>DOUGH
A case of uncommon cruelty, way beyond the desire to terrify the on-looker, pertaining to savage revenge, was displayed by the Hungarian nobility on the occasion of the execution of the leaders of a peasant uprising in 1514, in Hungary and Transylvania. On July 20, 1514, under the walls of the fortress of Timisoara, the main leader, a Szeckler called Gheorghe Doja (Dosza Gyorgy) was slowly burnt to death, seated, naked, on a hot iron throne; they placed on his head a hot iron crown. An engraving of Taurinus – Stauromachia, published in Vienna in 1519, depicted this very moment which punished the so-called attempt of Doja to take the throne of Hungary; the engraving also shows impaled leaders all around Doja; at Doja’s feet there is another impaled, not yet raised to the vertical. What the engraving did not show, but leaked from contemporary sources, was that the other condemned were force to eat the roasted flesh of Doja, pinched by iron claws from his still live body. Then Doja was cut in four and exhibited at the gates of Buda, Pesta, Alba Iulia and Oradea; the head – at Seghedin. It was this enforced cannibalism that made the German humanist Johann Sommer exclaim: “We reached a climax that cannot be surpassed – if we feed people, against their will, with living human flesh”.