Tablilla

Tablillas was a Medieval Spanish technique of torture for slowly squeezing and crushing the toes and fingers by means of pillories and wedges.^[1]

Description and procedure

The tablillas was an auxiliary torture used to increase the effectiveness of other tortures that could be applied while the prisoner was bound to the Rack and stretched to the point where his fingers and toes were tense. The tablillas were a set of four small pillories, each with five holes designed tightly to confine either fingers or toes, and—during the application of other tortures—long, thin, gradually tapered wedges were hammered into the holes alongside the fingers and toes, based upon the assumption that the simultaneous squeezing and crushing of up to ten fingers and ten toes would prove an effective enhancement to the primary torture. (In concept, then, the tablillas was analogous to the original torture of the boots and wedges [not the more technologically advanced spiked-iron-vise class of "boot"].) The ponderous style of the only writer to comment in detail on the torture of the tablillas may be paraphrased as follows: "The torture of the tablillas is rarely given, the subject trussed up as for the torture of water and cords; having not obtained confession, four palm-sized tablillas are brought, each with five narrow finger-width or toe-width holes, and to give grave pain they hammer a wedge, bit by bit, between the hole and the trapped finger or toe, one after the other; and the fingers and toes are so crushed and beaten, and the torture quite remarkably savage that rarely do the judges exhaust the wedges, for some faint and others confess the crime.”^[2]

Precursors

The Larousse article also cites a putative ancient Spartan torture device, the δακτυλήθρα (daktylēthra, Gk., thimble), featuring finely threaded iron jaws between which toes were slowly crushed. One questions the historical accuracy of the claim that such an instrument could be engineered in ancient times. However, it is conceivable that such a device could be manufactured, albeit extremely crudely, of bronze.

Iron mallets that could be employed ad hoc to shatter the bones of the fingers and toes were standard equipment in medieval European torture chambers. Toes were also torn from the feet with iron pincers or had their nails slowly extracted with forceps or, with remarkable cruelty, by slowly hammering sharp, thin iron wedges under the toenails.^[3]

References

1. "Tormento" in Larousse Enciclopedia Gran Universal Ilustrada (1939 ed.)
2. Joaquín Bastús y Carrera, Nuevas anotaciones al ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Barcelona: Impresta de la Viuda e Hijos de Gorchs., 1834), pp. 53 ff.
3. Hirsch, A., ed., The Book of Torture and Executions. Toronto: Golden Books, 1944.