Haunting Discovery: Medieval Skeletons Bear Evidence of Barbaric Punishment

[Judi Lynn]

By Rossella Lorenzi, Live Science Contributor | June 19, 2017 07:03am ET


Archaeologists who were digging in a medieval Portuguese necropolis unearthed three skeletons of young men who had their hands and feet cut off just before they died.

Most likely the consequence of judicial punishment, the gruesome amputation was inflicted on the men between the 13th and 15th centuries in the town of Estremoz, a city in southern Portugal, close to the Spanish border.

The remains, along with 94 other skeletons, were excavated in 2001 from a necropolis known as Rossio do Marquês de Pombal.

"The three bodies were buried in graves located side by side and relegated to the south[ern] limits of the cemetery," Eugénia Cunha, an anthropologist at the University of Coimbra, told Live Science. [25 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries]

More:
https://www.livescience.com/59529-medieval-skeletons-with-hands-feet-amputated.html

[orangecrush]

1. Extremely cool!

(Not the mutilations - anthropology.)

[democratisphere]

2. Just another example of why the state should not be allowed to execute

it's citizens. Barbarians!

[Javaman]

3. ...

[SCantiGOP]

4. my first thought also

Were these Jews or some other "undesirables" that were tortured and executed by the Catholic Church?

[Igel]

5. Perhaps.

But from 1200-1500 a lot of crap was happening there.

The city was taken by the Muslims around 1200, and then taken back from the Muslims for the last time in 1258 (I didn't remember the dates, so thanks Internet). So the earlier part of the timeframe given was still under Muslim rule: executions might have included thieves who also did worse crimes, perhaps they were apostates from Islam who "converted" during the brief Xian rule, or perhaps they were preachers who proselytized. Those last two were real no-nos, the Muslim rulers at the time were bad-ass and in "enlightened" Andalusia beheaded Xians who dared to preach in public. The area in the south of the country was only reconquered towards 1300, and these may have been captives from that battle.

In the 1300s there were battles with what would later be the Spanish over the eastern border of Portugal. It pays to remember that the Reconquista in Spain wasn't completed for another couple of hundred years.

The Papal inquisition was on-going in the 1200s: it wasn't just Jews who pretended to be Christian, it was also Muslims. Local judicial norms also probably didn't shift overnight. Often the population determines judicial norms and to keep the peace judges acquiesce.

Note that the inquisition itself, at least during the early portion of the 1200-1500 period, didn't have authority to execute and any executions done by inquisitors was generally punished. The best the inquisitors could do was recommend that the civil authorities do the executing, and usually that was only done after a few trials in which penitence and repentance were the punishment.

No way to assign blame until a year of death can be pinned down.