Free The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment through History by Mark P Donnelly, Daniel Diehl Page A

bits during the first round of questioning. Would their descendants learn more effective uses of torture than these ancient people ever did? In the next chapter we will examine the techniques of torture used in the medieval world to find out just how sophisticated the application of pain became over the next thousand years.

TORTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WORLD
     
    A fter the final collapse of Rome in the early fifth century the centre of power shifted to Constantinople, leaving Western Europe at the mercy of the Germanic tribes, the Goths and Vandals. Common sense dictates that no matter how brutal things might have been under the Romans they probably got a lot worse. The truth is that many of the so-called ‘barbarian’ tribes had a more enlightened approach to justice than the Empire ever had. Writing three and a half centuries earlier, the Roman historian Tacitus recorded that the only crimes the Germanic people considered worthy of execution were desertion on the battlefield, cowardice in battle, consorting with the enemy and homosexuality. Other, lesser crimes, including robbery and murder, were punished with a fine which could be paid in cattle or other property – half of the fine being paid to the family of the victim, the remainder to the local chieftain or king. It would seem the Germanic tribes were more concerned with keeping every possible man ready for battle than in extracting judiciary retribution. Apparently, they took an equally enlightened view of religion. In 410 AD, the year Alaric, King of the Vandals, sacked Rome, he declared that any Roman who sought sanctuary inside a church was to be spared – a far cry from the treatment the Christians had received at the hands of the Romans.
    As followers of the gentle teachings of Jesus, it is not surprising that the early Western Church and the Christianised Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople, had progressive views on crime and punishment. The legal codes of Emperors Theodosius and Justinian confined capital punishment to murder, treason, adultery and counterfeiting if it was carried out by a slave. Under pressure from the Church, the Germans, who now controlled the remnants of the Western Roman Empire, grudgingly included murder in their slate of capital crimes. Generally, under Church law, lesser crimes were punishable by a variety of penances, the severity of the penance being in line with the severity of the crime. In many cases, the Church decreed that when the facts in a case were less than clear, punishment should be left in God’s hands; thus preventing human judges from making mistakes which God might construe as grievous sins. In the year 865 Pope Nicholas I wrote to the ruler of the Bulgar people insisting that forced confessions (extracted through the prolonged use of torture) violated the basic concept of Christianity. Considering the times it was a truly enlightened approach.
    Elsewhere, punishments were not always imposed with such wisdom. In Britain and Gaul (now France) criminals, slaves and those captured in battle were still sacrificed and personal disputes and criminal proceedings were settled by trial by combat (where the accused engaged in one-to-one battle with their accuser), or trial by ordeal, (where the accused might be forced to plunge their hands into scalding water or grab a bar of red-hot iron). If you won the battle or came away unscathed by the boiling water, you were presumed innocent. If these seem as harsh and unenlightened as Roman punishments, it is well to consider that much of Great Britain and Western Europe was about to fall under the domination of a group whose concept of justice and punishment were even more basic and frightening: the Vikings.
    The first major Viking raid on the British Isles took place at Lindisfarne Abbey, located on a small island near the Scots/English border, in the year 763 AD and was carried out with a brutality that became the hallmark of these intrepid warriors. As primitive as they