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Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.-- Voltaire

But the museum that I would least like to spend a day in is the Museo della Tortura e di Criminologia Medievale in San Gimignano, Italy. According to a helpful review in www. tripadvisor. com, "The cost is €8,00. Pretty steep for a dozen or so small rooms totalling no more than 100-150 items. If you're into the macabre, though, you should not pass it by. Originals and reproductions of instruments of torture and execution are housed in moodily-lit stone-walled rooms. Each item is accompanied by excellent written descriptions in Italian, French, and English. No details are spared, including which orifice the device was meant for, which limb it was meant to dislocate, who was the usual customer and how the victim would suffer and/or die."

The world contains a lot of strange museums. There is the Museum of Pez Memorabilia in Burlingame, California, which showcases more than five hundred of the cartoon-headed candy dispensers. Visitors to Paris have long stood in line to see the museum devoted to the city's sewer system. The Devil's Rope Museum in McLean, Texas, "presents every detail and aspect of barbed wire." In Tokyo, the Meguro Museum of Parasitology invites its visitors to "try to think about parasites without a feeling of fear, and take the time to learn about their wonderful world of the Parasites." And then there is the Phallological Museum in Húsavík, "a collection of over one hundred penises and penile parts belonging to almost all the land and sea mammals that can be found in Iceland."

I think even the most atrocity-jaded readers of recent history would find something to shock them in this display of medieval cruelty. There is Judas's Cradle, used in the Spanish Inquisition: the naked victim was bound hand and foot, suspended by an iron belt around the waist, and lowered onto a sharp wedge that penetrated the anus or vagina; when victims relaxed their muscles, the point would stretch and tear their tissues. The Virgin of Nuremberg was a version of the iron maiden, with spikes that were carefully positioned so as not to transfix the victim's vital organs and prematurely end his suffering. A series of engravings show victims hung by the ankles and sawn in half from the crotch down; the display explains that this method of execution was used all over Europe for crimes that included rebellion, witchcraft, and military disobedience. The Pear is a split, spike-tipped wooden knob that was inserted into a mouth, anus, or vagina and spread apart by a screw mechanism to tear the victim open from the inside; it was used to punish sodomy, adultery, incest, heresy, blasphemy, and "sexual union with Satan." The Cat's Paw or Spanish Tickler was a cluster of hooks used to rip and shred a victim's flesh. Masks of Infamy were shaped like the head of a pig or an ass; they subjected a victim both to public humiliation and to the pain of a blade or knob forced into their nose or mouth to prevent them from wailing. The Heretic's Fork had a pair of sharp spikes at each end: one end was propped under the victim's jaw and the other at the base of his neck, so that as his muscles became exhausted he would impale himself in both places.

The devices in the Museo della Tortura are not particularly scarce. Collections of medieval torture instruments may also be found in San Marino, Amsterdam, Munich, Prague, Milan, and the Tower of London. Illustrations of literally hundreds of kinds of torture may be seen in coffee table books like Inquisition and Torment in Art, some of them reproduced in figure 4-1.

Torture, of course, is not a thing of the past. It has been carried out in modern times by police states, by mobs during ethnic cleansings and genocides, and by democratic governments in interrogations and counterinsurgency operations, most infamously during the administration of George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks. But the sporadic, clandestine, and universally decried eruptions of torture in recent times cannot be equated with the centuries of institutionalized sadism in medieval Europe. Torture in the Middle Ages was not hidden, denied, or euphemized. It was not just a tactic by which brutal regimes intimidated their political enemies or moderate regimes extracted information from suspected terrorists. It did not erupt from a frenzied crowd stirred up in hatred against a dehumanized enemy. No, torture was woven into the fabric of public life. It was a form of punishment that was cultivated and celebrated, an outlet for artistic and technological creativity. Many of the instruments of torture were beautifully crafted and ornamented. They were designed to inflict not just physical pain, as would a beating, but visceral horrors, such as penetrating sensitive orifices, violating the bodily envelope, displaying the victim in humiliating postures, or putting them in positions where their own flagging stamina would increase their pain and lead to disfigurement or death. Torturers were the era's foremost experts in anatomy and physiology, using their knowledge to maximize agony, avoid nerve damage that might deaden the pain, and prolong consciousness for as long as possible before death. When the victims were female, the sadism was eroticized: the women were stripped naked before being tortured, and their breasts and genitals were often the targets. Cold jokes made light of the victims' suffering. In France, Judas's Cradle was called "The Nightwatch" for its ability to keep a victim awake. A victim might be roasted alive inside an iron bull so his screams would come out of the bull's mouth, like the bellowing of a beast. A man accused of disturbing the peace might be forced to wear a Noisemaker's Fife, a facsimile of a flute or trumpet with an iron collar that went around his neck and a vise that crushed the bones and joints of his fingers. Many torture devices were shaped like animals and given whimsical names.

Medieval Christendom was a culture of cruelty. Torture was meted out by national and local governments throughout the Continent, and it was codified in laws that prescribed blinding, branding, amputation of hands, ears, noses, and tongues, and other forms of mutilation as punishments for minor crimes. Executions were orgies of sadism, climaxing with ordeals of prolonged killing such as burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, pulling apart by horses, impalement through the rectum, disembowelment by winding a man's intestines around a spool, and even hanging, which was a slow racking and strangulation rather than a quick breaking of the neck. Sadistic tortures were also inflicted by the Christian church during its inquisitions, witch hunts, and religious wars. Torture had been authorized by the ironically named Pope Innocent IV in 1251, and the order of Dominican monks carried it out with relish. As the Inquisition coffee table book notes, under Pope Paul IV (1555-59), the Inquisition was "downright insatiable -- Paul, a Dominican and one-time Grand Inquisitor, was himself a fervent and skilled practitioner of torture and atrocious mass murders, talents for which he was elevated to sainthood in 1712."

Sources: Sawing: Held, 1986, p. 47. Cat's Paw: Held, 1986, p. 107. Impalement: Held, 1986, p. 141. Burning at the stake: Pinker, 2007a. Judas's Cradle: Held, 1986, p. 51. Breaking on the wheel: Puppi, 1990, p. 39.

FIGURE 4-1: Torture in medieval and early modern Europe

Torture was not just a kind of rough justice, a crude attempt to deter violence with the threat of greater violence. Most of the infractions that sent a person to the rack or the stake were nonviolent, and today many are not even considered legally punishable, such as heresy, blasphemy, apostasy, criticism of the government, gossip, scolding, adultery, and unconventional sexual practices. Both the Christian and secular legal systems, inspired by Roman law, used torture to extract a confession and thereby convict a suspect, in defiance of the obvious fact that a person will say anything to stop the pain. Torture used to secure a confession is thus even more senseless than torture used to deter, terrorize, or extract verifiable information such as the names of accomplices or the location of weapons. Nor were other absurdities allowed to get in the way of the fun. If a victim was burned by fire rather than spared by a miracle, that was taken as proof that he was guilty. A suspected witch would be tied up and thrown into a lake: if she floated, it proved she was a witch and she would then be hanged; if she sank and drowned, it proved she had been innocent.

Far from being hidden in dungeons, torture-executions were forms of popular entertainment, attracting throngs of jubilant spectators who watched the victim struggle and scream. Bodies broken on wheels, hanging from gibbets, or decomposing in iron cages where the victim had been left to die of starvation and exposure were a familiar part of the landscape. (Some of these cages still hang from European public buildings today, such as the cathedral of Münster.) Torture was often a participatory sport. A victim in the stocks would be tickled, beaten, mutilated, pelted with rocks, or smeared with mud or feces, sometimes leading to suffocation.

Systemic cruelty was far from unique to Europe. Hundreds of methods of torture, applied to millions of victims, have been documented in other civilizations, including the Assyrians, Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Chinese, Hindus, Polynesians, Aztecs, and many African kingdoms and Native American tribes. Brutal killings and punishments were also documented among the Israelites, Greeks, Arabs, and Ottoman Turks. Indeed, as we saw at the end of chapter 2, all of the first complex civilizations were absolutist theocracies which punished victimless crimes with torture and mutilation.

This chapter is about the remarkable transformation in history that has left us reacting to these practices with horror. In the modern West and much of the rest of the world, capital and corporal punishments have been effectively eliminated, governments' power to use violence against their subjects has been severely curtailed, slavery has been abolished, and people have lost their thirst for cruelty. All this happened in a narrow slice of history, beginning in the Age of Reason in the 17th century and cresting with the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th.

Some of this progress -- and if it isn't progress, I don't know what is -- was propelled by ideas: by explicit arguments that institutionalized violence ought to be minimized or abolished. And some of it was propelled by a change in sensibilities. People began to sympathize with more of their fellow humans, and were no longer indifferent to their suffering. A new ideology coalesced from these forces, one that placed life and happiness at the center of values, and that used reason and evidence to motivate the design of institutions. The new ideology may be called humanism or human rights, and its sudden impact on Western life in the second half of the 18th century may be called the Humanitarian Revolution.

Of course no historical change takes place in a single thunderclap, and humanist currents flowed for centuries before and after the Enlightenment and in parts of the world other than the West. But in Inventing Human Rights, the historian Lynn Hunt notes that human rights have been conspicuously affirmed at two moments in history. One was the end of the 18th century, which saw the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789. The other was the midpoint of the 20th century, which saw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, followed by a cascade of Rights Revolutions in the ensuing decades (chapter 7).

Today the Enlightenment is often mentioned with a sneer. "Critical theorists" on the left blame it for the disasters of the 20th century; theoconservatives in the Vatican and the American intellectual right long to replace its tolerant secularism with the alleged moral clarity of medieval Catholicism. Even many moderate secular writers disparage the Enlightenment as the revenge of the nerds, the naïve faith that humans are a race of pointy-eared rational actors. This colossal amnesia and ingratitude is possible because of the natural whitewashing of history that we saw in chapter 1, in which the reality behind the atrocities of yesteryear is consigned to the memory hole and is remembered only in bland idioms and icons. If the opening of this chapter has been graphic, it is only to remind you of the realities of the era that the Enlightenment put to an end.

As we shall see, the declarations were more than feel-good verbiage; the Humanitarian Revolution initiated the abolition of many barbaric practices that had been unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But the custom that most dramatically illustrates the advance of humanitarian sentiments was eradicated well before that time, and its disappearance is a starting point for understanding the decline of institutionalized violence.