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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2009
Execution by the sword
This chapter introduces a third taxonomy, in addition to the spheres and institutions of punishment: that of types of punishment. Punishments under the Saljūqs fall into the following four categories: executions, corporal punishments, imprisonment and banishment, and shaming, that is, ignominious parading. These types of punishment are of interest here especially in as much as they are public. Private forms of punishment will be treated in a somewhat less detailed manner.
Public executions by the sword are mentioned infrequently in the historiography of the Saljūq period. There can be little doubt, however, that the practice existed and was rather widespread, as it had been prior to the rise of the Saljūqs. In 493/1100, sulṭān Barkyārūq had a chief of a non-military looting band in Wāsiṭ arrested, beaten, and then split in two. A Bāṭinī assassin was beheaded at Damascus in 507/1113–14. Some cases of decapitation in retaliation (qiṣāṣ) for homicide are recorded for Saljūq Baghdad. In the year 549/1155, a servant who had confessed to the murder of his patron's wife was beheaded by his patron in the courtyard of the Congregational Mosque (raḥbat al-jāmiʿ). In the same year, a slave-girl (jāriya) who had killed the wife of her master was beheaded in the same place “in the presence of the people, in the same way in which men are killed.”
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