Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XV.djvu/844

 814 TORTOSA TORTURE Great Britain, lying between Virgin Gorda and St. John's, in lat. 18 24' K, Ion. 64 32' W. ; area, 26 sq. m. ; pop. about 4,000. It is 12 m. long by 2 to 4 m. broad, and has a ronirh surface, rising to the height of over 1,600 ft. On the north, at Tortola, the chief town, is an excellent land-locked harbor. It exports sugar, molasses, rum, and copper ore. It is the seat of the lieutenant governor and the administrative council. The climate is un- healthful. (See VIRGIN ISLANDS.) TORTOSA (anc. Dertosa), a walled city of Catalonia, Spain, in the province and 41 m. 8. W. of the city of Tarragona, on the left bank of the Ebro ; pop. about 25,000. It is on the slope of a hill, and is entered by three gates ; the streets are narrow, ill paved, and some of them very steep. It has a Gothic cathedral, a theological seminary, and numerous churches and schools. Cotton and linen goods, glass, earthenware, cordage, wax candles, leather, soap, brandy, starch, and baskets are manu- factured. The river is navigable for vessels of 100 tons, and there is considerable trade. There are quarries of valuable marble, known as Tortosa jasper, about 3 m. from the city. The town enjoyed the privilege of a Roman municipium. It was early taken by the Moors, but was wrested from them in 811 by Louis le D6bonnaire. They afterward retook it, and it became a harbor of pirates. A crusade was proclaimed against it in 1148 by Pope Euge- nius III., and it was captured. The Moors made desperate efforts to retake it, but the Christian women defended the walls while the men sallied out and put the besiegers to flight. Many privileges were conferred upon the wo- men for their bravery, and in 1170 the military order of La Hacha, or the Flambeau, was in- stituted for them. The French took Tortosa in 1708, and again at the beginning of 1811. TORTUGAS. I. See DRY TORTUGAS. II. An island of the West Indies, off the N. E. coast of Cuba, from which it is separated only by a narrow channel called El Savinal. It forms the entrance to the harbor of Nuevitas, and is about 25 m. long from N. W. to S. E. and 6 m. wide. Several smaller islands are called Tor- tuga or Tortue (Sp. and Fr., a tortoise) from their shape, or from abounding in tortoises. TORTURE, properly, an infliction of severe pain upon an accused person to induce a con- fession of guilt, or upon a criminal to extort a revelation of his accomplices. The term is fre- quently used carelessly to designate severe and unusual punishment inflicted for crime, but improperly, as it is never spoken of by judicial writers as a punishment. By legal writers on the continent of Europe and the earlier Eng- lish authors, the word question (Lat. quastio, a seeking) is used as a synonyme of torture ; the object being a search for the truth in regard to the criminality of the tortured person, or the names of his accomplices, by the compul- sion of suffering. Torture was divided as to intensity into the " question ordinary," a com- paratively mild application of the instruments used in torturing, and the " question extraor- dinary," where these means were used to the greatest extent compatible with the preserva- tion of life. The threats of torture were divided into " verbal territion," when the executioner described the torture, and "real territion," when the victim was placed upon the rack but not tortured. As to the time of its applica- tion, it was called the " question preparatory" when used for the purpose of compelling the accused to confess his own crime, and the u ques- tion prealdble or preliminary " when applied to extort from a criminal the revelation of his accomplices. Torture seems to have been early practised as a means of discovering guilt, both judicially and privately, but was not inflicted on freemen or citizens till the time of the Ro- man emperors, except in cases of suspected crime against the state itself. The Greeks in- flicted it on their slaves, and after their subju- gation by the Romans it was inflicted on those who had not a claim to the name of Roman citi- zen; the oath of the citizen was considered suffi- cient. Under the emperors this distinction was not long continued, and men and women even of patrician birth were subjected to torture to compel confession of crimes existing only in the imagination of tyrants. Wherever the code of Justinian was adopted as the basis of the legal system of European nations during the middle ages, judicial torture formed a feature of the examination of persons accused of crime ; in the Teutonic nations it gradually took the place of ordeals and the trial by battle. In England it was probably never considered a part of the common law, though the peine forte ct dure, which was used to compel a prisoner to plead to the indictment, had certainly some counte- nance from that law. (See PEINE FORTE ET DURE.) But it was recognized as one of the prerogatives of the crown to order it, and was thus in occasional use up to 1640, when the last case occurred. Severe and cruel as were the punishments inflicted by the ecclesiastical law, there is no evidence of a resort to " the ques- tion " by the inquisition or any other ecclesi- astical court before 1252, when Innocent IV. called upon the civil arm to use it to induce confessions and accusations by offenders. Not long after this period the necessity of secrecy in the proceedings of the inquisition led to its extensive adoption, and to refinements of cru- elty in its use before unknown. Judicial tor- ture continued in most of the European states till the latter part of the last century. In 1780 the " question preparatory " was discontinued by a decree of Louis XVI., and in 1789 torture in general was abolished throughout the French dominions. In Russia it was abolished in 1801. In Austria, Prussia, and Saxony it was sus- pended soon after the middle of the last cen- tury, but in several of the smaller German states it continued on the statute books till the present century. Thomasius, Hommel, Vol- taire, Beccaria, and Howard were instrumental