The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century

by Joel F. Harrington

Popular prejudice always dies slowly, especially among those individuals most anxious about their own deteriorating economic situation and unstable social status.

his years of assisting his father had also taught him that the line between honest and dishonest was neither fixed nor always obvious.

The religiously charged atmosphere of the day also added a particular urgency to the legal process, since it was believed that unpunished offenses might bring down divine wrath on an entire community (Landstraffe), in the form of flood, famine, or pestilence.

Among more established members of the community, by contrast, privately negotiated financial settlements remained the norm.

The conduct of our lives is the true reflection of our thoughts. —Michel de Montaigne, “On the Education of Children” (1580)1 Do, but also seem. Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. To excel and to know how to show it is to excel twice. —Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)2

As the historian Stuart Carroll reminds us, honor “is not simply a moral code regulating conduct; like magic or Christianity, it is a world view.”

Trust, not obedience to God or state, was the more sacred bond criminals violated, and the greater the degree of that violation, the more infamous the criminal for Meister Frantz.

The word virtue, I think, presupposes difficulty and struggle, and something that cannot be practiced without an adversary. This is perhaps why we call God good, mighty, liberal, and just, but do not call Him virtuous. —Michel de Montaigne, “On Cruelty” (1580)

Authoritarian regimes of the past and present recognize no such externally imposed restrictions, nor do they place the sovereignty of the individual on par with, let alone above, the sovereignty of the state.

Neither death by the wheel nor burning at the stake appears likely to make a comeback in the near future (we hope), but rises in criminality anywhere—real or perceived—still reliably generate popular calls for less constrained means of investigation and harsher punishments of convicted felons. Many modern regimes still employ systematic torture—without any of the legal constraints of sixteenth-century Nuremberg—and other governments (including my own, the United States) have deliberately blurred the line between acceptable and unacceptable coercion during criminal interrogations. Capital punishment is still practiced in fifty-eight countries, most prolifically in China and Iran (with combined 2011 execution figures in the thousands), but also in self-proclaimed liberal democracies such as the United States and Japan.

The abstract legal concept of a set of basic human rights, by contrast, remains relatively new and surprisingly vulnerable to characterization as a disposable luxury in difficult times, easily outmatched by older, more entrenched primal urges.