Long before magic shows were doing it for fun, medieval executioners were sawing people in half for real. Only not the direction you'd think. They didn't saw you in half the short way, across the middle; they'd saw you from bottom to head. Often while hanging you upside down. To be fair, this was a punishment that may have very rarely happened in real life. But it's pretty likely it DID happen at least a few times. It was particularly favored by the Ottoman Turks, the mighty Muslim empire that spent much of the Middle-Ages invading Europe over and over again. In one famous case, there was a Hungarian General named Michael Szilagyi. He was a powerful and well-connected guy; the great military commander-in-chief John Hunyadi was married to Szilagyi's sister. And his niece was married to Dracula (seriously)! He worked/fought his way into the Hungarian nobility; and then his nephew, Hunyadi's son Matthias Corvinus ("the crow") became King of Hungary, and because Matthias was underage, Szilagyi was made Regent. He was basically running the whole country. So how did a guy with everything going for him end up being sawn in half? Well, Corvinus turned out to be a political badass who wasn't very interested in being a puppet for his uncle and the other barons of Hungary. Instead, he took power directly, fired his uncle, and sent him off to fight the Ottoman Turks. Szilagyi was sent with an army way too small to stop the massive Turk forces, and he ended up being defeated and captured. The Turks shamefully treated him as a spy rather than a captured enemy general (maybe because they realized that King Matthias wasn't going to pay any rescue for an uncle he didn't even like) and so they executed him by sawing him in half.