Featured Image Credit: MAFILM Stúdió 3Studio, Hraných Filmov BratislavaStudioul, Cinematografic Bucuresti
Topics: History
Jess Battison
Topics: History
Us humans really do come up with some f**ked up stuff.
Like, without getting into preaching peace and love, what inside our brains is causing people to think of things to torture other people with?
While plenty of that unfortunately still goes on today, if we look back through the history books, there’s been some grim methods used from one human to another.
From the horrific heretic fork to the Brazen Bull or the Breaking Wheel, there’s plenty of deadly examples.
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And one ‘fire seat’ torture method is hailed by some for causing the ‘cruellest’ death in history.
In 1514, György Dózsa led a peasants’ revolt in Hungary against the ruling nobility, earning the professional soldier the title of ‘peasant king’. However, this failed and he was served the grim punishment.
Said to be aged 44 at the time, the nobles he had planned to throne gave him his own coronation.
Dózsa was mocked as the so-called ‘peasant king’ and was placed in his very own throne.
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Only, the throne was made of an iron which was then brutally heated up until it was literally red hot.
Yeah, bet you’re squirming in your own cosy seat thinking about that, right? I can almost feel my bum getting itchy imagining the heat rising up.
But it didn’t stop there; Dózsa was even handed a similar heated iron sceptre in his hand with an iron crown placed on his head.
This apparently went on for an hour, with the partially roasted rebel still alive before he was removed from his cruel throne, ready for the torture to continue.
In further punishment, his brother Gergely was brutally killed before his eyes before he was led to a group of his followers who had also been captured.
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This lot had been starved for 10 days by this point, so were served up quite the meal.
They were forced to tuck into parts of their roasted leader’s flesh and if they refused to take part in the cannibalism, they were immediately killed.
What was left of Dózsa was then quarted up and sent to different cities across Hungary to display and set an example.
Many people regard all this horrific death as the ‘cruellest of all time and according to historian Paul Freedman, of Yale University, the execution was just ‘so stunningly barbarous that across Europe contemporaries, inured though they were to gruesome public spectacles, took notice’.