Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris–Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds. London, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year at Tyburn, just north of Hyde Park. (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a good view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg for mercy, he wrote, was a crowd of "at least 12 or 14, 000 people.") In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings. "The corpses dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes stand out against the sky, in so many old paintings, are merely a realistic detail, " Braudel observed. "They were part of the landscape." Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V.A.C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At that time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, 7, 500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortes estimated for the empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to Braudel.Charles C. Mann
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The Spanish Empire in the 16th century was the largest in the world, but it was also cruel and barbaric. The Spanish Inquisition tortured people by burning them at the stake. Torture was extremely common in Spain. People were often tortured for no reason at all.
For instance, the Spanish Inquisition believed that witches were real. This caused people to be tortured for having witchcraft beliefs or being accused of witchcraft. Torture was also lethal because it could kill people.
The Spanish Inquisition used torture to make people confess to crimes they had never committed. Another way to torture people was by hanging them on a rope that was tied around their neck and then strangling them to death. This would take a long time to do to a person alive because they would struggle and fight back while being strangled.
The only way to get this done quickly is if you are able to get them to admit their crimes so they can be hanged immediately after being strangled so their organs don't stop functioning while they are still alive.... especially if they are still conscious while being strangled so they can feel pain...
Source: 1491: New Revelations Of The Americas Before Columbus
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