An executioner's tale

I have read about Live by The Sword somewhere before, but don't think I've mentioned it here.

From its review in Literary Review (which I was looking at in hard copy at the newsagent this morning - it does seem a very high quality read):

This is a marvellous book about a fascinating subject. It is, in a sense, a portrait of a serial killer. Frantz Schmidt was employed between 1578 and 1618 as the official executioner (and torturer) of the prosperous German city of Nuremberg. Over the course of his career he personally despatched 394 people, and flogged, branded or otherwise maimed many hundreds more. His life is also a tale of honour, duty and a lasting quest for meaning and redemption.

The penal regimes of pre-modern European states were harsh and violent, heavy on deterrence and the symbolism of retribution. Towns such as Nuremberg needed professional executioners to deal with an ever-present threat of criminality through the public infliction of capital and corporal sentences. Punishing malefactors with lengthy periods of incarceration was an idea for the future, and would probably have struck 16th-century people as unnecessarily cruel. Methods ranged from execution with the sword (the most honourable) to hanging (the least), and from the relatively quick and merciful to the dreadful penalty of staking a person to the ground and breaking their limbs one after the other with a heavy cartwheel. This was not a world of mindless violence: the punishments Schmidt imposed were carefully prescribed by the city authorities, down to the number of 'nips' (pieces of flesh torn from the limbs with red-hot tongs) convicts were to receive on their way to the gallows.

Schmidt kept a diary, and it is from this that his life and views are re-created in this book.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is how he got into the business:

His own apprenticeship as an executioner was the result of a catastrophic fall in family fortunes, originating in an episode of almost cinematic vividness. In October 1553, the erratic and unpopular Prince Albrecht Alcibiades von Brandenburg-Kulmbach suspected three local gunsmiths of plotting against his life. Invoking an ancient custom, he commanded a hapless bystander to execute them on the spot. Frantz's father, Heinrich, had no option but to carry out the commission and, tainted by the act, no options thereafter but to become a professional executioner. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, after a lifetime of devoted civic service, his son successfully petitioned the imperial court for a formal restitution of the family honour so that he could see his own sons enter the medical profession. Schmidt himself was a killer, but his true vocation was as a healer. He tortured and executed hundreds of people, but claimed to have treated more than fifteen thousand patients in and around Nuremberg. This is not as paradoxical as it seems: executioners often doubled as medics, drawing on their unrivalled practical knowledge of human anatomy.

The original incident sounds like something bizarre from a Tarantino film, no?