~ breaking with the wheel ~

After hanging, "breaking with the wheel" was the most common means of execution throughout Europe from the early Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth century. The victim, naked, was stretched out on the ground or on the execution dock, with his or her limbs spread, and tied to stakes or iron rings. Wooden crosspieces were placed under the wrists, elbows, ankles, knees and hips. The executioner then smashed limb after limb and joint after joint, including the shoulders and hips, with the iron-tyred edge of the wheel, but avoiding fatal blows. (Wouldn't it be great to be the executioner? *giggles*) The victim was transformed, according to the observations of a seventeenth-century German chronicler, "into a sort of huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed bones". Thereafter the shattered limbs were "braided" into the spokes of the large wheel, and the victim hoisted up horizontally to the top of a pole, and were then feasted upon by the crows. Death came after what was probably the longest and most atrocious agony that the innocence of the power structure could inflict. Together with burning at the stake and drawing-and-quartering, this was one of the most popular exibits among the many similar ones that took place in all the squares of Europe more or less every day.