The Iron Maiden

THE IRON MAIDEN ~ A MYTHICAL TORTURE DEVICE

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The Iron Maiden is perhaps one of the most recognizable medieval torture devices, of all time.

As far as torture devices go, the Iron Maiden is really quite simple.

It is a human-shaped box, on the inside there are incredibly sharp spikes that would, presumably, impale through the victim on either side when the box was shut.

But the spikes were not long enough to kill a person outright.

They were short, and placed in such a way that the victim would die a slow and agonizing death, bleeding out over time.

While torture most certainly existed during the Middle Ages, the first written reference to the Iron Maiden didn’t appear until the late 1700s, long after the Middle Ages had come to an end.

The first mention of the Iron Maiden actually came from an 18th-century writer Johann Philipp Siebenkees, who described the device in a guidebook to the city of Nuremberg.

In it, he wrote of a 1515 execution in Nuremberg in which a criminal was allegedly placed in a device reminiscent of a sarcophagus lined on the inside with sharp spikes.

The man was shoved into the device and executed “slowly,” Siebenkees wrote~

“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 shoulder, 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.”

Some historians debate whether the Iron Maiden actually existed at all.

It wasn't until after Siebenkees wrote about this torture device, that Iron Maidens started popping up everywhere, in museums across Europe and the United States.

These were pieced together using various medieval artifacts and scraps, and put on display for those willing to pay a fee.

One even appeared in the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

Most of these myths about torture in the Middle Ages, were spread by people living in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In the years since, that exaggeration has compounded, and now many of these 18th-century myths are viewed as fact.

That’s not to say torture didn’t exist during that time, however.

There have certainly been execution methods used in the past that resembled the Iron Maiden.

The idea of a box with spikes inside isn’t particularly revolutionary ~ but the Iron Maiden itself seems to be more fiction than fact.

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https://allthatsinteresting.com/iron-maiden-device...

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https://ko-fi.com/thetudorintruders