14. The “breaking wheel” was used during the Middle Ages against condemned violent criminals to break bones prior to displaying their tattered, but still breathing body before the general public as a deterrent.
The “breaking wheel”, also known as the “Catherine wheel”, was a method of torture that featured as part of public executions in Europe between the start of the Middle Ages until the Early Modern Period. Those convicted, commonly murderers and robbers, would be “broken by the wheel” for their sins, whereupon they were staked out and endured having their limbs broken. Thereafter, the pulped remains of the still-living criminal were strapped to the wheel itself and erected on a pole, akin to a crucifixion, until death. In some instances, “mercy” might be granted allowing for a swifter death, with the wheelset on fire or the condemned beheaded.
Hypothesized to originate from the Kingdom of the Franks, by the time of the Holy Roman Empire it formed a staple of the legal system. Under the Habsburgs, the number of strikes inflicted was used as a measure of the severity of criminal conduct by the condemned. Exported by Europeans during the Age of Exploration, this method of torture is documented as occurring as far away as French-controlled Louisiana and in British-controlled India during the 18th century. Gradually declining, by 1813 the practice started to be outlawed, with the last known execution by the wheel known to have occurred taking place in Prussia in 1841.