Some torture instruments, like the rack, were real. Others were probably invented to help perpetuate the myth of the medieval “Dark Ages.”
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Throughout history, people have used torture devices to punish their enemies and those accused of crimes. They have also used torture as a means to obtain confessions or convince the victim to give names of other people, even though torture does not produce reliable information. (This is not a new finding; it is something that even Napoleon Bonaparte observed.)
However, sometimes people looking back have let their imaginations run wild when it comes to torture. Historians of ancient Greece have passed down some fantastic tales that perhaps were not intended for readers to take literally. Furthermore, people in the modern era have accused medieval Europeans of using gruesome torture devices that probably did not exist at the time, perpetuating the myth of an uncivilized so-called “Dark Ages.” Below are some famous torture devices from history, both real and legendary. 
The brazen bull
The brazen bull is an ancient mythical torture device supposedly used by Phalaris, a tyrant who ruled a part of Sicily in the 6th century BC. It consisted of a life-sized bronze bull, hollow inside and with a door on the outside. The torturer would place a victim inside and light a fire under the bull. The fire would burn the victim to death, while an acoustic system in the bull made the victim’s screams sound like bull noises to those outside.
The story of Phalaris and the bronze bull comes from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who lived about 500 years after these events supposedly occurred. The story, which the Italian poet and philosopher Dante referenced in The Inferno , is probably a myth or at least heavily embellished.
The Iron Attachment
One of the most fantastic tales of a torture device is the Iron Apega, also known as the Nabis Apega. The Greek historian Polybius wrote that the Spartan king Nabis, who ruled from 207 to 192 BC. C., built a kind of torture robot that resembled his wife, Apega.
Polybius wrote that every time Nabis tried to collect taxes from someone who refused to pay, the king invited the person to hug his wife and pointed him toward the robot. When the person hugged the robot, it dragged him in his arms, crushing the victim with iron hooks hidden under his clothes. However, scholars have suggested that Polybius’ story of the torturing tax-collecting robot was allegorical and that the Iron Apega did not actually exist.
The shelf
The rack was a torture device used in the Tower of London, a royal palace that also served as a prison. Beginning in the 15th century, guardians working in the tower used the support to pull ropes tied to the victim’s wrists and ankles. This stretched the body and dislocated the victim’s joints.
Yeoman guards used the rack against people suspected of treason and religious heresy to try to get them to confess and reveal the names of other “conspirators”. One famous victim was the English Protestant writer and preacher Anne Askew. In 1546, guards tortured her on the rack and asked her to name Protestant sympathizers. When she refused, the officials burned her at the stake. Because the torture prevented her from walking, she had to be carried until her execution.
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The Scavenger’s Daughter
During the 16th and 17th centuries, the scavenger’s daughter was also used as a torture device by the keepers of the Tower of London. The scavenger’s daughter was a metal structure that compressed the victim’s body on itself.
The compression of the scavenger’s daughter was so intense that it apparently could cause the victim to begin bleeding from the nose, mouth, and other parts of the body. This gruesome form of torture could result in death.
The butterfly screw
SSPL VIA GETTY IMAGEST THUMB SCREWS, OR THUMBS, ARE AN EARLY TORTURE INSTRUMENT WHICH IS USED BY INSERTING THE THUMBS INTO THE ARTIFACT AND COMPRESSING THEM WITH A SCREW.
Torturers used the thumbscrew, another painful device from early modern Europe (c.1450 to 1750), to crush a person’s fingers or thumbs.
Similar to the rack, torturers used the screw as a means of punishment and as an attempt to obtain a confession. The thumbscrew was also known as “thumbikin,” with many spelling variations.
The pear of anguish
The anguish pear is a device that early modern Europeans labeled as a medieval torture device. A torturer would allegedly insert the device into a person’s mouth, vagina or anus to widen the hole, causing extreme pain. However, scholars have questioned whether these devices originated in the Middle Ages, a period that ended around 1450.
Existing examples of the so-called anguish pear contain coiled springs, suggesting that the people who made them lived during the early modern period that followed the Middle Ages. These examples are of unclear origin and there are questions about how functional they would actually have been as orifice-widening torture devices.
The iron maiden
Another device of incomplete provenance is the iron maiden, a mythical instrument of torture that 19th-century Europeans falsely attributed to medieval Europeans. This is because there is no evidence that an iron maiden (an upright iron coffin with spikes inside) existed before the 19th century.
The myth that iron maidens existed during the Middle Ages was probably spread by the German philosopher Johann Philipp Siebenkees in the late 18th century, who wrote about how a coin counterfeiter in Nuremberg was executed with one in 1515. The first iron maidens Known irons were built in the 19th century and were passed off in museums as medieval torture instruments.
