Breaking with the Wheel

After hanging, “breaking with the wheel” was the most common means of execution throughout Germanic Europe from the early Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth century; in Gallic and Latin Europe the breaking was done with massive iron bars and with maces instead of wheels.

The victim, naked, was stretched out supine on the ground or on the execution dock, with his or her limbs spread, and tied to stakes or iron rings. Stout 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-tired edge of the wheel, but avoiding fatal blows. 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 (rohw, schleymig und formlos Fleisch wie di Schleuch eines Tündenfischs) 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, where the crows ripped away bits of flesh and pecked out eyes. Death came after what was probably the longest and most atrocious agony that the ingenuousness of the power structure could inflict.

Together with burning at the stake and drawing-and-quartering, this was one of the most popular spectacles among the many similar ones that took place in all the squares of Europe more or less every day. Hundreds of depictions from the span 1450-1750 show throngs of plebeians and the well-born lost in rapt delight around a good wheeling, better if of a woman, best of all if of several women in a row.

[The Wheel] In France and Germany the wheel was a popular form of capital punishment, not least because it was pure agony for the victim. In concept it was similar to a crucifixion. The prisoner was brought to the scaffold where his cloak was ripped off, to reveal nothing but a pair of brief linen pants.

The prisoner was then tied to the side of the wheel lying on the scaffold, stretched across its spokes and hub. Now the executioner advanced wielding an iron bar. His brief was to shatter the limbs one by one with the hefty weapon. Each arm and leg was broken in several places before the job was done. A skilled executioner would smash the bones of his victim without piercing the skin. The wheel was then propped upright so onlookers could appreciate the dying gasps of the victim.

At first the severity of the injuries was thought to be sufficient to bring about death. Later the executioner ended the torture by one or two blows to the chest. The wheel could be refined, too, to include other torturous aspects. A suspended wheel might be turned over a fire or a bed of nails. In any event it meant unbearable suffering for the victim.
[The Wheel]

Information and photographs in this virtual exhibition proceed from the book Torture instruments; a bilingual guide to the exhibition Torture Instruments form the Middle Ages to the Industrial Era presented in various cities in the world in 1983-2000.