The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (100 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M
Y SPECIAL THANKS GO TO VINCENZO OSTUNI FOR GETTING ME STARTED
on this project and to Steven Pinker for all his help and encouragement in getting me published. I am very grateful to my friends Jennifer, Joanna, Sarah, Gopa, Leila, Frances, Lou, Andrew, Robert, Niki, and Brian for criticizing the early drafts and talking me through so many tricky questions. Thanks to my brother Peter for all his encouragement and his shared interest in history. I am deeply indebted to Brendan Curry, Melanie Tortoroli, and Mary Babcock at W. W. Norton for their help in finalizing the book, correcting my mistakes, helping me clarify complicated issues, and generally nudging me toward better writing. Thanks also go to Adrian Kitzinger for his excellent maps. I am especially grateful to my agent and his colleagues—Max Brockman, Russell Weinberger, and Michael Healey—for guiding me through the strange new world of publishing. Finally I’d like to thank the acquisitions departments of the Richmond Public Library and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Cabell Library, whom I have never met, but their anonymous work at maintaining large history collections greatly helped my research.

NOTES

Second Persian War

1.
Hanson,
Carnage and Culture, p. 31, estimated that a quarter-million Persian soldiers died in both Persian Wars. Sorokin,
Social and Cultural Dynamics, vol. 3, p. 543, estimated that 57,000 Greeks were killed or wounded. These are all rough estimates, but they point to something in the neighborhood of 300,000 all told, including civilians.

2.
Hanson,
Carnage and Culture; Strauss,
Battle of Salamis.

Alexander the Great

1.
Hanson,
Wars of the Ancient Greeks, p. 178: "In the space of just eight years Alexander the Great had slain well over 200,000 men in pitched battle alone"; p. 178: "A quarter million urban residents were massacred outright between 334 and 324." I rounded upward to include Alexander's losses.

2.
Keegan,
Mask of Command, pp. 13–91.

3.
Pratt,
Battles That Changed History, pp. 17–37.

4.
Rogers,
Alexander.

Age of Warring States

1.
Ancient histories claim that Qin soldiers killed a total of 1.5 million enemies in all of their battles. Modern historians don't take this total literally, but they report it as a plausible order of magnitude for the dead on all sides from all causes. Hui,
War and State Formation, p. 87; Peers,
Warlords of China, pp. 58–59.

2.
Lei Hai-tsung, "Warring States."

3.
Ibid.

4.
Ibid.

5.
Peers,
Warlords of China, pp. 55–57.

6.
Ibid., p. 58.

7.
Peers,
Warlords of China, p. 61.

8.
Sima Qian,
Records of the Grand Historian, p. 163.

9.
Man,
Terra Cotta Army, pp. 46–47.

First Punic War

1.
Richard A. Gabriel,
The Culture of War: Invention and Early Development (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 110–111. "Polybius called this war the bloodiest in history, and it is probable that the loss of life on both sides, most of it Roman, approached four hundred thousand men."

2.
Bagnall,
Essential Histories,
p. 34.

3.
Ibid., p. 41.

Qin Shi Huang Di

1.
Fitzgerald,
China, p. 140: "Popular tradition has held his memory in undying hatred for building the Wall. . . . [T]he people repeat that a million men perished at the task."

2.
Peers,
Warlords of China, p. 66.

3.
Ibid., pp. 62–64; Lesley A. DuTemple,
The Great Wall of China (Minneapolis: Lerner, 2003), pp. 22–41.

4.
Peers,
Warlords of China, pp. 67–69; Qingxin Li,
Maritime Silk Road (Beijing: China Intercontinental Press, 2006), p. 11.

5.
Peers,
Warlords of China, p. 69.

6.
Ibid., p. 70.

7.
Ibid., pp. 66–67.

Second Punic War

1.
The Roman historian Appian (Pun. 20.134) recorded 300,000 Roman battle deaths. Theodore Ayrault Dodge, in
Hannibal: A History of the Art of War among the Carthaginians and Romans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1891), pp. 610–611, added disease and expanded this to 500,000 Roman and 270,000 Carthaginian soldiers dead of all causes.

2.
Bagnall,
Essential Histories, pp. 50–52.

3.
Ibid., pp. 54–55.

Gladiatorial Games

1.
Based on the number of amphitheaters uncovered by archaeologists, the frequency of festivals, etc., Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, in
The Colosseum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 92–94, estimated that 8,000 deaths, including from training accidents, occurred in the arena each year all across the empire. This would multiply out to a maximum of 5.6 million deaths during all 700 years of recorded gladiatorial combat, or (more likely) to 3.2 million deaths if this death rate was sustained only during the 400-year peak of the games between the times of Spartacus and Constantine. I chose a round number at the low end of this range as my guess.

2.
Kyle,
Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome, p. 45.

3.
Ibid., p. 106.

4.
Ibid., p. 51.

5.
Ibid., pp. 187–194.

6.
Ibid., p. 187.

7.
E. W. Bovill and Robin Hallett,
The Golden Trade of the Moors (Princeton, NJ: M. Weiner, 1995), pp. 5–7; Johnson Donald Hughes,
The Mediterranean (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), pp. 37–38.

8.
Kyle,
Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome, p. 86.

9.
Ibid., p. 162.

10.
Auguet,
Cruelty and Civilization, p. 55.

11.
Kyle,
Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome, pp. 158–165.

12.
Jones, "Gladiators: The Brutal Truth."

13.
Gibbon,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, ch. 16, citing Origen, estimated some 2,000 Christian martyrs.

Roman Slave Wars

1.
Athenaeus,
Philosophers at Dinner, 6.272 (cited in Zvi Yavetz,
Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Rome (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988), p. 78; Naphtali Lewis,
Roman Civilization, vol. 2:
The Roman Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 245).

2.
Mommsen,
History of Rome, vol. 3, pp. 309–310.

3.
Ibid., pp. 383–387.

4.
Strauss,
Spartacus War; Mommsen,
History of Rome, vol. 4, pp. 357–364.

War of the Allies

1.
Paterculus,
Roman History, p. 79,
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Velleius_Paterculus/2A*.html
(accessed March 9, 2011), 2.15.3 (killed on all sides).

2.
Mommsen,
History of Rome, vol. 3, pp. 490–527.

Third Mithridatic War

1.
Plutarch, "Life of Lucullus," in
Parallel Lives (1914),
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Lucullus*.html
(accessed March 9, 2011): In the third war, 300,000 Pontics were killed fighting for Mithridates (p. 505), plus 100,000 Armenians were killed fighting for Tigranes (p. 565).

2.
Plutarch says 200,000. Appian says 160,000.

3.
Alfred S. Bradford,
With Arrow, Sword, and Spear (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), p. 204.

Gallic War

1.
The 700,000 is the average of the two contradictory death tolls that have come down to us: one million in Plutarch, "Life of Julius Caesar," in
Parallel Lives (1919), vol. 7, para. 15, p. 479,
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Caesar*.html
(accessed March 9, 2011); 400,000 in Paterculus,
Roman History, book 2, ch. 47, p. 153,
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Velleius_Paterculus/2B*.html
(accessed March 9, 2011).

2.
Meier,
Caesar, pp. 239–241.

Ancient Innumeracy

1.
Catherine Rubincam, "Casualty Figures in Thucydides' Descriptions of Battle,"
TAPA 121 (1991): 181–198.

2.
John Heidenrich, "The Gulf War: How Many Iraqis Died?"
Foreign Policy no. 90, March 22, 1993.

3.
Rebecca Santana, "85,000 Iraqis Killed in Almost 5 Years of War," Associated Press, October 14, 2009.

4.
Tina Susman, "Poll: Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million,"
Los Angeles Times, September 14, 2007.

Xin Dynasty

1.
Twitchett and Fairbank,
Cambridge History of China, vol. 1, p. 218.

2.
Ibid., p. 219.

3.
"Wang Mang," in
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 12, p. 486.

4.
Gabriel R. Ricci, "Introduction," in
Cultural Landscapes: Religion and Public Life, vol. 35,
http://www.etown.edu/History.aspx?topic=Introduction+to+volume+35
(accessed March 20, 2011); H. H. Lamb,
Climate, History and the Modern World (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 315.

5.
Twitchett and Fairbank,
Cambridge History of China, vol. 1, pp. 241–242.

6.
Ibid., p. 243.

7.
Ibid., p. 245.

8.
Ibid., p. 247.

9.
Ibid., p. 248.

10.
Ibid., p. 250.

11.
Population collapse estimates, high to low:

• Dan Usher says the population declined from 58 million in 2 CE to 15.1 million in 31 CE, for a loss of 43 million (
Political Economy
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), p. 12).

• J. D. Durand estimates that the population of China Proper dropped from 71 million to 43 million between 2 CE and 88 CE, a loss of 28 million ("Population Statistics of China, AD 2—1953," p. 221).