Medieval skeleton puts a face on accounts of torture and violence in Europe: the remains are the first archaeological evidence of the so-called breaking wheel.
Medieval skeleton puts a face on accounts of torture and violence in Europe: the remains are the first archaeological evidence of the so-called breaking wheel.
4 comments
In a medieval Italian cemetery, archaeologists recently exhumed the skeletal remains of a victim of a medieval torture device known as the breaking wheel.
University of Milan archaeologist Debora Mazzarelli and her colleagues found the young man (who was probably between 17 and 20 years old when he died) in a medieval cemetery beneath what is now S. Ambrogio Square in Milan. Radiocarbon dating of his bones suggests that he died sometime between 1290 and 1430.
His skeleton bears evidence of brutal trauma inflicted around the time of his death, and it appears to match medieval descriptions of execution using the wheel.
Historically reliable sources describe convicts being tied, with their arms and legs spread, to the spokes of a wagon wheel while the executioner shattered their limb bones with a heavy maul.
When archaeologists exhumed the young man in Milan, they saw that the bones of his forearms and lower legs on both sides had been broken by heavy blows around the time of his death, leaving sharp edges the same color as the outer surface of the bone.
A blow from some blunt object had also broken several of the bones of his face. But none of those things would have been immediately fatal, and that was the point.
>The final blow[s] to the face and stomach [were] given after a certain amount of agony, chosen by the executioner,
wrote Mazzarelli and her colleagues.
show me one animal that does this to anyone. humans are such a fucked up crap…
So much violence. Let’s compare this with the torture in Ukraine. Not much has changed.