The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (19 page)

In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;

The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,

While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,

Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.

So, men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,

And the generals have accomplished nothing.

Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms

Were so seldom used by the benign sovereigns.

—Li Po, “Nefarious War”
¹²

Younger than Li Po by eleven years, Tu Fu had a cloud of bad luck following him around. After failing the exams necessary for a career in the civil service, he wandered and eventually befriended Li, acquiring a reputation as a promising poet. Returning to the court, he married and tried for five years to get a job with the government. Just as he landed a minor position, An Lushan attacked, and Tu Fu fled the capital only to be captured by bandits. After escaping them, he wandered ragged and hungry, eventually connecting again with the exiled court. He secured a minor job as a censor, but his hardships caused the deaths of some of his children by hunger and illness. After losing this job, he resumed wandering aimlessly. He too is said to have died drinking on a boat, by overindulgence after a ten-day fast.
¹³

The war-chariots rattle,

The war-horses whinny;

To each man a bow and a quiver at his belt.

Father, mother, son, wife, stare at them going,

Till dust shall have buried the bridge at Hsien-yang.

We trot with them and cry and catch at their long sleeves,

But the sound of our crying goes up to the clouds;

For every time a bystander asks the men a question,

The men can only answer us that they have to go.

—Tu Fu, “A Song of War-Chariots”
¹⁴

Bai Juyi belonged to the next generation of poets, born a few years after the war had ended, but his epic
Song of Everlasting Sorrow
told of the tragic love between Emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei. After her death, the emperor is said to have moped around, and then hired a medium to summon her spirit. They reminisce over old times, and Xuanzong is really, really sorry about tossing her to angry soldiers. Finally they agree that they are destined to reunite on the other side.

Bai Juyi says it better than I do, however. He did not consider this his best work, but it became very popular among romantic young girls.
¹⁵

The king has sought the darkness of his hands,

Veiling the eyes that looked for help in vain,

And as he turns to gaze upon the slain,

His tears, her blood, are mingled on the sands

—Bai Juyi, “
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow”
¹⁶

Numbers

The census taken in China in the year 754 recorded a population of 52,880,488. After ten years of civil war, the census of 764 found only 16,900,000 people in China.

What happened to 36 million people? Is a loss of two-thirds in one decade even possible? Perhaps. Peasants often lived at the very edge of starvation, so the slightest disruption could c
ause a massive die-off, particularly if they depended on large irrigation systems. As we saw with the Xin dynasty and the Three Kingdoms, this was not the only population collapse in Chinese history, and many authorities quote these numbers with a minimum of doubt. On the other hand, these numbers could also represent a decline in the central government’s ability to find every taxpayer rather than an actual population collapse.
¹⁷

More convincing, though less dramatically precise, is the count of households. In the seven counts before An Lushan’s Rebellion, the census repeatedly found between 8 and 9 million households, and then, in the seven counts following the rebellion, the census consistently found no more than 4 million. Even a century after the revolt, in 845, the Chinese civil service could fi
nd only 4,955,151 taxpaying households, a long drop from the 9,069,154 households recorded in 755.
¹⁸
This indicates that the actual population collapse may have been closer to one-half, or 26 million. For the sake of ranking, however, I’m being conservative and cutting this in half, counting only 13 million dead in the An Lushan Rebellion. Even so, it still ranks among the twenty deadliest multicides in human history.

MAYAN COLLAPSE

Death toll:
over 2 million missing

Rank:
46

Type:
failed state

Broad dividing line:
some awful unknown force, like the weather or Cthulu, against the Mayans

Time frame:
790–909

Location:
Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, and Guatemala

Who usually gets the most blame:
Most people suspect that the Mayans somehow brought it on themselves

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
Where did everyone go?

T
HE MAYANS BUILT A FASCINATING AND COMPLEX CIVILIZATION FROM
scratch, prospered for several centuries, and then abandoned it, without even saying good-bye. From being builders and mathematicians on a grand scale, they went back to being quiet subsistence gardeners, leaving behind huge jungle-encrusted ruins to mystify later generations. For over a century and a half, we’ve been trying to figure out why.

The three most popular explanations among archaeologists are:

1.
Drought. In this scenario, the Mayan disappearance was driven by climate, and there wasn’t much the Mayans could have done to prevent it.

2.
Systematic ecological collapse. This scenario focuses on the poor choices the Mayans made in the management of resources. For example, they may have cut down too many forests, which parched and eroded the soil.

3.
Politics and war. In this case, the Mayans more or less killed each other off.

Other explanations are occasionally floated but easily shot down. Perhaps a new disease killed off all of
the Mayans—but, as we will see in later chapters, the Western Hemisphere was unfamiliar with pandemic diseases before the Europeans brought them. Or maybe the Mayans were wiped out by foreign invaders—but there has been no evidence of an abrupt, widespread appearance of foreign artifacts in any of the sites. How about a volcano or earthquake? No, the collapse wasn’t quick enough; it took almost a century to unfold. This is a classic locked-room mystery.

This is also a classic Rorschach test. With such sketchy evidence, the temptation is to pick whatever scenario supports one’s underlying worldview. Do you want to demonstrate that humans are forever at the mercy of nature? Then the Mayans succumbed to drought. Want to teach us to manage our resources better? Then the Mayans carelessly destroyed their environment. Want a backstory for your novel about dreadful supernatural forces? Then the Mayans meddled in occult matters and unleashed demonic forces from the darkening void. I bet you can guess which one I’m going with.

Most scholars don’t pick one explanation to the exclusion of the others. Several destructive forces were obviously
wearing away at Mayan civilization, but in keeping with the theme of this book, we will focus on war.

War to End All Wars

Arthur Demarest of Vanderbilt University is the major proponent of war as the agent of the Mayan collapse. According to his scenario, the rivalry between cities spun out of control in the middle of the eighth century. Excavations show that the Mayan kings built greater palaces, demanded more pomp and ritual, and displayed flashier adornment to amaze and awe their competitors. Unfortunately, their escalating ambition may have removed the limits that had kept earlier wars from becoming too destructive. War shifted from ritualistic contests of honor and prestige to wholesale butchery and robbery. It chewed up resources and distracted the Mayans from more productive activities, such as trade and farming.

Through much of the Classic Period, Mayan communities were laid out in a lazy sprawl, and the
peasants farmed the best land available. Then Mayan cities in the Late Classic Period showed signs of trouble. The settlements pulled back and concentrated into easily defended hills surrounded by palisades. These were not always near the most productive farmland, so harvests suffered. War intensified, as indicated by archaeological evidence of a more violent society.

In the ruined city of Cancuen, Guatemala, Demarest found thirty-one skeletons of men, children, and women (two of them pregnant) dismembered and dumped into a cistern around 800 CE. Jewelry of jade, jaguar teeth, and Pacific shells indicates that these people were nobility, killed for some reason other than robbery. In a shallow grave nearby were skeletons of the last king and queen of the city. Demarest also found unfinished defensive walls, scattered spearheads, and another dozen skeletons here and there with markings of spear and ax wounds. This was the end of Cancuen. Nothing later than this massacre has been found in the ruins.
¹

The most interesting feature in the ruins of Chunchucmil is a stone wall encircling the center of the site
and visible in aerial photos. Dating to sometime in the Late Classic Period, the wall was constructed over every road, plaza, and building in its path, using stones plundered from nearby structures. It appears to have been built urgently to keep something out, without regard to aesthetics or architectural preservation. Unfinished and C-shaped, the wall was apparently the last feature built at the site, but the builders never closed the circle. Something interrupted the construction, and that was the end of Chunchucmil.

Although evidence varies from site to site, archaeologists often come up empty when looking for an alternative, purely natural explanation of the Mayan collapse. In the Petexbatun region of the Southern Lowlands, Lori Wright (Texas A&M) examined Mayan bones from the end of the Classic Period, but found that the people were well nourished. Nick Dunning (University of Cincinnati) studied soil core samples but found no evidence of climate change. These findings tend to point away from drought and famine as the primary cause of the disappearance; however, excavations have uncovered evidence of growing poverty in the land: less imported pottery and a l
ower quality of artifacts.
²

We can track the collapse of the Mayan civilization with eerie precision. At abandoned cities all across the Mayan homeland, monumental inscriptions fizzle out as the ninth century progresses. They don’t stop in mid-sentence with an “arrgh” and a splash of blood, but at each site, there comes a point where nothing new is added to the generally mundane inscriptions from before the final crisis hit. The last d
ates recorded at Pomona and Aguateca correspond to our 790 CE. Over the next decade, Palenque, Bonampak, and Yaxha fell silent. In the first quarter of the 800s, seven more notable cities stopped inscribing their history; five more stopped in the second quarter. Another eight fell silent by 889. The last date chiseled at Chichen Itza was in 898. Uxmal kept going until 907, but after Tonina stopped recording in 909, the Classic Mayans had nothing more to say.

Death Toll

Even though we aren’t sure whether chronic warfare was the primary cause of the collapse, we’re pretty sure it was the result. Whether a specific scenario begins with a bad harvest, a volcanic cloud, or failed rains, it always seems to end up with the Mayans fighting over dwindling resources.

How many died as a direct consequence of war? For the entire civilization to disappear, the body count must have been substantial. Throughout this book, cultures have been able to bounce back even after losing as much as one-fourth of their people, so it was probably more than that.

Of course, no one knows what the population of the Mayans was at the classic peak of their civilization, but estimates run anywhere from 3 to 14 million.
³
On top of that, no one is sure how many were left after the worst had happened. B. L. Turner II estimated that an original population of almost 3 million in 800 dropped to less than 1 million by 1000. Richard E. W. Adams estimated that the population peaked at 12 to 14 million and crashed to 1.8 million afterward.
⁴

For the sake of ranking, I’m being conservative and assuming that one-third of the minimum population was killed in their final conflicts. This comes to an even million.