I do not have profound thoughts to share, other than the sickening metaphor of a friar tortured in the Middle Ages; one of the first men in history to raise his fist in the air in the land of hypocrisy.
The Italian martyr Savonarola was tortured in a machine called the “strappado.” It’s a very cruel instrument used against criminals to get them to confess. Perhaps it’s popular now in S&M circles, but history has it on good account that this object was an instrument of torture.
Savonarola was tied by his left hand by ropes and leather straps, suspended on the rack-like device. He was repeatedly and methodically raised and jerked down to get him to retract everything he said about the evils and corruption of the Papacy, as he did with his preaching. It may seem like an amusement park ride – the medieval form of Enchanted Kingdom, only disenchanted and without wizard mascots – yet the device was able to get him to sign the confession.
You could imagine the agony of Savonarola; raised by his hand and its fingers, the joints hyperextended and flexed beyond its limits. The locks are then released from the wheel, and he plummeted… with only his bound hand saving him. Just before he collapses into the marble walks of the city of Florence, the locks in the wheel were engaged again, and Savonarola is saved – and tortured – by his bound hand.
Imagine the pain that radiated from his fingertips to his knuckles. Every bone in his wrist was pulverized, the skin cut through by the straps, ropes, and chains. The tendons and ligaments of his elbows were ready to snap, if not that they already had. His one shoulder dislocated from its socket, shredded from bearing his full weight in the strappado. Mutilated, battered… broken, beat, and scarred.
The very man who hangs there like a piece of meat had a voice that echoed through the very souls of the laity that crowded the Church of San Marco, preaching against the excesses and the vanity of a corrupt Borgia masquerading as a Pope. The murals of the masters lay silent, mute witnesses for the man who scaled the pulpit on mornings of worship, and preached not from the parchment leaves of Bibles, or sermons not heard from the tired old homilies of aging men of the cloth, but from rage and anger… from the belief that there is right and wrong, and that his Church stands for the former, and that his Church stands because of the latter.
All the while, the friar hung like a pendelum of flesh and bone, passing out from the pain and yet awakened by it. Screaming… wailing… strapped to a machine of nothing more than a wooden wheel, rough ropes, chains, crude pulleys, and leather straps.
“I confess!” he wails. “I confess to the truth!”
