The Iron Maiden of Nuremberg
The history of torture records many devices that worked on the
principle of the anthropomorphic container with two doors, fitted with spikes on
the inside that pierced the victim upon the doors being shut. The most famous
example has always been the so called “Iron Maiden of Nuremberg”, destroyed
in the air raids of 1944.
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It is difficult to separate legend from fact concerning
this contrivance because most published material is based on nineteenth
century research distorted by romanticisms and by fanciful popular
tradition. The first reference to an execution with the Maiden that has
yet come to light stems from August 14, 1515, although the instrument
had been in use for several decades by then. That day a forger of coins
was placed inside, and the doors shut “slowly, so that the very sharp
points penetrated his arms, and his legs in several places, and his
belly and chest, and his bladder and the root of his member, and his
eyes, and his shoulders, and his buttocks, but not enough to kill him;
and so he remained making great cry and lament for two days, after which
he died”. Probably the spikes of that time were movable among various
sockets drilled into different places on the inside, more or less
lethal, more or less mutilating, according to the requirements of the
sentence. |
Investigative torture fell slowly into disuse in Nuremberg with the
passing of the eighteenth century, so that a tourist guide of 1784 speaks of
“the Iron Maiden, that abominable work of horror (dieses abscheuliche
Greulwerk) that goes back to the times of Frederick Barbarossa”, an error
of almost four centuries but one that proves that the Maiden had already been
relegated to the museum. Nevertheless, in spite of this comment, even in 1788
–a portentious year, at the apex of the Enlightenment, in France a time of
revolutionary ferment, in England of well-advanced industrialism, in the New
World of enthusiastic republicanism– sentences of drawing-and-quartering, of
breaking on the wheel and of the cutting-off of tongues and hands were carried
out in Nuremberg.
Punishments handed down from mediaeval times were to remain in legal force
throughout the greater part of Catholic Europe until after the end of the
Napoleonic era, especially in Austria, Bavaria, Italy (except Tuscany, Lucca and
Parma), and of course in Spain.
The Iron Maiden of Nuremberg
"The maiden was a tomb-sized container with folding doors. Upon the
inside of the door were vicious spikes. As the prisoner was shut inside he would
be pierced along the length of his body. The talons were not designed to kill
outright, however, and the pinioned prisoner was left to slowly perish in the
utmost pain".
The following is a description of an iron maiden from Andrei Codrescu's
novel, The Blood Countess:
Sharing the room with the rack wheel at the Thurzo was an iron maiden, a metal
statue of a woman. This was a great example of this sort of object, a unique
construction from one of Germany's greatest clock makers. She had breasts, arms,
legs, and two faces, one in front and one in back. The front face was round,
with oval eyes that peered down with a look that could be alternately filled
with pity and enigmatically amused. The small mouth was finely etched with
hair-thin wrinkles. The eyes in the back face were closed, but the mouth was
slightly open, as if she was about to whisper something. Long fine blond hair
covered her head and came down in two braids over her ears, past her waist. She
was dressed in a ballooning dress of worn velvet folded thousands of times,
spilling over her feet. Her bare breasts were round and shiny from the
generations of furtive schoolchildren who had rubbed them on visits to the
museum. Two strands of pearls and a gold necklace with a black stone on the end
were draped about her curved swan's neck. She opened from the front... along a
seam between her breasts that was invisible when she was closed. The trigger
that caused her to open was hidden in the black stone at the end of the gold
chain. When the stone was pressed, her hands moved to embrace the person who had
set off the hidden mechanism. When she opened, she revealed a hollow interior
with sharp iron spikes. Her arms pulled in her victim, and then she closed up,
piercing her prey
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.