Knights Templar
Foot roasting was one of the principal tortures used to extract supposed confessions of heresy and other accusations made against the Knights Templar after their arrest in October 1307. It is recorded that one Templar's feet was so savagely tortured that—as he was being carried back to his cell—various pieces of charred bone fell from his feet to the floor, here and there. Prisoners could also be suspended head-downwards from stocks, with hot coals placed directly on the soles of the feet—held in place by gravity—while thin slivers of burning embers were slid between pairs of adjacent toes. Templars were also tortured by having their limbs disjointed by a system of pulleys and weights (the strappado, or squassation) or by having sharp, thin wedges of wood or metal hammered beneath the nails of their toes and fingers, or had their teeth extracted with pliers and the empty sockets stimulated with sharp iron tools.
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Famous quotes containing the word knights:
“The threadbare trees, so poor and thin,
They are no wealthier than I;
But with as brave a core within
They rear their boughs to the October sky.
Poor knights they are which bravely wait
The charge of Winter’s cavalry,
Keeping a simple Roman state,
Discumbered of their Persian luxury.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)