985 



BASTINADO. 



BASTION. 



(Dulaure, ffistoire de Paris ; JKemarques Historiquet sur la, Bastille ; 

 La Bastille dtvoitte ; Memoiret de Linguet ; M$moiret de la Tude : and 

 the various histories of the French Revolution.) 



BASTINA'DO is derived from the Italian bastone, a stick, bastonare, 

 to beat with a stick, &c. The word would have been more correct in the 

 form bastondta, but long use has confirmed our etymological error. 



The bastinado is the chief governing instrument of a great part of 

 the world, from Corea and China to Turkey, Persia, and Russia. It is 

 administered in different ways, and called by different names, as the 

 bamboo in China, the knout in Russia, &c. 



According to our modern acceptation, the term bastinado does not 

 include all these methods of stick-beating, but is confined to the 

 Turkish and Persian method, which is to beat the soles of the feet 

 with sticks. This excessively painful punishment is thus inflicted : 

 Two men support between them a strong pole which is kept in a hori- 

 zontal position ; about the middle of the pole are some cords with two 

 running knots or nooses ; through these the naked feet of the sufferer 

 are forced, and then made tight in such a manner that the soles are 

 fairly exposed ; the sufferer is then thrown on his back, or left to rest 

 on his neck and shoulders with his feet inverted, which are forthwith 

 beaten by a third man with a heavy tough stick. When the presiding 

 officer or magistrate gives the word, the heavy blows cease, the maimed 

 feet are cast loose from the cords and pole, and the victim is left to 

 crawl away and cure himself as best he can. 



In the Koran, stripes are prescribed as a punishment for some 

 offences; murder was to be punished by death, and theft by the 

 cutting off of the hand ; but the bastinado became an early substitute, 

 except in the case of highway robbery, when the offender is beheaded. 

 By the letter of the penal code of the Ottoman empire, this punish- 

 ment can only be inflicted on the men of the fourth and last class of 

 society, which comprises the slaves, and the rayahs or tributary sub- 

 jects of the empire, as Jews, Armenians, Greeks, &c. The other three 

 classes, namely : 1. The Emirs, or issue of the race of the prophet 

 Mohammed, and the Oulemas, or men of the law ; 2. Public function- 

 aries, civil and military ; 3. Free citizens and private individuals who 

 live on their rents or the proceeds of their industry, were all exempted 

 by law from this cruel and degrading punishment ; but the distinction 

 was not very rigorously observed. By the original code the number of 

 blows to be given was from three to thirty-nine ; but a later clause 

 permitted them, in certain cases, to be carried to seventy-five, and in 

 practice, when the p'assions are inflamed, the Turks seem to dispense 

 with the ceremony of keeping any account of the blows, and the men lay 

 on till they are tired and the sufferer's feet reduced to an unsightly jelly. 



The punishment, called zarb in Turkish, was generally inflicted in a 

 summary manner, without examination or any form of trial, at the 

 will or caprice of the sultan, his representatives, and the officers of 

 justice and police. The most frequent dispensers of it were probably 

 the Meuhtessibs, or the commissaries of police at Constantinople, each 

 of whom, from time to time, and always unexpectedly, made the round 

 of the quarter of the city assigned him, to see that the provisions were 

 sold at the exact prices despotically and most absurdly fixed by the 

 government, and to ascertain whether the weights and measures in use 

 by the dealers were all just. This officer generally went on horseback, 

 followed by an armed mob of irregular soldiers, and preceded by his 

 bastinado-men (falacadjii), whose office was to execute the sentence 

 the moment it was uttered. If the offending dealer were absent^ then 

 his shopman or journeyman was punished as his substitute, the "com- 

 missary only requiring a victim ad terrorem, and not having patience 

 to await the return or arrest of the master. The punishment was 

 always inflicted on the spot, in front of the shop in the open street. 

 Mr. W. J. Hamilton, in his ' Researches in Asia Minor, Pontus, and 

 Armenia,' 1842, describes the punishment thus : " At Ispir " (not far 

 from Kara) he says, " I was treated with a novel kind of entertainment, 

 being roused by loud shouts and cries, and, looking round, I saw an 

 unfortunate wretch lying on his back, with his heels up in the air, tied 

 to a log of wood held up by two men, whilst others were inflicting the 

 bastinado on his naked soles with great rapidity. On appealing to the 

 governor to know the meaning of this proceeding, he was pleased to 

 say that, in consequence of my presence, he would let the man off with 

 a slight punishment, although he richly deserved more for his turbu- 

 lent and quarrelsome behaviour, and ordered him to be set at liberty. 

 On being released he could hardly move, and was roughly pushed out 

 of the way into the house. He had been quarrelling with and striking 

 an old woman; but the aggravation of his crime was having used 

 indecorous language to a woman." Sometimes, instead of being basti- 

 nadoed, the offender or his journeyman (accomplice or not as it might 

 be) was nailed by the ear to the door-post of his shop, and so exposed 

 till sun-set ; at other times there was substituted the punishment of 

 the portable pillory, called a khang or cang by the Chinese (who make 

 reat use of it as well as of the bamboo), and styled tahtakulah by the 

 Turks, who probably derived the instrument from the Tartars, who 

 may either have borrowed the invention from or given it to the 

 Chinese. [CANG.] 



Under the old system the greatest violence, caprice, injustice, and 

 corruption prevailed in the administration of justice. The man with 

 money in his hands, could always save the soles of his feet by bribing 

 the authorities, and the pain of the bastinado was seldom ;inflicted 

 except on the very poorest of the baccali, or shop-keepers, and desti- 



tute and unprotected rayah subjects of the Porte. Sultan Mahmoud 

 introduced some improvements; but under a despotic government, 

 like that of Turkey, a summary and rapid mode of proceeding will 

 always obtain more or less. 



Although the privileges of the free Turks, or Osmanlis, civil and 

 military, were not always respected, yet their pashas and men of 

 authority or dignity were never subjected to the bastinado like the 

 khans, begs, and others in Persia, where the shah would frequently 

 have his vizir, or prime-minister, cudgelled on the feet in his presence, 

 and the vizir would do the like with the highest of the ministers and 

 officers xmder him. The Osmanlis were always a more sturdy and 

 proud-spirited people than the Persians, and thought that only Jews, 

 Christians, and other tributary subjects could be beaten with propriety. 

 It appears, however, that in the time of Busbequius the Janissaries 

 were " basted with clubs." That excellent old traveller says : " Their 



lighter offences are chastised by the club And here let me 



acquaint you with the patience of the Turks in receiving that punish- 

 ment : they will receive sometimes a hundred blows on their legs, 

 their feet, and buttocks, so that divers clubs are broken, and the exe- 

 cutioner cries out, ' Give me another I ' Yea, sometimes the chastise- 

 ment is so severe, that several pieces of torn flesh must be cut off from 

 the wounded parts before anything can be applied to cure them. Yet, 

 for all this, they must go to the officer who commanded them to be 

 punished ; they must kiss his hand, and give him thanks ; nay, they 



must also give the executioner a reward for beating them As 



some relief to their misery, they count those parts wounded with the 

 rod or club to be free from any purgations and expiations after this 

 life." 



BA'STION. This term is applied to a species of tower, or rather to 

 what has taken the place of the flanking towers in old fortresses, and 

 which constitutes the principal member of the fortifications immediately 

 surrounding a town, or position to be defended. The rampart by 

 which it is formed is disposed on four sides of a pentagon, two of 

 which, technically called the faces, meet in an angle whose vertex 

 projects towards the country ; the other two, denominated the flanks, 

 connect the opposite extremities of the faces with the curtain, or that 

 part of the rampart which coincides in direction with the sides of a 

 polygon supposed to inclose the town ; the fifth side of the pentagon is 

 generally unoccupied by a rampart, and is called the gorge of the 

 bastion. 



From the infancy of the art of war the defenders of a fortress must 

 have felt the necessity of having the walls disposed so as to afford 

 means of observing the enemy when very near their foot ; for, when 

 these means were wanting, the enemy was enabled to plant his scaling- 

 ladders against, or even to make a breach in the wall itself, with almost 

 perfect security. This was inevitably the case when the ground-plan 

 of the enceinte, or inclosing rampart, was a simple polygon, since the 

 men stationed on the rampart for its defence, behind the parapet by 

 which they were protected, were incapable of seeing the exterior ground 

 which lay near the base of the walls. Thus, according to the old story 

 in Pausanias (iv. 20), when the Messenians were besieged in their 

 hastily erected fort on Mount Ira, the guards being driven from their 

 posts by violent rains, and there being no towers or projections from 

 the walls to shelter them, the Spartans gained possession of the parapets 

 by escalade. To avoid such a surprise, it was the practice of the 

 ancient engineers to construct either machicoulis on the top of, or 

 projecting towers at certain intervals along the walls of fortresses, that 

 from thence the besieged might get a view of and be able to annoy the 

 enemy, when at the latest and most critical period of the siege the 

 latter should have gained the otherwise undefended ground. The walls 

 of Messene, built by Epaminondas (Pans. iv. 31), which were all of 

 stone, and furnished with battlements and towers, were reckoned by 

 Pausanias among the best specimens of Grecian fortification. 



From the accounts given by ancient writers of their fortified places, 

 and particularly from the precepts of Vitruvius (' Architecture,' lib. i. 

 cap. 5), we learn that the projecting towers were sometimes square or 

 polygonal, but generally circular, and that their distance from each 

 other along the walls was regulated by the range of the weapons 

 employed in the defence. In the fortifications of cities this distance 

 seems to have varied from 80 to 100 paces, according to local circum- 

 stances, and the power of annoying the enemy by the arrows and jave- 

 lins discharged from the towers ; but, from the greater distance at which 

 modern arms will take effect, the bastions, measuring from the vertices 

 of their projecting or salient angles, are now generally, and agreeably 

 to the rules of Vauban, placed at 360 yards from each other. It was 

 a maxim with the ancient engineers that the projecting quoins of walls 

 were detrimental to the defence, from the facility with which they 

 might be destroyed by the battering-ram ; and it is on this account 

 that Vitruvius recommends the towers to be circular, or to have faces 

 forming with each other obtuse angles. These towers were placed 

 indifferently at the angles, or at any part of the line of the inclosing 

 rampart : in the latter case, when they were of a square form, one side 

 was parallel to the length of the rampart, and in the former, one face 

 was almost always perpendicular to a line bisecting the angle between 

 two adjacent sides of the polygon surrounding the town ; that is, to 

 what would be now called the capital of the bastion. It must have 

 frequently happened, therefore, that this face was nearly unseen from 

 any other part of the rampart, and that the enemy made his assault 



