ANCIENT PRACTICES

The Babylonian law system does not report torture practices but there are traces of them among the Egyptians and the Assyrians and in the city-states of ancient Greece. Slaves and foreigners were tortured in Athens.
Demosthenes said that it was the most efficacious system for wrenching confessions out of somebody. Torture was also practiced by the Romans, slaves charged with “lesa maestà” (betrayal) were put to the torture. A wife could be subjected to torture, but only after her slaves had been tortured, if she had been accused of poisoning her husband.
The degree of torture was at the discretion of the judge, but should never be mortal. The investigation never began with torture, in hopes of obtaining rapid confessions it started with the weaker subjects, weather physically or psychologically weaker. Despite these precautions torture was constantly attacked by Cicero and Seneca. These argued that “torture forced innocent people to lie”. The Justinian Digest described torture as unreliable, dangerous and misleading.

 

MIDDLE AGES

The ancient ecclesiastical Authorities disapproved torture until it came to be used against heretics. Priests could not inflict it on accused persons and even the “professional” torturers had to display pity. Very little pity was however shown in the killing of the Templars. Between 1307 and 1310 thirty-six thousand Templars were tortured to death in Paris. The use of torture was reinforced because medieval jurists referred to the Roman law books in their search for the “truth”.
At first inquisitorial procedure could be practiced only with the agreement of the accused or if he were caught in the act. Later on these practices took hold and principally in Germany and Italy torture came to be used for one main purpose: that of obtaining confessions from the reluctant accused, such that confessions would contain “elements that only the accused could know”.

 

THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

In the fourteenth century a distinction was made between ordinary and extraordinary procedures. Torture came to be coupled with the concept of “secretness” and became ordinary procedure in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The French Ordinances of 1498 and 1539 revealed how well-established was the procedure of obtaining confessions by torture. In England, where torture was not practiced in the accusatory system in which the accuser had to demonstrate the guilt of the accused and not the accused his innocence, it was not unusual for the accused person reluctant to confess to be “helped” with the employment of the “trial by duress”. The accused was placed under a table upon which were placed weights until complete confession was given. In case of death the accused’s goods passed directly to his family instead of being confiscated by the Crown.

 

THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

The Spanish inquisition regularly put somebody to torture to obtain complete confessions from both the male and female accused.
In 1480 the Pope gave his approval to the use of inquisitorial trials. The first inquisitorial trial was prosecuted in Seville in 1481. The creation of a central court in 1483 was followed the year after by the publication of the INSTRUCTIONS by Tommaso de Torquemada which gave detailed descriptions of tortures in heresy trials. Three “preliminary hearings” were granted to the accused, if there was no confession the court could resort to torture.
The work of Torquemada as accuser was carried on by his successors and in particular by Cardinal Jimenes de Cisneros and his system was subsequently perfected by Fernando de Valdez in 1561.