Author Archives: Headsman

1976: Three terrorists in Syria

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On this date in 1976, three Abu Nidal terrorists were hanged before the Hotel Semiramis in Damascus, barely 24 hours after they had entered it and taken 90 hostages in a bid to win release of Palestinian prisoners.

Palestinians Muhammad al-Barqawi and Mouatassem Jayyoushi and Iraqi Jabbar Darwish suffered Syria’s first public execution since an accused Israeli spy more than a decade before — and as the late Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad had pledged, justice was swift and ruthless.

The security of the citizen is sacred. We shall not be soft in this matter. We shall hit back very hard and we denounce this criminal action committed by the gang, which acted as if it was in Israel.

They were the surviving 75% of a quartet of gunmen who early the previous morning had seized the hotel, barricaded themselves on the fifth floor, and attempted to make their trade. Plainly, it didn’t quite work out; the attempt precipitated a battle with Syrian troops which saw the fourth terrorist killed, along with four of the hostages. The Supreme State Security Court condemned the captured men to death overnight; the sentence was carried out between 6:00 and 6:30 the next morning.

New York Times coverage of the raid and the execution is unfortunately behind the paper’s paid-login firewall, but a photo of the execution shows onlookers ringing a single wooden frame for what must have been a short-drop hanging. An unused fourth noose, possibly symbolically present for the killed fourth terrorist (or possibly not; there’s no explicit comment on it), hangs beside the dead men.

So why the grievance? That June — “Black June,” to the Palestinians — Syria had bailed on hard-line Palestinians and entered the Lebanese Civil War on the side of Phalangist Christians,* just as they were on the verge of being overrun. It was the second time in six years that a neighboring Arab power had turned its guns on Palestinians. (In 1970, Jordan had expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization in “Black September.” Lots of black in the Palestinian annals.)

And why the Iraqi, among the hanged?

Palestinian terrormeister Abu Nidal had hung out his shingle in Iraq, then under the control of a rising young dictator destined for the gallows himself, but who grasped the opportunist potential of backing the Palestinian cause while states like Jordan and Syria visibly sold it out. Television crews had a few words in edgewise with the doomed men the evening before their hanging, and they claimed to have trained for their abortive mission in Iraq.

* This put Damascus on the same side as Israel.

Part of the Themed Set: Semiramis.

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Themed Set: Semiramis

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As a gauzy figure of Orientalist fantasy, the half-legendary (at least) Bronze Age queen Semiramis is hard to top.

Supposedly a Babylonian ruler, the exploits of Semiramis — erotic, politic, possibly magic — have been worthy of otherly projection from Dante on down.

Herodotus (to whom she was already archaic) has her a pan-Asian ruler; the guy whose proclivities gave us the term “masochism” wrote a novel about her (but good luck finding it in English). Of course, Queen S. was divinely descended and radiantly beautiful; in the general legend, she becomes queen when her husband King Ninus is killed (or in some versions, when she kills him), rules competently (or aggressively, or simply lustfully), then maybe gets killed by her son. This bare scaffolding will enact many a play. And the costumes!

Thanks, Rossini.

Check out some versions of her myth here, here and the hostile Armenian version here. Rumor has it her tomb is quite the find, too.

In Boccaccio’s Famous Women, she’s a girl who knows how to have a good time, but invents the chastity belt to keep her female courtiers in line, or possibly to reduce competition. (More about this volume here (pdf), though this review doesn’t have a lot to say about our heroine.)

In the dour outlook of a particular brand of fundamentalist Protestant, Semiramis can also be a sort of proto-pagan, a former harlot (natch) who invented goddess-worship. (A seminal text in this theory is this 19th century pamphlet by Rev. Alexander Hislop.)

Does it say anywhere that she built Babylon? Eh. It does now!


Semiramis Building Babylon, by Edgar Degas (1861)

So what does Semiramis have to do with the ultimate sanction? Not much … but thanks for reading.

She breaks the monotony a little bit — and what do you know? She makes two blink-and-you’ll-miss-her cameos for totally unrelated (to each other or, really, to Semiramis) executions this weekend.

Update: And the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are sometimes attributed to her as the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis. So what if that’s almost certainly wrong … doesn’t the name just take you right there?

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1396: Thousands of knights of the Last Crusade

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On this date in 1396, Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I put thousands of Christian Crusaders to the sword — and with them, Christians’ zest for holy war against the Turk.

The day after crushing a European Crusading expedition at the Battle of Nicopolis — where Christ’s multinational divisions might have crippled themselves by opting for political reasons to go with gloryhounding French knights’ demand for a heavy cavalry charge as opposed to sneakier tactics — Bayezid was mighty sore to find that the invaders had executed en masse Muslim prisoners from their last engagement.

Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror relates the result:

The defeat was followed by a frightful sequel. As Bajazet toured the battlefield … he was “torn by grief” at the sight of his losses, which outnumbered the Christian. He swore he would not leave their blood unavenged, and the discovery of the massacre of the prisoners of Rachowa augmented his rage. He ordered all prisoners to be brought before him next morning. … [T]he leading nobles … were … spared [for ransom], as well as all those judged to be under twenty for forced service with the Turks.

The rest, an uncertain figure of several thousand, were marched naked before the Sultan, bound together in groups of three or four, with hands tied and ropes around their necks. Bajazet looked at them briefly, then signed to the executioners to set to work. They decapitated the captives group by group, in some cases cut their throats or severed their limbs until corpses and killers alike were awash in blood. [The Christian nobles being spared] were forced to stand by the Sultan and watch the heads of their companions fall under the scimitars and the blood spurt from their headless trunks…. The killing continued from early morning to late afternoon until Bajazet, himself sickened at the sight or, as some say, persuaded by his ministers that too much rage in Christendom would be raised against him, called off the executioners.

In truth, the era of the Crusade as most readily conceived — a bid to conquer the Holy Land — was long past by this time. But it had been under that tattered old banner that Christendom summoned its vassals to check the rising Ottoman Empire, which by this time had reduced Byzantium to a rump state around Constantinople.

The battle that precipitated this day’s* feast of carrion occurred in Bulgaria, where the Turks’ growing European footprint (and this affair essentially pinched out the Bulgarian Empire of the day) exercised the European courts in figurative as well as literal ways. Though other ventures would hoist the crusading pennant, there would be no major offensive incursions against the Turks until “crusades” had fallen well out of fashion.

None of this gory affair is to be confused with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where a leap of faith proved more felicitous.

* Most sources place the Battle of Nicopolis at September 25, although some say September 28 — the latter date would obviously place this massacre on September 29.

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1792: Jacques Cazotte, occultist

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On this date in 1792, Jacques Cazotte, a writer distinctly out of step with his times, was guillotined for treason in Paris.

The Martinique-born Cazotte (English Wikipedia entry | French) was into his 40s when he launched the writing career that earns him notice enough for this blog.

He wasn’t a liberte, egalite, fraternite kind of guy: Cazotte’s works, like Le Diable Amoureux (The Devil in Love),* were fantastical, Gothic — far from the rationalist fare of the Enlightenment.

And that wasn’t exclusively a literary posture.

Cazotte fancied himself gifted with prophecy — enthusiasts’ accounts have him prophesying the course of the Revolution — and preferred the mystical enlightenment of the illuminati to the Voltairean kind.** He viewed the onset of the French Revolution with horror.

When some scribblings to that effect were discovered in his papers, the mystical goose was cooked. The French Wikipedia entry credits his daughter with saving his life during the September Massacres … buying the 72-year-old only a few weeks of life.

Cazotte’s Le Diable Amoureux has the devil as a young man’s servant girl, endeavoring to seduce him. Here is Cesare Pugni‘s balletic rendition, Satanella, with its grand pas de deux, “Le Carnaval de Venise”:

Cazotte finds his way to us, as the dark arts are wont to do, through more meandering channels as well.

Le Diable Amoureux inspired supernatural mystery The Club Dumas by Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte. That novel in turn was riffed by Roman Polanski for the weird 1999 flick The Ninth Gate (review), starring Johnny Depp. (Cazotte’s book is explicitly referenced in both its progeny.)

Although only tangentially related, this digression into the occult gives us leave to notice one of the many cultural ephemera of executions linked to no particularly blog-friendly date. The Club Dumas and The Ninth Gate make use of striking woodcuts of modern vintage but after a style of centuries past that help unlock the central puzzle.

Charged with esoterica, the topical-looking “hanged man” print comes clearly modeled after its tarot cousin … although the tarot version, in most instances, is hoped to be of less deadly effect upon the plot.

* Available free in the original French at Project Gutenberg.

** Voltairean rationalism had its own ways of getting in trouble. It may have been an age of ideas, but it was hardly safe to have them.

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1652: Captain James Hind, royalist highwayman

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On this date in 1652, James Hind, a highwayman who preyed on Roundheads, was drawn and quartered for treason.

Famed throughout the realm for his dashing heists on the roads, Hind was the subject of no less than 16 printed pamphlets of the nascent popular press in the early 1650’s, which magnified brigand’s feats, oratory and persona into a sort of populist Cavalier superhero: Marvel Comics for the woodcut age.

The highlights of Hind’s adventures receive rapturous attention from the Newgate Chronicles:

  • Setting upon Oliver Cromwell shortly after the execution of Charles I, his partner Thomas Allen being taken in the affray;
  • An amusing duel of Biblical citations while robbing regicide Hugh Peters, resolved in the characteristic manner of such impasses by reference to which disputant holds the gun.

    “Pray, sir, make no reflections on my profession; for Solomon plainly says, ‘Do not despise a thief’; but it is to little purpose for us to dispute. The substance of what I have to say is this: deliver thy money presently, or else I shall send thee out of the world to thy master in an instant.”

  • Any number of pleasing episodes with lesser personages suitable for the gallant highwayman — ladies charmed but un-pillaged, paupers subsidized, and always, wicked Parliamentarians chastened. Several excellent Hind anecdotes are gathered by Gillian Spraggs here.

As to the veracity of this stuff, the Captain himself suggests a pinch of caution.

A Gentleman or two, desired so much favour of [the gaoler], as to aske Mr. Hind a civil question; which was granted. So pulling two books out of his pocket, the one entituled, Hind’s Ramble, The other Hind’s Exploits, asked him whether he had ever seen them or not: He answered, yes; And said upon the word of a Christian, they were fictions: But some merry Pranks and Revels I have plaid, that I deny not.

But Hind’s adherence to the Stuart cause was real enough, or at any rate something he had the 17th century media savvy to play up. At his execution, he professed pleasure in having targeted Roundheads for most of his crimes, and it was not theft that saw him to the scaffold, but treason. He made free royalist talk upon his arrest, proposing a toast to the exiled king that otherwise sympathetic guests were too cautious to take up.

Hind fits symbolically into the tradition of the romantic outlaw of Robin Hood stock, and anticipates the 18th century rogues’ gallery of noble brigands fighting a doomed rearguard against capitalism. Hind’s acts, criminal by any standard, are justified by the illegitimacy of the society he preys upon; he embodies at once a social and political rejection of the nascent mercantile England, and a biographical realization of its actuating mythos — personal aptitude and acquisition,* with a cover story for why his victims had it coming.

Neither did I ever wrong any poor man of the worth of a penny: but I must confess, I have (when I have been necessitated thereto) made bold with a rich Bompkin, or a lying Lawyer, whose full-fed fees from the rich Farmer, doth too too much impoverish the poor cottage-keeper: And truly I could wish, that thing were as little used in England amongst Lawyers, as the eating of Swines-flesh was amongst the Jews.

A dead-end position — just like James Hind himself.

* In a supposed rhapsody over gold forced from the hand of John Bradshaw — yet another regicide; Hind seemingly met them at every turn — our robber rather has his cake and eats it too in extolling and condemning lucre.

Ay, marry, sir, this is the metal that wins my heart for ever. Oh! precious gold, I admire thee as much as Bradshaw, Prynne or other such villains, who would for the sake of it sell our Redeemer again, were He now upon earth.

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1994: Johannes van Damme, heroin smuggler

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At dawn this date in 1994, Dutch citizen Johannes van Damme was hanged at Singapore’s Changi Prison for drug trafficking.

The first westerner hanged under Singapore’s draconian anti-drug law, the engineer had been nabbed at the airport with 4.32 kilos of heroin.

Van Damme, 59 at his death, claimed ignorance of the illicit contents and his case drew appeals from the Dutch government — to no avail.

The city-state’s severe criminal code and comprehensively ordered society — “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” in cyberpunk author William Gibson’s formulation — is somewhat notorious at this point.

But while foreign migrants and guest workers had regularly faced the gallows for similar offenses, van Damme’s hanging marked a significant ramping-up of enforcement. According to Amnesty International, Singapore carried out 54 drug-related hangings in 1994 and another 52 in 1995, after an early-90’s pace of under ten per year. It’s maintained rates in the dozens of executions per annum since then, making it the heaviest per-capita user of the death penalty in the world.

And it doesn’t mind making its visitors sweat about it.

Welcome to Singapore. You’ll also see the warning on your embarkation card.

An intensified pace perhaps came with a new resolve on the part of the former British colony to forswear juridical perks to European offenders — at least to some extent. Van Damme’s fate makes an interesting contrast with that of his countrywoman, Maria Krol-Hmelak (the link is to her scanty Dutch Wikipedia page). Krol-Hmelak had been arrested a few months before van Damme also for possessing enough heroin to be presumed a smuggler and incur an automatic death sentence; at her trial a few months after van Damme’s, she received a surprise acquittal.

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1776: Nathan Hale, with regrets

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On this date in 1776, Revolutionary spy Nathan Hale was hanged by the British in Manhattan — allegedly uttering the immortal last words, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

Nathan Hale statuary (with bound feet and hands) ironically stationed at Washington D.C.’s Department of Justice. Like statues are at the Chicago Tribune building and the Yale University campus; dueling plaques in New York contend to mark the execution spot.

Two years out of Yale when the Revolution broke out in 1775, the Connecticut-born Hale hitched onto the Continental Army and was directly promoted to captain.

When British Gen. William Howe landed at New York in the summer of 1776, Nathan Hale volunteered to slip behind enemy lines and reconnoiter enemy strength for George Washington. It turned out to be his mission into eternity.

As one might suspect, there’s a great deal more to Nathan Hale than his last words — and a fair bit of uncertainty about what his last words really were. Hale’s Wikipedia page retails many versions of the line from many sources.

The sentiment commonly attributed him (formulated in slight variations, e.g., “I only regret that I have but one life to give to my country”) was supposed to have been reported by a British officer attending him; it’s certainly a punchier version than, e.g., a Revolutionary War era report of “I am so satisfied with the cause in which I have engaged, that my only regret is, that I have not more lives than one to offer in its service.” Gah.

If all these presumably paraphrased reports have the gist right, it’s possible the 21-year-old recited an identical sentiment in the tragic play Cato:*

How beautiful is death, when earn’d by virtue!
Who would not be that youth? What pity is it
That we can die but once to serve our country.

There’s much more about this short-lived character and his larger-than-life transfiguration in mythologia Americana. The Library of Congress has a collection of links, and William Phelps recently penned this new (and surprisingly, first) biography of the revolutionary legend.

* The play was all the rage among patriots; Patrick Henry might have plucked his immortal “give me liberty or give me death” line from it, too. (“It is not now time to talk of aught/But chains or conquest, liberty or death.”)

Part of the Themed Set: Counterrevolution.

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1822: Four Sergeants of La Rochelle

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On this date in 1822, four sergeants from La Rochelle were guillotined at the Place de Greve with “Vive la liberte! on their lips for plotting to overthrow the restored Bourbon monarchy.

In the Restoration following Napoleon, the cautious gouty brother of the Revolution’s most famous guillotinee came to the throne as Louis XVIII.

And in a right-wing reaction following a royal assassination, Louis found himself in the anomalous position of having a government more monarchist than he himself. Though not renowned for his sagacity, the sovereign had the wit to see that completely reversing the Revolution was a nonstarter. His ultra-royalist deputies, however, wanted nothing less than the full restoration of an absolute monarchy.

The new Prime Minister cracked down hard on the Liberal opposition. Here’s the scene as described by The Cambridge Modern History, a Google Books freebie:

The Chief Minister [Villele] had the merit of keeping constantly in mind the fact that his friends owed their power to the forces of reaction and alarm, aroused in the country by the dagger of an assassin who had mortally wounded a member of the royal family. To keep this fear awake, in order to establish his authority, was his first care. In this he succeeded. The Liberals, finding themselves compelled to prudence, organized themselves into secret societies; and the Republcians, imitating the Neapolitans, actually formed in 1821 the Charbonnerie francaise, which avowedly aimed at giving back “to the French nation the free exercise of the right to choose its sovereign.” In order to give battle to the ancien regime and its Bourbon protectors, they recruited their soldiers and captains without hesitation from among the officers, commissioned and non-commissioned, of the old Imperial army. Villele showed particular skill in the discovery, exaggeration, and signal punishment of these conspiracies … With a magistracy obedient to its orders, the Ministry devoted itself assiduously to representing isolated movements no sooner known than crushed, as forming part of a permanent conspiracy organized by the Liberals, not only against the monarchy, but against society itself.

Les quatre sergents de La Rochelle — by the names of Bories, Goubin, Pommier and Raoulx — comprised perhaps the most egregious such case.

Driven underground (the link is French) like the rest of the Liberal opposition, they had joined the charbonnerie, a loose network modeled on Naples’ carbonari. (Lower-level officers were prime recruits for the dissidents, since their career prospects were truncated by aristocratic privilege in the upper brass.)

It was never clear that their subversiveness extended to anything beyond their affiliation with a criminalized ideology, and they kept their own peace to protect other associates in the charbonnerie. Guillotining them on this basis conformed neatly to the principles of, say, an Ann Coulter: “We need to execute [these] people … in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.”

Back to The Cambridge Modern History:

It seemed that the Ministers were eager to multiply these trials and executions. Since certain deputies of the Liberal Opposition, Lafayette* among others, and D’Argenson, had openly associated themselves with these enterprises, which otherwise were devoid of danger, this supplied a fair pretext for exhibiting them publicly as criminals. The indictment with the King’s Procurator, Marchangy, formulated, in order to obtain the condemnation of the four sergeants of La Rochelle, left no doubt as to the intentions of the Government. Its chief aim was to terrorise the French people “by this vast conspiracy against social order, against the families of citizens, which threatened to plunge them once more into all the horrors of anarchy.” While keeping up the appearance of saving society, Villele gained forthwith the power to govern it in accordance with the wishes of his friends. The threat of anarchy, exploited by the judges in his service, allowed him to organise a despotism.

The public execution reportedly had its onlookers appalled, (more French) and as word of the young men’s heroic deaths got around, they elbowed into the vast host of (somebody’s) martyrs. (In Balzac’s Human Comedy, the courtesan Aquilina is said to have been involved with one of the four sergeants; in her appearances after the executions, she always commemorates him by wearing something red.) The Lantern Tower in their garrison’s city — depicted below in a 1927 Paul Signac painting — was renamed in their honor, Tour de Quatre Sergents.

* Lafayette always seemed to be somebody’s dangerous element. It’s a wonder he never got himself into this blog.

Part of the Themed Set: Counterrevolution.

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Themed Set: Counterrevolution

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As the Enlightenment gave way to the West’s great revolutionary age in the late 18th and early 19th century, the crowned heads of Europe weren’t just sitting around — and with good reason. Regimes don’t get to be ancien without knowing how to deal with troublemakers.

For the next three days, Executed Today presents the mailed fist in three lands, and the agitators it smashed.

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1803: Robert Emmet, “let no man write my epitaph”

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On this date in 1803, Irish nationalist Robert Emmet was hanged and posthumously beheaded, a day after his trial for treason against England.

The well-to-do scion of a Protestant family, Robert Emmet followed his older brother into the Republican ferment of the time and led an unavailing uprising in Dublin on July 23, 1803.

Captured a month later when he romantically recklessly moved his hideout closer to his beloved Sarah Curran.*

Emmet won his great laurels in the annals of Irish Republicanism with a stirring “Speech from the Dock” addressed to the courtroom the day before he died. Or better to say that it was addressed in a courtroom, for knowing that his death sentence was a foregone conclusion, the real audience was posterity and a wider world.

Emmet found that audience with one of the great orations of the 19th century.

This clip is a truncated version of a longer speech not set to paper by Emmet, so no single definitive version exists. Versions can be found at this Irish history site, and at SinnFein.ie.

I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world — it is the charity of its silence! Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them. let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character; when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.

On the strength of such sentiment — and the public’s learning of his love for Sarah Curran — the 25-year-old became iconic in death. Robert’s own death inspired the mandatory Irish patriotic ditty, “Bold Robert Emmet”:

But that sundered love between Emmet and Sarah Curran — who broken-heartedly accepted another proposal and moved to Sicily — was at least as stirring to the Romantic imagination. Washington Irving dedicated a short story to the lost romance; Emmet’s friend Thomas Moore made Curran the subject of a poem (beware: link opens an auto-playing audio file).


Anti-British terrorist Robert Emmet has a statue on Washington, D.C.’s Massachusetts Ave, and probably an entry on the no-fly list.

* 19th century Irish poet Thomas Moore paid her tribute in “She Is Far From the Land”:

She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,
And lovers are round her, sighing:
But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,
For her heart in his grave is lying.

She sings the wild song of her dear native plains,
Every note which he lov’d awaking; —
Ah! little they think who delight in her strains,
How the heart of the Minstrel is breaking.

He had liv’d for his love, for his country he died,
They were all that to life had entwin’d him;
Nor soon shall the tears of his country be dried,
Nor long will his love stay behind him.

Oh! make her a grave where the sunbeams rest,
When they promise a glorious morrow;
They’ll shine o’er his sleep, like a smile from the West,
From her ow lov’d island of sorrow.

Part of the Themed Set: Counterrevolution.

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