Medieval Information

When the offense was not serious enough, sometimes the victim would survice. Those who survived narrate The Wheel as being the most painful torturing device ever made.

Of course this is very subjective because there was no comparison in the first place, but there is something very clear: The Wheel was terribly painful and mostly deadly.

The wheel had many variants out of which using horses for pulling a person was the most common. In order to accomplish this, the victim would have his feet tied with a rope to a caged wild horse. His hands would be sometimes fixed to the wall (sometimes with nails to imitate Jesus Christ and give it a more religious meaning).

When everything was ready, the horse would be ordered to ride at full speed with the only impediment of the agonizing human. After much struggle from the horse, the person's bones would finally break. For very strong people, sometimes two or three horses were used instead of one to accelerate the process and make it overall more painful and faster.

In general, sepparating a person in two was almost impossible when using any variants of the wheel as bones had to be completely crushed and human skin is very resistant to this. Nevertheless, when horses were very hungry and ordered to run and when there were two or three or them, sometimes the victim would have his arms sepparated which was, in their words, "quite an spectacle".

Of course there were many other variants. The wheel itself was a device used for stretching a person using specifically a wheel. The torturer would turn a handle with a person tied to the wheel - the more he pulled, the more the wheel would be turned and the more the person would be stretched.

Sometimes to cause more pain, the wheel would itself move around with the person on top of it - like when roasting a chicken. To delve deeper into the analogy, sometimes fire was used as well to even cause more pain. Additionally, very mean torturers would place nails in the floor to potentially hurt the victim while not killing him.

The wheel's origins are unknown, but unfortunately for the tortured victims, it existed through most of the Dark Ages and it was very common in England, France and even Germany.