The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (103 page)

22.
Grousset,
Conqueror of the World, p. 264.

23.
Man,
Genghis Khan, p. 262; McEvedy,
Atlas of World Population History, p. 172; Morgan,
Mongols, p. 83, citing John D. Langlois,
China under Mongol Rule; McFarlane, in
Savage Wars of Peace, p. 50, estimates that the Chinese population was reduced to half in fifty years—60 million people dying or failing to be replaced.

24.
Man,
Genghis Khan, p. 180; McEvedy,
Atlas of World Population History, pp. 78, 152–156.

25.
Durand, "Population Statistics of China."

26.
Grousset,
Conqueror of the World, p. 233.

27.
Morgan,
Mongols, p. 79.

28.
Ibid., pp. 79–81.

29.
Weatherford,
Genghis Khan, p. 114.

30.
Ibid., p. 118.

31.
Man,
Genghis Khan, p. 177.

32.
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed. (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1999), p. 842.

Albigensian Crusade

1.
This is the traditional death toll given for the war against the Cathars. I don't know where it originated, nor have I seen it in a scholarly history of France, but this number is commonly repeated in religious studies, for example: Christopher Brookmyre,
Not the End of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1998), p. 39; Max Dimont,
Jews, God, and History (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 225; Dizerega Gus,
Pagans and Christians: The Personal Spiritual Experience (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 2001), p. 195; Helen Ellerbe,
The Dark Side of Christian History (Orlando, FL: Morningstar & Lark, 1995), p. 74; Michael Newton,
Holy Homicide (Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics, 1998), p. 117. The number has been kicking around for at least a century; see John M. Robertson,
A Short History of Christianity (London: Watts, 1902), p. 254 ("It has been reckoned that a million of all ages and both sexes were slain").

2.
O'Shea,
Perfect Heresy, pp. 75–87.

3.
Ibid., p. 106.

4.
Riley-Smith,
Crusades, p. 137.

5.
Ibid., p. 138.

6.
Chalk and Jonassohn,
History and Sociology of Genocide, pp. 114–134.

Hulagu's Invasion

1.
Most accounts even today repeat that 800,000 people were killed at Baghdad. While this is clearly too large for a single city, I'll let it stand as a place holder for the war as a whole.

2.
Frazier, "Destroying Baghdad"; Morgan,
Mongols.

Hundred Years War

1.
Tuchman,
Distant Mirror, pp. 70–71.

2.
Mortimer, "Poitiers," p. 41(7).

3.
Joan Bos, "Charles VI of France,"
Joan's Mad Monarch Series,
http://www.xs4all.nl/~monarchs/madmonarchs/charles6/charles6_bio.htm
(accessed March 20, 2011); Tuchman,
Distant Mirror, pp. 497–516.

4.
Keegan,
Face of Battle, pp. 79–116.

5.
Pratt,
Battles That Changed History, pp. 104–121.

6.
Sorokin,
Social and Cultural Dynamics, vol. 3, pp. 548–549, 560.

7.
Turchin,
Historical Dynamics, p. 180.

8.
Philip Pregill,
Landscapes in History, 2d ed. (New York: John Wiley, 1999), p. 167 (the population of France began at approximately19 million, but had declined by one-third by end of the Hundred Years War); Frederic J. Baumgartner,
France in the Sixteenth Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 65 (the population of France was 20 million in 1340, 10 million a century later); Henry Heller,
Labour, Science and Technology in France 1500–1620 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 202
(17 million at the beginning of fourteenth century; 9 million in 1440). In most countries, the Black Death killed one-third of the population, but the French population apparently declined by half, so the extra one-sixth of deaths (about 3.33 million) may have been caused by the war.

9.
Robert S. Lopez, in Edward Miller, ed.,
The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire, vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 386.

Fall of the Yuan Dynasty

1.
Mote and Twitchett,
Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, p. 60.

2.
Ibid.

3.
Lorge,
War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, p. 99; Edward L. Farmer,
Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society (Leiden: Brill, 1995), p. 21.

4.
Mote and Twitchett,
Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, pp. 44–47.

5.
S. L.Yang, J. Zhang, S. B. Dai, M. Li, and X. J. Xu, "Effect of Deposition and Erosion within the Main River Channel and Large Lakes on Sediment Delivery to the Estuary of the Yangtze River,"
Journal of Geophysical Research 112 (2007): F02005: "surface area of Lake Poyang has decreased from 5050 km
^{2 in 1949 to 3919 km
2 in 1995."}

6.
Lorge,
War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, pp. 102–103; Michael E. Haskew et al.,
Fighting Techniques of the Oriental World, AD 1200–1860 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008), p. 234.

7.
Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett,
The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6:
Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 622.

Bahmani-Vijayanagara War

1.
Scott and Firista,
Ferishta's History of Dekkan from the First Mahummedan Conquests, p. 26.

2.
Ibid., pp. 27–30.

3.
Sewell,
Forgotten Empire.

Timur

1.
Median of eight published estimates. Allen Howard Godbey,
The Lost Tribes a Myth: Suggestions towards Rewriting Hebrew History (New York: Ktav, 1974), p. 385 ("Genghis Khan is estimated to have destroyed twenty million people, Tamerlane twelve million"); McWilliam, "Uzbekistan Restores Samarkand" ("A ruthless conqueror who, by one estimate at least, caused the deaths of about 7 million people"); Ford, "Ex-Russian Satellite" ("Tamerlane . . . was responsible for the deaths of as many as 20 million people"); Kinzer, "Kinder, Gentler Tamerlane" ("His Turkish and Mongol army is said to have killed 17 million men, women and children in his 14th century rampage"); Carpenter, "Barbaric Tamerlane" ("His armies . . . are estimated to have massacred as many as 17 million people"); Greenway, "New Waves across the Steppes" ("He is said to have killed 15 million people"); Fenby, "Crossroads of Conquest" ("A local warrior with a limp from arrow wounds marched north, east, west and south to found an empire of his own on some 17 million corpses"); McMahon, "Rehabilitation of Tamerlane" ("an estimated death toll of as many as 17 million people").

2.
Stephen Greenblatt,
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 189–192.

3.
Marozzi,
Tamerlane, p. 326.

4.
Ibid., p. 65.

5.
Ibid., p. 132.

6.
Picton, "Tamerlane."

7.
Marozzi,
Tamerlane, pp. 113–114.

8.
Ibid., p. 132.

9.
Ibid., pp. 153–154.

10.
Hildinger,
Warriors of the Steppe, pp. 179–180, Marozzi,
Tamerlane, p. 65.

11.
Marozzi,
Tamerlane, p. 190.

12.
Hildinger,
Warriors of the Steppe, pp. 179–180; Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo and Guy Le Strange,
Embassy to Tamerlane: 1403-1406 (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 92.

13.
Marozzi,
Tamerlane, pp. 312–316.

14.
Ibid., p. 82.

15.
"Clavijo's Embassy to Tamerlane,"
http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/clavijo/cltxt1.html
(accessed March 11, 2011).

16.
Hildinger,
Warriors of the Steppe, p. 194.

17.
Carpenter, "Barbaric Tamerlane"; Ford, "Ex-Russian Satellite"; Kinzer, "Kinder, Gentler Tamerlane"; McMahon, "Rehabilitation of Tamerlane"; McWilliam, "Uzbekistan Restores Samarkand."

Chinese Conquest of Vietnam

1.
Geoff Wade, "Ming Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia," in Hack and Rettig,
Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia, p. 84. Chinese historians claimed 7 million were killed and the plains turned red with blood. For the sake of ranking, I'm dividing this by ten and counting 700,000 for no good reason whatsoever. The census conducted by the Ming found 5.2 million people in Vietnam after the conquest.

2.
Sun Laichen, "Military Technology Transfers from Ming China and the Emergence of Northern Mainland Southeast Asia; c. 1390–1527,"
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (October 1, 2003), p. 495; Hack and Rettig,
Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia, pp. 83–88.

3.
Minh Do, "Le Loi's Struggle: Under the Ming Dynasty,"
VietNow Magazine, July 31, 1997, p. 15.

Aztec Human Sacrifice

1.
Carrasco,
City of Sacrifice, p. 51, quoting Bernal Díaz del Castillo.

2.
Time-Life Books,
Aztecs, pp. 99–100.

3.
Harris,
Cannibals and Kings, pp. 149–151.

4.
Carrasco,
City of Sacrifice, pp. 196–197.

5.
Ibid., pp. 204–207.

6.
Time-Life Books,
Aztecs, p. 103.

7.
Cocker,
Rivers of Blood, p. 47.

8.
This theory was most recently and persuasively set forth by anthropologists Michael Harner and Marvin Harris in the 1970s, but it also shows up in Edward John Payne's
History of the New World Called America, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), p. 550.

9.
Carrasco,
City of Sacrifice, p. 167; Kyle,
Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome, p. 152.