Church bells rang on a November morning in 1617 in Nuremberg to announce an execution. The condemned man had counterfeited coins, and authorities sentenced him to burn to death.
It all began with a mile-long walk from the town hall to the execution site. The prisoner begged the chaplain to convert his punishment from burning to beheading, a faster and seemingly less painful method reserved for the upper class. But the chaplain refused, and the doomed man cried the entire mile.
The executioner, Frantz Schmidt, forced the prisoner to sit in a chair while he bound him with chains and placed a hood over his head. Schmidt kept a professional diary, and he noted his attempts to mercifully end prisoners’ lives. For live burnings, he subtly wrapped a cord around the prisoner’s throat and hid a small packet of gunpowder. As he dropped the lit torch onto the straw encircling the chair, his assistant yanked the cord and strangled the prisoner before they felt the agony of the flames. If the cord failed, the gunpowder was meant to ignite and quickly end the suffering. All the while, the witnesses assumed the prisoner had slowly and painfully burned to death.
