Random Gruesome Ways People Were Executed By Popes And Other Catholic Authorities (8 items)

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  (#2) Burning At The Stake: Business As Usual

  While burning at the stake was used for both sexes, it was the go-to for women because it was deemed too vile for them to be drawn and quartered. Joan of Arc, for instance, went out this way thanks to the Vatican (she was convicted of wearing men's clothes). 

  Men were burned at the stake too. It happened to William Tyndale, who deigned translate the Bible into English for common people to read. 
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  (#3) Boiled In Oil: More Or Less Self-Explanatory

  During the Roman Inquisition, it was a good idea to keep your head down and your ideas non-controversial. Unfortunately, civil law student Pomponio Algerio didn’t get that memo.

  His philosophical ideas against the Church caught their attention, so they threw him in prison. After a year, he refused to change his views, so he was boiled alive in hot oil. It took him 15 minutes for him to die. 
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  (#1) Drawn And Quartered: Dragged By Horses And Ripped To Pieces

  In the early 19th century, the Papal States (areas of Italy under direct papal authority), banned some of the more heinous methods of execution, though held on to drawing and quartering for crimes that were "especially loathsome." 

  If you've never seen Braveheart, maybe you aren't intimately familiar with the process, so here are the basics: drawing and quartering has two parts. First, the condemned is drawn (dragged) by horses to the site of the execution. So, that hurts like hell. Then, the actual execution takes place, and methods are relatively diverse. One popular version of quartering involved tying each of the condemned’s limbs to different horses and spurring them off. You can guess how that ended. 

  In another iteration, "hanged" was added to the sentence ("hanged, drawn, and quartered" is a common phrase in the torture and execution world). So, there was the horse dragging, hanging, removal of the genitals, evisceration, decapitation, then the corpse was chopped to pieces (quartered). 
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  (#8) Garrote: Strangled By Metal, Rope, Or Wire

  Garroting was an alternative method of strangulation commonly used in executions in Spain and Portugal for centuries. During the Inquisition, a garrote was used to execute some who were spared burning at the stake by conversion to Catholicism or recanting beliefs or statements. It was also employed by conquistadors working in the name of God and Spain in Latin America.

  As it turns out, garrote has more than one meaning. In abstract, the garrote is a way to strangle someone to death. In more concrete terms, it may be a sharpened wire or rope used to strangle someone by hand. Or, a garrote may be a sort of chair with a metal band attached to it. The metal band is wrapped around the neck of the person sitting in the chair and tightened to suffocate the condemned. It might also be simply a post with a rope around it, where the rope was used to strangle. 
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  (#7) Strangulation: Clemency From Divine Hands

  Whether they were spearheading an inquisition or rooting out nefarious Satanists and practitioners of witchcraft, popes and their minions considered themselves pretty clement guys. Those accused of heresy were typically questioned and tortured, during which time they had the opportunity to make a confession.

  If you confessed your heretical ways to Church authorities, they took mercy on you and strangled you to death. If you didn't confess, you would likely be burned at the stake. 
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  (#6) Immurement: Walled Up And Left To Die

  You probably haven’t heard of immurement. To be immured was to be put, by the Church, into a space with no exit. Sometimes, this meant building a room around the condemned, but in other, less lavish, cases of immurement, the condemned was simply shoved into a coffin.

  Proper immurement meant starving to death or dying of dehydration, while immurement in a confined space, such as a coffin, led to death by asphyxiation. 

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