The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (18 page)

It was a brutal crossing. One European traveler crossed the Sahara in the 1800s on a large caravan that lost three or four slaves to exhaustion, disease, thirst, and heat stroke for every survivor who arrived at market. Entire caravans with hundreds of slaves often disappeared in the desert.

Even if we put aside morality for the moment and look at this from a simple profit motive, it seems wasteful to allow so many slaves to die. You would think the slave dealers would want to protect their investment, but as one contemporary explained, the slave trade was like the ice trade. A certain amount of melting away was acceptable because the final product fetched a high-enough price to cover the losses. It
wasn’t even much of an investment to begin with. At their source, slaves were cheap. In the central Sahel, a single horse was worth twenty slaves.
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Abolition in the Middle East was imposed by outside forces, not by an upwelling of local goodwill. Europeans began to have moral qualms about slavery
in the late eighteenth century, so when they took control of Africa in the next century, they put a stop to the international traffic in slaves. Local slavery persisted, however, even to the present day, and perhaps a couple of hundred thousand slaves are still being held in Mauritania and Sudan, although their governments deny it.

Eunuchs

Eunuchs were especially useful for guarding the harem—the large assemblage of wives and concubines that every Asian potentate collected. Eunuchs had all of the physical strength of men but none of the sex drive, so they could be trusted not to help themselves to the women and not to produce families to put on the throne in place of the emperor. The disadvantage is that the population of eunuchs was not self-sustaining. They had to be continuously resupplied from elsewhere.

Islam forbids the mutilation of slaves, but rather than let a mere technicality interfere with the demand for eunuchs, Muslims assign
ed that task to the infidels. The slaves were castrated either by pagans in Africa shortly after being caught or by the Jews and Christians living in the Muslim world.

Eunuch-using societies preferred to castrate boys before puberty. This left them childlike in sex drive, voice, and appearance, unlike castrated adults, who still looked and acted more like men. Slave boys were taken aside, supposedly to be circumcised—as was customary for all males in the Muslim world—but this was a trick to get the knife close enough to strike without the boy struggling. When the barber surgeon got the knife near, he would grab and sever the boy’s entire genitalia instead of just the foreskin.
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Eunuchs received a different procedure according to their race. White eunuchs had only their testicles snipped off, but black eunuchs had the whole apparatus—testes, scrotum, and penis—cut away and cauterized with boiling hot butter, leaving just a hole for urination.

Because the final sale of eunuchs came at the end of a long process of raids, caravans, and markets, with their numbers winnowed by disease, brutal discipline, and drowning all along the way, a British consul in the nineteenth century estimated that 100,000 Sudanese had died to produce the 500 eunuchs in Cairo—a loss of 200 lives for each eunuch.
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As we’ve seen in the chapters on, for example, the Xin dynasty, the fall of Rome, the Three Kingdoms, and Justinian, royal women were often the center of a web of family intrigue, and ambitious eunuchs would often turn their access to the harem to their own advantage. Eunuchs were not under all of the legal restrictions that kept women repressed, so they could
move easily between the world of men and the world of women, serving as useful facilitators and front men. All across the Old World, eunuchs made a lot of history.

Corsairs

Because of the religious divide between the Christian northern and Muslim southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, the opposite coasts were considered fair game for slave raids. As a rule, both Christians and Muslims did not enslave members of their own religions. Well, actually, they did this quite often, but it was considered wrong . . . not illegal as such, but certainly impolite. Snatching citizens of a fellow Christian or Muslim country could cause all sorts of diplomatic problems. On the other hand, kidnapping infidels was almost a sacred duty.

Generally, the Barbary pirates or corsairs from North Africa were the worst offenders in the Mediterranean tr
ade. A pirate fleet would pounce on any rich and vulnerable ships to seize cargo, crew, and passengers for sale at one of the Barbary ports in North Africa such as Algiers, Tunis, or Tripoli. Most of the people pulled off the ship would be sold ashore, but prosperous or important prisoners were set aside to be ransomed back to their families or governments. Eventually, most seafaring nations in Europe established consulates in the Barbary cities to expedite the ransoming.

Crewmen captured on ships might be bribed or tortured into assisting the corsair fleet in attacking their seaside hometowns. They would be used as a familiar face to talk their way past the town’s defenses. Even without trickery, a small fishing village was no match for a pirate fleet. Corsairs would swoop in from the sea, round up entire villages, and haul the inhabitants away into slavery. Sometimes pirates stayed ashore for a few days to see if any rich relatives were willing to ransom their prisoners. Because of primitive communications, the corsairs could usually count on several days of safe looting before local authorities could mobilize enough strength to chase them off.

The largest hauls in slaves came from raids against the coastal communities of Italy, Spain, and Greece, although
attacks in the Atlantic Ocean were not unknown. Around 1625, a corsair raid against Reykjavik, Iceland, enslaved 400 men, women, and children; in 1631, another raid enslaved 237 from Baltimore, Ireland.
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Those who were too young, old, or weak might be thrown overboard on the way back to Africa, but the majority of captives were taken to the market. Women were usually sold into harems, while men often became galley slaves.

At this point in history, rowing galleys created the biggest demand for cheap, expendable labor in the Mediterranean. In the ancient world, free men had rowed galleys for wages, but by the Middle Ages it had become slave work. Galley slaves were usually worked to death without a second thought. Chained to their benches, the slaves pulled the oars continuously, constantly, in the sun, in the rain, and then through much of the night. Not even able to lie down for sleep, the slaves could only catch an occasional nap while slumped over their oars. In battles and storms, galley slaves went down with the ship. At the Battle of Lepanto between Ottoman Turkey and Spain in 1571, more than 10,000 Christian galley slaves drowned, shackled in the bellies of the Turkish warships.

Western naval technology eventually surpassed that of the corsairs. By the early 1800s, European and American warships were systematically retaliating against any Barbary ports that continued to harbor pirates. The North African cities were forced to crack down on the corsairs, and the Mediterranean became safe for commerce.

Mamelukes

Slaves served as the backbone of many Muslim armies. The Ottoman Turks (ca. 1450–1900) required Christian peasant communities in the Balkans to surrender a quota of young boys to be raised as Muslims and trained as soldiers. The Egyptians of the same period usually bought Circassian boys from the Caucasus Mountains. These boys were kept isolated from the outside world during their childhood as they learned war craft and Islam. They were counted as slaves, the personal property of the sultan. Although legally freed upon reaching adulthood, they could never leave the sultan’s service. They would live their entire lives as soldiers in a barracks. Their own children were sent away and forbidden from following in their fathers’ line of work. When these soldiers got too old for combat, they would be moved into support duties and eventually into a comfortable retirement, with slaves assigned to keep them happy.

Called Mamelukes after the Arabic word for slave, these slave soldiers had no family, tribal affiliations, or property to interfere with their loyalty to the sultan. On the other hand, they tended to have more loyalty to their comrades than to the crown, and Muslim dynasties were under constant threat of a coup by Mamelukes if they pushed them too hard.
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I don’t count Mamelukes in the statistics of this megadeath because I consider them, morally, to be more a type of draftee than a type of slave. The restrictions imposed on the average Mameluke were more in line with military duty than with slavery.

Numbers

Slavery in the Muslim world has not been studied as deeply as slavery in Christendom, so there are fewer trustworthy numbers. In
Islam’s Black Slaves
, Ronald Segal reported estimates of either 11.5 million or 14 million African slaves shipped to the Muslim world. Other estimates run from 10 to 25 million live slaves imported.

How many Africans died in the slave trade? Although many anecdotes point to dozens of dead slaves for every live one delivered, these may be isolated incidents. Overall, there is no solid proof that the eastern trade was either more or less deadly than the western trade, so I’m going to apply the western ratio from that chapter and declare that three slaves died for every two transported. That would come to 18 million deaths to produce 12 million live slaves.

Robert C. Davis estimated that between 1.0 and 1.25 million European Christians were enslaved by Muslims on the Barbary Coast between 1530 and 1780.
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Few ever saw their homes again, and we probably should count at least half of them as dead. Because of cruelty and hard labor, the death rate among these slaves was nearly six times the death rate among a free population,
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and attrition eroded their numbers.

AN LUSHAN REBELLION

Death toll:
36 million missing

Rank:
13

Type:
military uprising

Broad dividing line:
the frontier military vs. the central government

Time frame:
755–63

Location:
China

Who usually gets the most blame:
An Lushan mostly, but also the dotty and infatuated Emperor Xuanzong

C
HINA UNDER THE TANG DYNASTY REACHED FARTHER WEST THAN AT ANY
time before or since. This Chinese expansion coincided with the eruption of Arab empire builders all across the Middle East, leading to history’s only battle between Chinese and Arab armies, at the Talas River in central Asia in 751.

Somewhere in the rugged borderland between these expanding cultures, probably near Bukhara in Turkistan, An Lushan was born around 703. His mother was descended from an important Turkic clan. His father, pr
obably a soldier of Sogdian descent (medieval kin to the Pashtuns who dominate Afghanistan today), died when Lushan was young. His mother remarried into the family of a prominent nomadic warlord.

When rival tribesmen assassinated the khan of that particular batch of Turks in 716, the An clan found itself on the wrong side of tribal intrigues and fled eastward, into the outlying provinces of the Chinese Empire, where it came under the protection of a friendly Turkish warlord. For a while, young Lushan liv
ed at the edge of the law, until he was caught stealing sheep. Sentenced to death, the twenty-year-old thief tried to bargain with Governor Zhang Shougui even as the executioner raised the club to bash his skull in. “Does the great lord wish to destroy the barbarians?” he asked. “Why kill a brave warrior?” Seeing his point, the governor put An to use as a scout.

On the Way Up

In 733, when the Tang emperor transferred Governor Zhang to the northeast to replace a commander who had been defeated and killed by the Khitan (the local barbarians),
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An Lushan followed. He proved adept at the fast cavalry raids that characterized frontier warfare. Although short-tempered and impetuous when dealing with subordinates, An was always good-natured and quite likeable when dealing with superiors. He rose through the ranks, becoming Zhang’s lieutenant and eventually his adopted son. Even so, An was going from stout, to stocky, to morbidly obese, and Zhang frequently chewed him out in public over it. Then, in 736, while Zhang was visiting the capital, An had to deal with an attack by the Khitan and Hsi (the other local barbarians) on his own and was badly defeated. When Zhang returned from the capital fuming, he sentenced An to death, but realizing this might not go over well, he expelled An from the army instead. Within a year, however, An was reinstated.
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In 742, the emperor gave An his own frontier province to defend. He kept a steady stream of tribute flowing from his frontier command back to the capital—camels, dogs, falcons, horses, and, best of all, bags of h
eads taken from Khitan chieftains. Some accused him of collecting these heads from enemy leaders he had lured into negotiations under a truce before springing a trap on them. But results mattered, and the emperor gave him two additional provinces to protect, making a solid fiefdom of three territories in the northeast, near the Great Wall. More would be added later.
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An Lushan became a frequent and welcome visitor at the palace in Chang’an, where he played the fat buffoon for the amusement of the courtiers. He became a special favorite of the emperor’s favorite young concubine, Yang Guifei. She even pretended to adopt him as a son in a mock ceremony where the monstrously obese An was presented to his new mom in a diaper. Rumors swirled that Lushan and Guifei were lovers, but she has been remembered across time as one of the four great beauties of Chinese history, while he couldn’t even walk without draping his arms over servants who held up his enormous bulk, so . . . ick.
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Based on the fabled love between the emperor and his lady, and the continued high regard the emperor felt for An, historians consider an affair unlikely. Yang Guifei had originally been married to one of the emperor’s sons (but not one of the sons who shows up later in this story), until the infatuated seventy-year-old emperor dissolved the marriage and stashed Yang in a nunnery for a couple of years to restore her lost virginity. The romance of Emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei became the stuff of legends.

Things Go Wrong

In 751, An Lushan led his army and Hsi allies against the Khitan, but after a long, dusty journey, the Hsi chieftain demanded a rest, so An had him killed. The Hsi contingent deserted, and on the way out, they warned the Khitan that the Chinese were coming. When the exhausted Chinese pressed on, they stumbled into a Khitan ambush and were slaughtered. An Lushan barely escaped with his battered army. Upon returning to camp, he executed several surviving officers, while others fled to the hills to wait for his anger to cool.
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When the emperor’s chief minister died in 752, he was succeeded by a cousin of Yang Guifei, Yang Guozhong, who immediately began to blame all of the problems of the empire on his predecessor. An Lushan, tarnished by his friendship with the previous minister, quickly got on the bad side of Minister Yang, who whispered rumors into the emperor’s ear. Emperor Xuanzong sent a trusted eunuch out to spy on An, but a healthy bribe made sure the emperor got a glowing report on the loyalty of his general. Even so, the emperor felt that An’s loyalty should be examined at close hand, and he summoned him back to court. An Lushan suspected that if he left his army and returned to the capital, he would be stripped of his authority at the very least, and possibly imprisoned, exiled, or killed. An thanked the emperor for the invitation, but said he wasn’t felling well. Then the emperor gave a bride to An’s son, along with an order for An Lushan to return and attend the wedding. An refused and, realizing that he was running out of excuses, rebelled. He issued a flimsy cover story that the emperor had secretly begged him to get rid of the prime minister, and in December 755 he set out for the capital with an army of 100,000, traveling by night, eating at daybreak.
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Suffering an irritating skin disease and nearly blind, An Lushan had lost whatever good humor he may have once had. He was prone to unreasonable rages during which he would have subordinates dismembered.
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After he pulled his army away from the border, his old territories rose in counter-revolt behind him, but that didn’t matter. All he cared about was reaching the capital. To keep his soldiers loyal, he allowed a quick rape, looting, and slaughter in each captured city, but always pressed on. In January, An’s army crossed the icy Yellow River and captured the secondary capital at Luoyang, where he proclaimed himself emperor.
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The main imperial army of 80,000 was gathering at Tongguan Pass, but An’s arrival drove its forward units back in disorder. Then the rebel advance stalled before the pass. The armies waited, but this delay gave palace eunuchs in Chang’an enough time to plot against the imperial generals. Maybe they had a good reason to plot, maybe they didn’t. Who knows? I mean, they’re palace eunuchs; plotting is what they do best. Regardless of the reason, they convinced Emperor Xuanzong to have his generals executed.

Finally, in July, after a huge battle of horsemen and archers, the imperial army was defeated and the pass lay open. Emperor Xuanzong fled the capital on a highway choked by desperate and demoralized imperial soldiers who were looking for a scapegoat. The prime minister, Yang Guozhong, was dragged from his wagon and stomped to death. Then the soldiers stopped the emperor’s caravan and demanded the death of the concubine, Yang Guifei, whom they suspected of being An Lushan’s accomplice and lover. Xuanzong reluctantly allowed it, and imperial soldiers hauled her away. She was strangled and dumped in a ditch, while the emperor continued on his way.
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The Next Generation

The flight of the emperor was as good as an abdication in the eyes of his ambitious third son, Suzong, who then declared himself emperor. Ex-emperor Xuanzong spent the rest of his life in closely guarded retirement.

After the rebels took the capital
of Chang’an, An Lushan began to consolidate his power, but he had made far too many enemies within his own entourage to survive much longer. One of his advisers, having been flogged in punishment for some offense, conspired with An Lushan’s son, An Qingxu. They approached An Lushan’s favorite eunuch, whom Lushan had personally castrated many years earlier in a fit of anger. This eunuch stabbed An Lushan in his sleep with his own sword, but it took a lot of messy effort to cut through all of the layers of fat. An Lushan screamed and struggled, but eventually succumbed. He was buried under his tent, and the army was told he died of illness.
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Within a few months, an imperial counterattack recaptured the capital on behalf of the new emperor, Suzong.
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As the rebels fell back, An Qingxu was deposed by his lieutenant Shi Siming. An Qingxu was quickly put on trial for the murder of his father and strangled. Shi continued the rebellion for several years, followed by his son, and so on, until the last of his family was caught and killed.

In the end, the Tang dynasty survived only by bringing in outsiders like the Tibetans and Uighurs to fight their battles for them, for a price. China had to cede its western territories—the desert colonies in the Tarim Basin—to its new allies. The days when Chinese garrisons maintained direct control o
ver the road to the west would not return for hundreds of years.

Poets’ War

The An Lushan Rebellion stands high in the cultural history of China because two of their greatest poets lived and wrote during this time. This gives us an interesting glimpse into the Chinese attitude toward war. It is much more pacifistic than, for example,
Beowulf
, which was written about the same time in England.

Li Po was an enthusiastic drinker and drifter, an alchemist and Taoist mystic, who lived a lucky life full of ups and downs. In his mid-fifties when the war began, he was considered the greatest poet of his era. He attached himself to Prince Lin, sixteenth son of the emperor, but in 756, the prince was accused of plotting to establish an independent kingdom and was executed. Li Po was tossed into prison, but an old soldier he had helped thirty years before had now risen to high command in the loyalist army. This commander released Li and employed him as his secretary. Soon, however, the charges were restored, and Li Po was exiled to the southern barbarian province of Yelang. He dawdled and visited with friends along the way, so even after three years, he had still not arrived at his destination. Then a general amnesty arrived, so Li turned around and went back home to east China. While staying at a relative’s house, he died. Legend has it that while drinking wine in a boat on the river, he tried to grab the moon’s reflection on the surface and tumbled in, which is probably the poet’s equivalent of dying bravely in battle.
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