneath a person's ribs and hang him up to die slowly. This technique was in 18th-century Ottoman-controlled Bosnia called the cengela, but the practice is also attested in 1770s Dutch Suriname as a punishment meted out to rebellious slaves.Bamboo torture
A recurring horror story on many websites and popular media outlets is that Japanese soldiers during World War II inflicted bamboo torture upon prisoners of war. The victim was supposedly tied securely in place above a young bamboo shoot. Over several days, the sharp, fast growing shoot would first puncture, then completely penetrate the victim's body, eventually emerging through the other side. However, no conclusive evidence exists that this form of impalement ever actually happened.History
Antiquity
Mesopotamia and the ancient Near East
The earliest known use of impalement as a form of execution occurred in civilizations of the ancient Near East. The Code of Hammurabi, promulgated about 1772 BC by the Babylonian king Hammurabi specifies impaling for a woman who killed her husband for the sake of another man. In the late Isin/Larsa period, from about the same time, it seems that, in some city states, mere adultery on the wife's part could be punished by impalement. From the royal archives of the city of Mari, most of it also roughly contemporary to Hammurabi, it is known that soldiers taken captive in war were on occasion impaled. Roughly contemporary with Babylonia under Hammurabi, king Siwe-Palar-huhpak of Elam made official edicts in which he threatened the allies of his enemies with impalement, among other terrible fates. For acts of perceived great sacrilege, some individuals, in diverse cultures, have been impaled for their effrontery. For example, roughly 1200 BC, merchants of Ugarit express deep concern to each other that a fellow citizen is to be impaled in the Phoenician town Sidon, due to some "great sin" committed against the patron deity of Sidon.Pharaonic Egypt
During Dynasty 19, Merneptah had Libu prisoners of war impaled to the south of Memphis, following an attempted invasion of Egypt during his Regnal Year 5. The relevant determinative for ḫt depicts an individual transfixed through the abdomen. Other Egyptian kings employing impalements include Sobekhotep II, Akhenaten, Seti, and Ramesses IX.Neo-Assyrian Empire
Evidence by carvings and statues is found as well from the Neo-Assyrian empire. The image of the impaled Judeans is a detail from the public commemoration of the Assyrian victory in 701 BC after the Siege of Lachish, under King Sennacherib, who proceeded similarly against the inhabitants of Ekron during the same campaign. From Sennacherib's father Sargon II's time, a relief from his palace at Khorsabad shows the impalement of 14 enemies during an attack on the city of Pazashi. A peculiarity about the "Neo-Assyrian" way of impaling was that the stake was "driven into the body immediately under the ribs", rather than along the full body length. For the Neo-Assyrians, mass executions seem to have been not only designed to instill terror and to enforce obedience, but also, it can seem, as proofs of their might that they took pride in. Neo-Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II was evidently proud enough of his bloody work that he committed it to monument and eternal memory as follows:Paul Kern, in his "Ancient Siege Warfare", provides some statistics on how different Neo-Assyrian kings from the times of Ashurnasirpal II commemorated their punishments of rebels.
Although impalement of rebels and enemies is particularly well-attested from Neo-Assyrian times, the 14th-century BCE Mitanni king Shattiwaza charges his predecessor, the usurper Shuttarna III for having delivered unto the Assyrians several nobles, who had them promptly impaled. Some scholars have said, though, that it is only with king Ashur-bel-kala that we have solid evidence that punishments like flaying and impaling came into use. From the Middle Assyrian period, we have evidence about impalement as a form of punishment relative to other types of perceived crimes as well. The law code discovered and deciphered by Dr. Otto Schroeder contains in its paragraph 51 the following injunction against abortion:
Achaemenid Persia
The Greek historian Herodotus recounts that, when Darius I, king of Persia, conquered Babylon, he impaled 3000 Babylonians. In the Behistun Inscription, Darius himself boasts of having impaled his enemies. Darius speaks proudly of the ruthlessness with which these revolts were put down. In Babylon Nidintu-Bel was impaled along with 49 of his companions:on Behistun Inscription in chains, the cuneiform reads "This is Phraortes, He lied saying I am Khshathrita of the dynasty of Cyaxares, I am king in Media"
In 522 BCE Phraortes proclaimed that he was a descendant of the Median king Cyaxares and took the throne, he seized Ecbatana, the capital of Media and rebelled against the Achamenied yoke, this revolt was Suppressed by Darius king of Persia and Phraortes was captured and Impaled:
Biblical evidence
A Bible passage in the Book of Esther concerning the fate of the 5th-century BC Persian minister Haman and his ten sons has been treated differently by different translators, leading to an ambiguity as to whether they were impaled or hanged. The passage explains that Haman conspired to have all the Jews in the empire killed but his plan was thwarted, and he was given the punishment he had thought to mete out to Mordecai. The English Standard Version of Esther 5:14 describes this as hanging, whereas The New International Reader's version opts for impalement.The Assyriologist Paul Haupt opts for impalement in his 1908 essay "Critical notes on Esther", while Benjamin Shaw has an extended discussion of the topic on the website ligonier.org from 2012.
Other passages in the Bible may allude to the practice of impalement, such as II Samuel 21:9 concerning the fate of the sons of Saul, where some English translations use the verb "impale", but others use "hang".
Although we lack conclusive evidence either way for whether Hebrew law allowed for impalement, or for hanging, the Neo-Assyrian method of impalement as seen in carvings could, perhaps, equally easily be seen as a form of hanging upon a pole, rather than focusing upon the stake's actual penetration of the body.
Rome
From John Granger Cook, 2014: "Stipes is Seneca's term for the object used for impalement. This narrative and his Ep. 14.5 are the only two textually explicit references to impalement in Latin texts:"Europe
Transversal impalement
Within the Holy Roman Empire, in article 131 of the 1532 Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, the following punishment was stated for women found guilty of infanticide. Generally, they should be drowned, but the law code allowed for, in particularly severe cases, that the old punishment could be implemented. That is, the woman would be buried alive, and then a stake would be driven through her heart. Similarly, burial alive, combined with transversal impalement is attested as an early execution method for people found guilty of adultery. The 1348 statutes of Zwickau allowed punishment of an adulterous couple in the following way: They were to be placed on top of each other in a grave, with a layer of thorns between them. Then, a single stake was to be hammered through them. A similar punishment by impalement for a proven male adulterer is mentioned in a 13th-century ordinance for Bohemian mining town Jihlava, whereas in a 1340 Vienna statute, the husband of a woman caught in flagrante in adultery could, if he wished to, demand that his wife and her lover be impaled, or alternatively demand a monetary restitution. Occasionally, women found guilty of witchcraft have been condemned to be impaled. In 1587 Kiel, 101-year-old Sunde Bohlen was, on being condemned as a witch, buried alive, and afterwards had a stake driven through her heart.Rapists of virgins and children are also attested to have been buried alive, with a stake driven through them. In one such judicial tradition, the rapist was to be placed in an open grave, and the rape victim was ordered to make the three first strokes on the stake herself; the executioners then finishing the impalement procedure. Serving as an example of the fate of a child molester, in August 1465 in Zurich, Switzerland, Ulrich Moser was condemned to be impaled, for having sexually violated six girls between the ages four and nine. His clothes were taken off, and he was placed on his back. His arms and legs were stretched out, each secured to a pole. Then a stake was driven through his navel down into the ground. Thereafter, people left him to die.
Longitudinal impalement
Cases of longitudinal impalement typically occur in the context of war or as a punishment for robbery, the latter being attested to as the practice in Central and Eastern Europe.Individuals accused of collaborating with the enemy have, on occasion, been impaled. In 1632 during the Thirty Years' War, the German officer Fuchs was impaled on suspicion of defecting to the Swedes, a Swedish corporal was likewise impaled for trying to defect to the Germans. In 1654, under the Ottoman siege of the Venetian garrison at Crete, several peasants were impaled for supplying provisions to the besieged. Likewise in 1685, some Christians were impaled by the Hungarians for having provided supplies to the Turks.
In 1677, a particularly brutal German General Kops leading the forces of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I who wanted to keep Hungary dominated by the Germans, rather than allow it to become dominated by the Turks, began impaling and quartering his Hungarian subjects/opponents. An opposing general on the Hungarian side,, responded in kind, by flaying alive Imperial troops, and fixing sharp iron hooks in fortress walls, upon which he threw captured Germans to be impaled. Finally, Emperor Leopold I had enough of the mutual bloodshed, and banished Kops in order to establish a needed cessation of hostilities. After the Treaty of The Hague, Sicily fell under Habsburg rule, but the locals deeply resented the German overlords. One parish priest is said to have broken into joy when a German soldier arrived at his village, exclaiming that a whole eight days had gone by since he had last killed a German, and shot the soldier off his horse. The priest was later impaled. In the short-lived 1784 Horea Revolt against the Austrians and Hungarians, the rebels gained hold of two officers, whom they promptly impaled. On their side, the imperial troops got hold of Horea's 13-year-old son, and impaled him. That seems to have merely inflamed the rebel leader's determination, although the revolt was quashed shortly afterwards. After the revolt was crushed by early 1785, some 150 rebels are said to have been impaled.
From 1748 onwards, German regiments organized manhunts on "robbers" in Hungary/Croatia, impaling those who were caught.
Heinous murderers
Occasionally, individual murderers were perceived to have been so heinous that standard punishments like beheading or being broken on the wheel were regarded as incommensurate with their crimes, and extended rituals of execution that might include impalement were devised. An example is that of Pavel Vašanský, who was executed on 1 March 1570 in Ivančice in present-day Czech Republic, on account of 124 confessed murders. He underwent a particularly gruelling execution procedure: first, his limbs were cut off and his nipples were ripped off with glowing pincers; he was then flayed, impaled and finally roasted alive. A pamphlet that purports to give Wasansky's verbatim confession, does not record how he was apprehended, nor what means of torture was used to extract his confessions.Other such accounts of "heinous murderers" in which impalement is a prominent element include cases in 1504 and 1519, the murderer nicknamed Puschpeter executed in 1575 for killing thirty people, including six pregnant women whose unborn children he ate in the hope of thereby acquiring invisibility, the head of the Pappenheimer family in 1600, and an unnamed murderer executed in Breslau in 1615, who under torture had confessed to 96 acts of murder by arson.
Vlad the Impaler
During the 15th century, Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, is credited as the first notable figure to prefer this method of execution during the late medieval period, and became so notorious for its liberal employment that among his several nicknames he was known as Vlad the Impaler. After being orphaned, betrayed, forced into exile and pursued by his enemies, he retook control of Wallachia in 1456. He dealt harshly with his enemies, especially those who had betrayed his family in the past, or had profited from the misfortunes of Wallachia. Though a variety of methods were employed, he has been most associated with his use of impalement. The liberal use of capital punishment was eventually extended to Saxon settlers, members of a rival clan, and criminals in his domain, whether they were members of the boyar nobility or peasants, and eventually to any among his subjects that displeased him. Following the multiple campaigns against the invading Ottoman Turks, Vlad would never show mercy to his prisoners of war. After The Night Attack of Vlad Țepeș in mid-June 1462 failed to assassinate the Ottoman sultan, the road to Târgoviște, the capital of Vlad's principality of Wallachia, eventually became inundated in a "forest" of 20,000 impaled and decaying corpses, and it is reported that Mehmet II's invading army of Turks turned back to Constantinople in 1462 after encountering thousands of impaled corpses along the Danube River. Woodblock prints from the era portray his victims impaled from either the frontal or the dorsal aspect, but not vertically.Ottoman Empire
Longitudinal impalement is an execution method often attested within the Ottoman Empire, for a variety of offenses, it was done mostly as a warning to others or to terrify.Siege of Constantinople
The Ottoman Empire used impalement during, and before, the last siege of Constantinople in 1453. During the buildup phase to the great siege the year before, in 1452, the sultan declared that all ships sailing up or down through the Bosphorus had to anchor at his fortress there, for inspection. One Venetian captain, Antonio Rizzo, sought to defy the ban, but his ship was hit by a cannonball. He and his crew were picked up from the waters, the crew members to be beheaded, whereas Rizzo was impaled. In the early days of the siege in May 1453, contingents of the Ottoman army made mop-up operations at minor fortifications like Therapia and Studium. The surrendered soldiers, some 40 individuals from each place, were impaled.Civil crimes
Within the Ottoman Empire, some civil crimes, such as highway robbery, might be punished by impalement. For some periods at least, executions for civil crimes were claimed to have been rather rare in the Ottoman Empire. :sv:Aubry de La Motraye|Aubry de La Motraye lived in the realm for 14 years from 1699 to 1713 and claimed that he had not heard of twenty thieves in Constantinople during that time. As for highway robbers, who surely had been impaled, Aubry heard of only 6 such cases during his residence there. Staying at Aleppo from 1740–54, Alexander Russell notes that in the 20 years gone by, there were no more than "half a dozen" public executions there. Jean de Thévenot, traveling in the Ottoman Empire and its territories like Egypt in the late 1650s, emphasizes the regional variations in impalement frequency. Of Constantinople and Turkey, de Thévenot writes that impalement was "not much practised" and "very rarely put in practice." An exception he highlighted was the situation of Christians in Constantinople. If a Christian spoke or acted out against the "Law of Mahomet", or consorted with a Turkish woman, or broke into a mosque, then he might face impalement unless he converted to Islam. In contrast, de Thévenot says that in Egypt impalement was a "very ordinary punishment" against the Arabs there, whereas Turks in Egypt were strangled in prison instead of being publicly executed like the natives. Thus, the actual frequency of impalement within the Ottoman Empire varied greatly, not only from time to time, but also from place to place, and between different population groups in the empire.Highway robbers were still impaled into the 1830s, but one source says the practice was rare by then. Travelling to Smyrna and Constantinople in 1843, Stephen Massett was told by a man who witnessed the event that "just a few years ago", a dozen or so robbers were impaled at Adrianople. All of them, however, had been strangled prior to impalement. Writing around 1850, the archaeologist Austen Henry Layard mentions that the latest case he was acquainted with happened "about ten years ago" in Baghdad, on four rebel Arab sheikhs.
Impalement of pirates, rather than highway robbers, is also occasionally recorded. In October 1767 Hassan Bey, who had preyed on Turkish ships in the Euxine Sea for a number of years, was captured and impaled, even though he had offered 500,000 ducats for his pardon.
Klephts and rebels in Greece
During the Ottoman rule of Greece, impalement became an important tool of psychological warfare, intended to inflict terror into the peasant population. By the 18th century, Greek bandits turned guerrilla insurgents became an increasing annoyance to the Ottoman government. Captured klephts were often impaled, as were peasants that harbored or aided them. Victims were publicly impaled and placed at highly visible points, and had the intended effect on many villages who not only refused to help the klephts, but would even turn them in to the authorities. The Ottomans engaged in active campaigns to capture these insurgents in 1805 and 1806, and were able to enlist Greek villagers, eager to avoid the stake, in the hunt for their outlaw countrymen.Impalement was, on occasion, aggravated with being set over a fire, the impaling stake acting as a spit, so that the impaled victim might be roasted alive. Among other severities, Ali Pasha, an Albanian-born Ottoman noble who ruled Ioannina, had rebels, criminals, and even the descendants of those who had wronged him or his family in the past, impaled and roasted alive. Thomas Smart Hughes, visiting Greece and Albania in 1812–13, says the following about his stay in Ioannina:
During the Greek War of Independence, Greek revolutionaries or civilians were tortured and executed by impalement. A German witness of the Constantinople massacre narrates the impalement of about 65 Greeks by Turkish mob. In April 1821, thirty Greeks from the Ionian island of Zante had been impaled in Patras, in front of the British consulate. This was recorded in the diary of the French consul Hughes Pouqueville and published by his brother François Pouqueville.
Athanasios Diakos, a klepht and later a rebel military commander, was captured after the Battle of Alamana, near Thermopylae, and after refusing to convert to Islam and join the Ottoman army, he was impaled. Diakos became a martyr for a Greek independence and was later honored as a national hero. Non-combatant Greeks were impaled around Athens during the first year of the revolution.
Rebels elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire
Impaling perceived rebels was an attested practice in other parts of the empire as well, such as the 1809 quelling of a Bosnian revolt, and during the Serbian Revolution against the Ottoman Empire, about 200 Serbs were impaled in Belgrade in 1814. Historian James J. Reid, in his Crisis of the Ottoman Empire: Prelude to Collapse 1839–1878, notes several instances of later use, in particular in times of crises, ordered by military commanders. He notes late instances of impalement during rebellions like the Bosnian revolt of 1852, during the Cretan insurrection of 1866–69, and during the insurrections in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1876–77.In the Nobel Prize-winning novel The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andrić, in the third chapter is described impalement of a Bosnian Serb, who was trying to sabotage the bridge's construction.
Occurrences in genocides
Impalement was also purported during the Assyrian and Armenian Genocides.Aurora Mardiganian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1923, claimed that sixteen young Armenian girls were "crucified" by Ottomans. The film Auction of Souls, which was based on her book Ravished Armenia, showed the victims being nailed to crosses. However, almost 70 years later Mardiganian claimed that the scene was inaccurate:
A Russian clergyman who visited ravaged Christian villages in northwestern Persia claimed that he found the remains of several impaled people. He wrote: "The bodies were so firmly fixed, in some instances, that the stakes could not be withdrawn; it was necessary to saw them off and bury the victims as they were."