"Peter on his return reopened the inquiry, and fourteen torture chambers were conducted under his surveillance in the Preobrajenski suburb. The fires were never allowed to burn down, nor the gridirons on which his victims were charred to become cool either by night or day. A most compromising letter from Sophia to the Streltsi is generally considered to be a forged document, made up of stray, incoherent scraps of information wrung from maddened creatures in the torture chamber. Whereas fifteen blows with the knout were equal to a capital sentence, one of the Streltsi was put to the torture seven times and received in all ninety-nine blows, yet confessed nothing. Korpatkov, unable to bear his tortures, killed himself. Others of the Streltsi having been put to the strappado, flogged, and burnt without getting any accusations; the wives, sisters and female relatives of the Streltsi were tortured; so were the ladies and sewing women in attendance on Sophia. Still no evidence was forthcoming. Then Sophia herself was put to the torture, Peter doing the hangman's work. She never wavered in denying all connection with the movement. Her younger sister, Marfa, was then strung up in turn and all that could be learned of her was that she had apprised her sister Sophia of the return of the Streltsi to Moscow and of their desire to see her rule re-established. Peter was unwearying in his attendance in the torture chambers, and it is said [F] took a fiendish delight in the agony his own wrought cruelties produced on his relatives, but when he failed to obtain evidence he determined to punish indiscriminately. The executions of the Streltsi, like those of Ivan the Terrible's victims, were in wholesale fashion. Five were beheaded just outside the torture chamber by the Tsar Peter himself; the courtiers of his bodyguard he commanded to do the same, thinking doubtless they would enjoy the shedding of blood even as he did. Two foreigners alone refused to comply with this order. Some 200 Streltsi were crucified, impaled or hanged before Sophia's windows in the Novo Devichi Convent: but most were executed in the Grand Square under the wall of the Kremlin, viz.:-- 200 on Sept. 30th, 1698 144 " Oct. 11th, " 205 " " 12th, " 141 " " 13th, " 109 " " 17th, " 65 " " 18th, " 106 " " 19th, "