The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (101 page)

• P. M. G. Harris estimates a population of 41 million in 23 CE, which suggests a decline of 16 million since 2 CE (
The History of Human Populations
, vol. 1:
Forms of Growth and Decline
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), p. 241).

• William Leonard says that the population declined from just under 60 million in 1 CE to just under 50 million in 140 CE, a decline of approximately 10 million (
The Encyclopedia of World History
(London: Harrap, 1972), p. 51).

• Rafe de Crespigny: In 2 CE the population of the whole empire was over 57 million; in the 140s there were 48 million, indicating a decline of 9 million ("South China under the Later Han Dynasty," 1990,
http://www.anu.edu.au/asianstudies/decrespigny/south_china.html
).

• Twitchett and Fairbank suggest a population decline of 8 or 9 million between 2 CE and 140 CE (
Cambridge History of China
, vol. 1, p. 240).

Roman-Jewish Wars

1.
Lester L. Grabbe,
An Introduction to First Century Judaism: Jewish Religion and History in the Second Temple Period (Edinburgh: Clark, 1996), pp. 64–65.

2.
Jona Lendering, "Messianic Claimants (18) Simon ben Kosiba (132–135 CE)," Livius.org,
http://www.livius.org/men-mh/messiah/messianic_claimants17.html
(accessed March 18, 2011).

3.
Will Durant,
Caesar and Christ (New York: MJF, 1971), p. 545.

4.
Cassius Dio,
Roman History (1925), 69.14,
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/69*.html
(accessed March 8, 2011).

5.
Will Durant,
Caesar and Christ (New York: MJF, 1971), p. 548.

6.
Among the population estimates are Anthony Byatt, "Josephus and Population Numbers in First Century Palestine,"
Palestine Exploration Quarterly 105 (1973): 15 (2,265,000); C. C. McCown, "The Density of Population in Ancient Palestine,"
Journal of Biblical Literature 66 (1947): 425 (less than 1,000,000); Adolf von Harnack,
Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1902) (500,000); Seth Schwartz,
Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) (500,000).

The Three Kingdoms of China

1.
"Romance of the Three Kingdoms,"
TV Tropes,
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/RomanceOfTheThreeKingdoms
(accessed March 20, 2011).

2.
Andrew O'Hehir, "John Woo on 'Red Cliff' and the Rise of Chinawood,"
Salon, November 18, 2009,
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/11/18/john_woo/index.html
.

3.
Etienne Balazs,
Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 193 (imperial repression killed half a million in 184 alone).

4.
Fitzgerald,
China, p. 255.

5.
Hong-Sen Yan,
Reconstruction Designs of Lost Ancient Chinese Machinery (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 275–277; Joseph Needham and Colin Ronan,
The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: An Abridgement of Joseph Needham's Original Text (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 170.

6.
de Crespigny, "Three Kingdoms and Western Jin."

7.
There's nothing magical about this; it's just that when you're faced with two wildly different numbers (let's say, 16 and 10,000), averaging them by aritmetic mean (16 + 10,000/2 = 5,008) is pretty much the same as dividing the highest in half. However, averaging them by geometric mean (√(16*10,000) = 400) comes up with a number that's more recognizably influenced by and lying between the two levels.

If all you know is the general order of magnitude, this trick can still help narrow it down to a single number for statistical purposes. If an event killed "hundreds of thousands," we can guess the single most likely number to be the geometric mean of 100,000 and 1,000,000, or 316,228. This is not far off from reality. By my count (see
http://www.necrometrics.com
), there were forty-seven multicides in the twentieth century with a death toll between 100,000 and 1,000,000. These had an average (mean) death toll of 297,766—which you'll notice is closer to the geometric mean than to the arithmetic mean (550,000).

Fall of the Western Roman Empire

1.
Colin McEvedy, in
New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, p. 38, estimated that the Roman Empire's population on the eve of collapse was 36 million, and the territory lost 20 percent of its people between 400 CE and 600 CE—a loss of 7.2 million.

2.
Ward-Perkins,
Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, pp. 22–23.

3.
Howarth,
Attila King of the Huns, p. 89.

4.
Bury,
Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians, pp. 114–119; Grant,
Fall of the Roman Empire, pp. 15–17.

5.
Howarth,
Attila King of the Huns, p. 49.

6.
Ibid., pp. 95–97.

7.
Gregory of Tours, quoted in ibid., p. 99. You'll notice that chroniclers get especially upset whenever priests get killed—possibly because priests write the chronicles.

8.
Hildinger,
Warriors of the Steppe, pp. 69–70.

9.
Ibid., p. 72.

10.
Grant,
Fall of the Roman Empire, pp. 19–20.

11.
Ibid., pp. 27–34.

12.
Ibid., pp. 35–47.

13.
Ibid., pp. 203–204.

14.
Ibid., pp. 155–162.

15.
Ward-Perkins,
Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, pp. 3–10, 169–183.

16.
Ibid., pp. 87–168.

17.
"The population of Europe (west of the Urals) in c. AD 200 has been estimated at 36 million; by 600, it had fallen to 26 million; another estimate (excluding 'Russia') gives a more drastic fall, from 44 to 22 million." Francois Crouzet,
A History of the European Economy, 1000–2000 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), p. 1.

Justinian

1.
Ormsby, "Hidden Historian."

2.
Gibbon,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 4, ch. 40.

3.
Rosen,
Justinian's Flea, pp. 74–76.

4.
Ibid., pp. 137–141.

5.
Ibid., pp. 148–151.

6.
Procopius, "How Justinian Killed a Trillion People," in
The Secret History, trans. Richard Atwater (Chicago: P. Covici, 1927; reprinted, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), available at Medieval Sourcebook,
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/procop-anec.html
.

7.
Thomas Dick,
The Philosophy of Religion: Or an Illustration of the Moral Laws of the Universe (Philadelphia: Key & Biddle, 1833), pp. 260–262; George Cone Beckwith,
The Peace Manual: Or, War and Its Remedies (Boston: American Peace Society, 1847), pp. 39–42.

8.
The modern estimate of plague deaths is that Justinian's empire lost 4 million in the first two years of the epidemic. Rosen,
Justinian's Flea, p. 261.

9.
Gibbon,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 4, ch. 42.

10.
McEvedy,
New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, p. 38.

Goguryeo-Sui Wars

1.
According to Chinese sources (see below), the Chinese lost around 300,000 in each war. Although this might be an exaggeration, the Chinese were meticulous record-keepers and quite capable of fielding armies of 100,000 or more, losing most of them with hardly a second thought. Throw in the other side plus all of the collateral deaths, and 300,000 per war isn't unreasonable.

2.
Graff,
Medieval Chinese Warfare, p. 145.

3.
Kenneth B. Lee,
Korea and East Asia: The Story of a Phoenix (Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood, 1997), p. 16.

4.
Jae-un Kang and Suzanne Lee,
The Land of Scholars: Two Thousand Years of Korean Confucianism (Paramus, NJ: Homa & Sekey Books, 2006), p. 40.

Mideast Slave Trade

1.
Commonwealth v. Turner, 26 Va. 678 (Va. Gen. Ct., November Term 1827).

2.
Segal,
Islam's Black Slaves, p. 146.

3.
Ibid., p. 159.

4.
Ibid.

5.
Ibid., p. 156.

6.
Alan Weisman,
The World without Us (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007), pp. 95–96.

7.
Ibid.

8.
Segal,
Islam's Black Slaves, p. 148.

9.
Ibid., p. 160.

10.
Ibid., p. 167.

11.
Ibid., p. 169.

12.
Ibid., p. 171

13.
Ibid., p. 156.

14.
Milton,
White Gold, p. 16.

15.
Keegan,
History of Warfare, pp. 32–40.

16.
Davis,
Christian Slaves, p. 23.

17.
Davis, in
Christian Slaves, estimated an annual death rate of 17 percent per year. For comparison, the death rate for a healthy preindustrial population would rarely exceed 3 percent (E. A. Wrigley,
Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 181).

An Lushan Rebellion

1.
Newark,
Medieval Warlords, pp. 48–51.

2.
Ibid., p. 52.

3.
Fitzgerald,
China, pp. 399–400.

4.
Newark,
Medieval Warlords, p. 55.

5.
Pulleyblank, "An Lu-shan Rebellion," p. 41.

6.
Ibid., p. 43.

7.
Graff,
Medieval Chinese Warfare, p. 219.

8.
Fitzgerald,
China, p. 301.

9.
Newark,
Medieval Warlords, p. 63.

10.
Graff,
Medieval Chinese Warfare, p. 222.

11.
Fitzgerald,
China, p. 349.