Random Gruesome Ways People Were Executed By Popes And Other Catholic Authorities (8 items)

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  (#5) The Ax: Like A Hot Knife Through Your Neck

  Sometimes, the simplest methods are the best. As the Medieval Inquisition spread, agents of the Church went from village to village finding new supposed witches and heretics to persecute.

  The problem was, if they were found guilty, these agents didn't have the usual tools to carry out the execution. So, they had to settle for axes to decapitate people with. Crude, but it got the job done. 
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  (#6) Immurement: Walled Up And Left To Die

  You probably haven’t heard of immurement. To be immured was to be put, by the Church, into a space with no exit. Sometimes, this meant building a room around the condemned, but in other, less lavish, cases of immurement, the condemned was simply shoved into a coffin.

  Proper immurement meant starving to death or dying of dehydration, while immurement in a confined space, such as a coffin, led to death by asphyxiation. 
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  (#4) Water Torture: Forced Ingestion While Choking On Cloth

  Water torture, also known as the water cure, was a common technique during the Spanish inquisition, used by those acting on Catholic authority to brutalize accused heretics and anyone else they didn't like. The accused had their mouth pried open with a bit of iron and a cloth stuffed into it. Then, buckets of water were forced down the accused's throat for choking. The water also lodged the bit of cloth in the accused's throat, for a bit of extra choking fun. 

  In some cases, to be extra nasty, interrogators used boiling water or huge quantities of vinegar, expediting the process with a funnel. In at least one documented case, a man accused of demon possession and of being a werewolf died of a distended stomach. Interrogators claimed the werewolf in him went a little wild and drank so much water that he died. 
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  (#3) Boiled In Oil: More Or Less Self-Explanatory

  During the Roman Inquisition, it was a good idea to keep your head down and your ideas non-controversial. Unfortunately, civil law student Pomponio Algerio didn’t get that memo.

  His philosophical ideas against the Church caught their attention, so they threw him in prison. After a year, he refused to change his views, so he was boiled alive in hot oil. It took him 15 minutes for him to die. 
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  (#7) Strangulation: Clemency From Divine Hands

  Whether they were spearheading an inquisition or rooting out nefarious Satanists and practitioners of witchcraft, popes and their minions considered themselves pretty clement guys. Those accused of heresy were typically questioned and tortured, during which time they had the opportunity to make a confession.

  If you confessed your heretical ways to Church authorities, they took mercy on you and strangled you to death. If you didn't confess, you would likely be burned at the stake. 
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  (#1) Drawn And Quartered: Dragged By Horses And Ripped To Pieces

  In the early 19th century, the Papal States (areas of Italy under direct papal authority), banned some of the more heinous methods of execution, though held on to drawing and quartering for crimes that were "especially loathsome." 

  If you've never seen Braveheart, maybe you aren't intimately familiar with the process, so here are the basics: drawing and quartering has two parts. First, the condemned is drawn (dragged) by horses to the site of the execution. So, that hurts like hell. Then, the actual execution takes place, and methods are relatively diverse. One popular version of quartering involved tying each of the condemned’s limbs to different horses and spurring them off. You can guess how that ended. 

  In another iteration, "hanged" was added to the sentence ("hanged, drawn, and quartered" is a common phrase in the torture and execution world). So, there was the horse dragging, hanging, removal of the genitals, evisceration, decapitation, then the corpse was chopped to pieces (quartered). 

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