The Amsterdam Museum of Torture is listed as one of the world’s strangest museums — and when you walk through this maze of shadowy rooms, running your fingers over cold wooden and metal instruments that have elicited screams of terror, it’s the stuff of nightmares.
We visited the Amsterdam Torture Museum during a tour we made of four European countries. Its main exhibit, Punishments and Verdicts of the Middle Ages, contains 40+ instruments of torture. While they’re fascinating, the drawings depicting their usage in medieval society really packed a punch, as they say. I couldn’t imagine how a number of them would have been used, but the paintings on the wall made it all too clear.
Each darkened room of the Torture Museum has several exhibits consisting of an instrument of torture or two, illustration showing their usage, and a write-up giving names and descriptions. It took us about 45 minutes or so to go through.
The medieval period of world history (5th to the 15th centuries) was violent and often exacted punishment through torture. However, torture also carried on into the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition lasted for another few centuries until the Spanish queen regent Maria Cristina de Borbon issued a degree abolishing it on July 15, 1834.
From the Spanish Inquisition and its extension, the Mexican Inquisition, Inquisitions took various forms in countries around the world. Whatever their form, Inquisitions typically were ecclesiastical courts of the Catholic Church. Their intent was combat heresy, witchcraft, and blasphemy by using violence and torture to get confessions and denunciations from heretics.
Here are some of the torture devices I found particularly intriguing.
This mask below doesn’t have any penetrating nails or thumb screws or stretching devices, but still inflicts torture. But what crimes was it designed to punish?
The mask was used during medieval times to curb free speech, one of the most important freedoms we’re guaranteed in modern society. Criticisms of those in power, of course, weren’t tolerated, along with negative comments on the church or society.
However, the mask also punished gossip, which was considered disorderly conduct. In fact, another version of this mask is called Scold’s Bridle, and was used in England into the 1800s in workhouses as a punishment for “rude, clamorous women,” to keep them from speaking.
While the mask was made for public humiliation much more than physical, it was impossible to talk, eat, or drink while wearing it.
Stocks have been used around the world, including North America. They mainly punished petty crimes and were mostly humiliating, depending on what passers-by threw at the criminal held securely by neck and hands. Left out in the sun, though, or battered by stones, the stocks could be a death penalty.
The wheel was also used as a torture device in the Middle Ages.
While the invention of the wheel is one of the most important steps in the development of civilizations, some could argue that wheeled transportation contributed more to power and warfare than anything else. And how were wheels used as instruments of torture? Well, it was a particularly gruesome way of killing someone, as their limbs were systematically broken and woven around the wheel spokes.
The cage was a coffin-like device that imprisoned a criminal and hung him up to die, rather than burying him. Victims were pecked by birds, nibbled on by animals, and baked in the sun.
Another variation of the cage, a whirligig, was used to punish wrongdoers by spinning them violently. It was typically a military punishment.
The Torture Museum is located at Singel 449, 1012 WP, Amsterdam. It’s open daily from before lunch until 11 pm at night. We stayed a couple of blocks from the Amsterdam Centraal Train Station on Damrak, and it was an easy walk to the Torture Museum on the Munt square (Muntplein), on the left bank of the Singel canal. It’s also close to the Kalvertoren shopping Mall and the Flower Market.
URL - https://torturemuseum.org/en/
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Linda Aksomitis has published 35+ books, many of them historical fiction and nonfiction, as well as a few thousand articles in newspapers and on blogs. Much of her research is done visiting museums and historic sites. She has a masters degree in education, with a specialization as a teacher-librarian. Find her online at https://aksomitis.com and https://guide2museums.com and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/guide2travel