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The 'breaking wheel' (also known as the 'Catherine wheel'; originally, 'the whele') was a torturous capital punishment device used in the Middle Ages and early modern times for public execution by cudgeling to death. It was not used for coercion through torture.

Contents

Description

Metaphorical uses of the term

See also

Sources and references

Description

Breaking on the wheel was a form of torturous execution formerly in use, especially in ancient Greece (where it was originated), France, Germany, Sweden, and Russia.
The wheel itself was similar to a large wooden wagon wheel, with many radial spokes, but a wheel was not always used.
In France the condemned was placed on a cart-wheel and his or her limbs stretched out along the spokes, one by one over two sturdy wooden beams. The wheel was made to slowly revolve, and a large hammer or an iron bar was then applied to the limb over the gap between the beams, breaking the bones. This process was repeated several times per limb. Sometimes it was 'mercifully' ordered that the executioner should strike the criminal on chest and stomach, blows known as ''coups de grâce'', which caused lethal injuries, leading to the end of the torture by death; without those, the broken man could take hours, even days, before shock and dehydration caused death. In France, a special grace, called the ''retentum'', could be granted, by which the condemned was strangled after the second or third blow, or in special cases, even before the breaking began.
Afterwards, the condemned's shattered limbs were woven ('braiden') through the spokes of the wheel which was then hoisted onto a tall pole, so that birds could eat the sometimes still-living individual.
Legend has it that Saint Catherine of Alexandria was to be executed on one of these devices, which thereafter became known as the ''Catherine wheel'', also used as an iconographic attribute.

Metaphorical uses of the term

The breaking wheel was a cruel torment as well as a great dishonor, rather like crucifixion in Antiquity.
It is referred to in the Dutch expression ''opgroeien voor galg en rad'' ('to grow up into gallows and wheel', i.e. to come to no good at all, especially: ripe for a life of crime). It's also known the Spanish expression ''morir en la rueda'' ('to die by the wheel', i.e. to keep silence about something). It is also referred to in the Dutch expression ''ik ben geradbraakt'' (literally: 'I have been broken on the wheel', i.e. I am broken / tired / exhausted.
The word 'roué' 'dissipated debauchee' is French, and its original meaning was broken on the wheel. As execution by breaking on the wheel was reserved in France, and some other countries, for crimes of peculiar atrocity, roué came by a natural process to be understood to mean a man morally worse than a pendard or gallows-bird, who only deserved hanging for common crimes. He was also a leader in wickedness, since the chief of a gang of brigands (for instance) would be broken on the wheel, while his obscure followers were merely hanged. Philip, duke of Orleans, who was regent of France from 1715 to 1723, gave the term the sense of impious and callous debauchee, which it has borne since his time, by habitually applying it to the very bad male company who amused his privacy and his leisure. The locus classicus for the origin of this use of the epithet is in the Memoirs of Saint-Simon.
The Finnish word for the breaking wheel is ''teiliratas'' and the verb for execution on the wheel is ''teilata''; in Modern Finnish the word ''teilata'' refers to forceful and violent critique or rejection of performance, ideas or innovations.
Alexander Pope, in his 1735 "Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot", famously asked, "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?"

See also

★ Fustuarium

Sources and references

★

★ notably Religious toleration

★ Probertenencyclopaedia - illustrated

★ Breaking on the Wheel (rotten.com, with illustration)

★ Rulers and Their Times: Peter the Great and Tsarist Russia, by Miriam Greenblatt, ©2000 Marshall Cavendish Corporation, Published by Benchmark Books, ISBN 0-7614-0914-9