The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (24 page)

John Man makes a rough guess that 1,250,000 people were killed in Khwarezm in two years—one-fourth of the 5 million original inhab
itants. McEvedy states that the population of Iran declined by 1.5 million; the population of Afghanistan dropped by some 750,000, while European Russia lost 500,000.
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One of the most common arguments about Chinggis Khan is that he just couldn’t have been this destructive, could he? He had such primitive weapons, and there were far fewer people to kill in those days, so how could he kill m
ore people than Stalin and World War I combined? There has been a recent trend to rehabilitate his reputation by dismissing all of the horror stories as propaganda. It’s interesting to watch the debate go back and forth over time as each expert weighs in:

J. D. Durand, 1960: “A considerable decrease of population in the north might have been caused by the struggle between the Chinese an
d the Mongol invader. . . . Still the sheer magnitude of the decrease in the north, not balanced by any corresponding increase in the south, creates a suspicion that the census in the north was very defective.”
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Rene Grousset, 1972: “Courtesies having been observed in respect to strict historical objectivity, let us make no bones about our horror at the appalling butchery.”
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David Morgan, 1986: “Professor Bernard Lewis, something of a revisionist on this matter of the Mongol horrors, has suggested that in the twentieth century we are better able to judge man’s destructive capacity than were our Victorian forebears, to whom the Mongol conquests seemed terrible beyond normal human experience. . . . [H]e feels . . . we should resist the temptation to believe that the Mongols, whose apparatus of destruction was so primitive compared with what was available to Hitler, could have devastated the Islamic world so totally.”
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David Morgan, 1986 (speaking for himself): “It is true that what we hear most about is the slaughter and demolition of the great cities of [eastern Persia]. But more serious . . . was the effect of the Mongol invasions on agriculture. . . . [S]ome of [the irrigation systems] were destroyed during the invasions, and without effective irrigation much of the land would soon revert to desert. But a more long-term consideration is that [these systems], even if not actually destroyed, quickly cease to operate if they are not constantly maintained. Hence if peasants were killed in large numbers, or fled from their land and stayed away, land would suffer irreparable damage simply through neglect.”
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Jack Weatherford, 2004: “The Mongols operated a virtual propaganda machine that consistently inflated the number of people killed in battle and spread fear wherever its words carried.”
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“Although accepted as fact and repeated through the generations, the numbers have no basis in reality. It would be physically difficult to slaughter that many cows or pigs, which wait passively for their turn. Overall, those who were supposedly slaughtered outnumbered the Mongols by ratios of up to fifty to one. The people could have merely run away, and the Mongols would not have been able to stop them.”
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John Man, 2004: “
One million three hundred thousand?
. . . Many historians doubt this because it sounds simply incredible. But we know from the last century’s horrors that mass slaughter comes easily . . . 800,000 were killed in the Rwanda genocide of 1994 . . . over just three months. . . . For a Mongol, an unresisting prisoner would have been easier to dispatch than a sheep. A sheep is killed with care, in order not to spoil the meat. . . . There was no need to take such trouble with the inhabitants of Merv, who were of less value than a sheep. It takes only seconds to slit a throat, and move onto the next.”
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The important point to notice is that the exact same evidence can easily be interpreted in opposite directions. A recorded drop in the population between censuses is either an accurate reflection of a massive decline or an indication that the census was flawed. Either the Holocaust shows how difficult it is to kill huge numbers of people or it proves how easy it is. A full confession to killing thousands is either the truth or mere boastfulness.

There’s a word for this shifting interpretation of underlying facts:
paradigm
. This is the theoretical framework within which theories, laws, and generalizations are formulated.
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If your ruling paradigm declares that human populations do not crash abruptly, then the only way to interpret the census is to assume an error in the data. If your paradigm declares that only the industrial efficiency of the gas chambers made the Holocaust possible, then obviously spear-waving barbarians can’t kill millions, regardless of what the chronicles say. In 1994, when a million people were massacred in Rwanda in three months, mostly with machetes, the paradigm shifted to accept the idea that gas chambers are not necessary for genocide.

Admitt
edly, history is biased by the available sources, and many of the stories that have come down to us are likely exaggerations. Unfortunately, when you dismiss too much history as mere propaganda, you find yourself caught in a paranoid cycle where you will not trust what anyone says, and you will believe only what you want to believe. Maybe the relentless bad press that surrounds Chinggis Khan means only that history was written by his victims. On the other hand, that’s to be expected when everyone who interacted with him ended up as a victim.

Did Everybody Do It?

Whenever you start denigrating a notable person from the past, you will be told that those were different times. Everybody did it. You can’t judge the past by modern standards, his defenders will say. Everybody else was just as bad.

Is this true? Were all the people of the Middle Ages as barbarous as Chinggis Khan? Well, unfortunately for the defenders of Chinggis Khan, the rebuttal is almost too easy. The career of the Universal Leader spanned almost the same years as a man who was nearly as famous, nearly as influential, and completely the opposite. Let’s consider the biography of a contemporary who
didn’t
kill as many people as Chinggis Khan:

In 1206—the same year that the Mongol tribes proclaimed their warlord Temujin to be Chinggis Khan—a twenty-three-year-old ascetic arrived in Rome. Like Temujin, Giovanni di Bernardone is more commonly known by another name, in this case, Francesco, the Frenchman, even though he was from the Italian town of Assisi.
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Unlike Temujin, Francesco’s early attempts at soldiering were simply a matter of duty to his hometown, and they proved less than legendary. He was captured by forces from Perugia at the age of twenty and spent a year as a prisoner of war before a truce secured his release. He tried again in the next war, but he was sent home from this campaign with a serious fever. Charming, witty, and pleasure-loving in his youth, Francesco turned to religion and philosophy after his experience of war and near brush with death.

After dedicating the next few years to prayer and study, Francis of Assisi concluded that all nature manifested the benevolence of God. He considered all living creatures to be the brothers of mankind. Giving away all his worldly goods and tending to the sick and poor, he made it a point to live his life as Jesus had. Francis
of Assisi founded a monastic order, the Franciscans, dedicated to poverty and good works, although his contribution was mostly that of a charismatic example rather than a methodical organizer. Unlike the severe scourges-and-scorpions holy men that every religion churns up, Francis was always good-humored and pleasant.

Francis is the first person recorded to have spontaneously sprouted the stigmata, the five wounds of Christ. Inventing this new way of being mystic
ally weird is probably a point against him, but Saint Francis of Assisi exemplifies the best of Christianity. He died in 1226, a year before Chinggis Khan did. No gravediggers were slaughtered to hide the tomb of Saint Francis. It’s now a major pilgrimage site and one of the world’s great tourist traps.

ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE

Death toll:
1 million
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Rank:
46

Type:
religious war

Broad dividing line:
Catholics vs. Cathars

Time frame:
1208–29

Location:
southern France

Who usually gets the most blame:
Pope Innocent III, Simon de Montfort

A Perfect Storm

Catharism was a persistent heresy that survived several centuries of attempted eradication all across Christendom. Cathars believed that Jesus was not of this corrupt world but was a purely divine entity, a phantom. He had come to replace the vicious, vengeful God of the Old Testament who had created our flawed universe. The word
Cathar
came from the Greek word for purity, and Cathars believed that all people should strive to separate themselves from the corruption of the material world to reach a condition called Perfect. They also believed that humans needed no intermediaries to receive Jesus’s salvation, which obviously did not go over well with the Roman Catholic Church. After many centuries of persecution, the Cathars were finally exterminated in their last stronghold in the south of France in the thirteenth century.

Crusade

Sovereignty was complicated in the Languedoc region of southern France. Although the French king had ultimate dominion over the region, outsiders like the kings of England and Spain had some valuable fiefdoms scattered around the area as well. Feudal lords had even more autonomy here than most of their peers elsewhere.

The lack of central authority attracted heretics. Cathars—called Albigensians here—weren’t the majority in Languedoc, but they were a tolerated minority. Enough local lords, such as the powerful Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, considered them useful, peaceful citizens and gave them protection. This annoyed the Catholic Church, which accused the Cathars of the usual atrocities—sodomy, devil worship, baby stealing, and desecration of holy objects. In May 1207 Raymond was excommunicated by the church for being uncooperative in its efforts to eradicate the Cathars.

In January 1208, Rome sent an envoy into the r
egion to try to convince Raymond to stamp out the heretics. After unsuccessful and angry negotiations, unknown assassins killed the papal representative while he was returning home. The church blamed Raymond.

Pope Innocent III now preached a full crusade against the heretics. This was especially popular in northern France because anyone who took up the cross against the Cathars would earn the same spiritual bonus points with
God as fighting in the Holy Land—without having to take a long, queasy sea voyage or eat disgusting foreign foods. Ten thousand of them gathered in Lyon.

Beziers

The crusaders attacked the city of Beziers first. It was well fortified and well supplied, and everyone expected it to withstand a siege, but on the first day, as the crusaders were setting up the camp, several shiftless camp followers—cooks, drivers, and so on—went down to a shaded creek beneath the city walls to rest and cool off.

Defenders on the wall started exchanging insults with the northern riffraff, and tempers frayed. The townsmen decided to go outside and teach the stray northerners a lesson. Unfortunatel
y, during this sortie, they left the town gate wide open, filled with cheering civilians. Others in the crusader camp spotted the fight. They grabbed their clubs and rushed over to join the melee, finally chasing the townsmen back inside and following hard on their heels. As northerners got inside the gate, soldiers from the town rushed down from the city walls to drive them out. Distracted by the brawl, no one noticed that some of the more quick-witted crusaders had snuck in and propped ladders up against the suddenly unguarded walls.

And that was the end of Beziers.

As the crusaders eradicated this hotbed of heresy, the leader of the Catholic forces, Simon de Montfort, was asked how they could tell the heretics from the orthodox. His solution was simple: “Kill th
em all; God will know his own.”
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Thousands of civilians took sanctuary in the town church, but the crusaders followed them inside and slaughtered them anyway. Although most of the townspeople were Catholic, all of the inhabitants of Beziers—20,000 people—were massacred regardless of religion.
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Root and Branch

Town after town fell to the crusaders. After the water supply to Carcassonne was cut, the inhabitants surrendered and were exiled with just the clothes they wore. The mountain fortress of Minerve near Beziers lost its water supply when crusader catapults destroyed the fortified tunnel to the town’s well. After Minerve surrendered, the Cathars were forcibly converted to Catholicism, except for 140 who refused and were burned.

After the capture of Bram, every member of the Cathar garrison had his eyes gouged out and his nose and uppe
r lip sliced off. Only one soldier was left with a single eye intact in order to guide the faceless men back to spread fear in Cathar territory.
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Raymond of Toulouse had been keeping a low profile, riding along in support of the crusade, but after a year of watching his domain become ravaged, he switched sides. After Toulouse withstood a siege by Simon de Montfort, Raymond counterattacked, retaking much of the lost territory and bringing Montfort under siege. The next year, the Catholics had the upper hand and ended up outside Toulouse again. Because Raymond was the vassal and brother-in-law of King Peter II of Aragon in northern Spain, this king now joined the fight against the crusaders.

Languedoc became a maelstrom of battle, and Toulouse changed hands several times before it was all done, but the war dragged on, year after year, without a final knockout blow. Because the pope required only forty days of crusading to earn God’s favor, the holy mobs that came south every summer for the campaign season would pack up and go home six weeks later, leaving Simon de Montfort alone in Languedoc to face the Cathar counterattack.
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The war lasted longer than its major participants. King Peter II of Spain was killed in battle at Muret in 1213. In 1218, Simon de Montfort was killed outside Toulouse by a stone from a catapult manned by women of the town. Raymond fled to England for a time, then went to Rome to plead his case; he returned to fight and finally died in 1222.

During the 1220s the war continued under a new generation of leaders, sons of Simon and Raymond, but one by one the last Cathar strongholds fell and stayed down. In 1226, King Louis VIII of France pledged himself to the crusade, and now the full French army overwhelmed the heretics in one tough year of campaigning. The king then negotiated acceptable terms with the principal nobles of the south, and the Treaty of Paris ended hostilities in 1229.
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In 1229, Rome established the Inquisition in Toulouse to make sure none of the supposed converts were secretly
practicing their old heretical ways. Sporadic rebellions and uprisings continued in the hinterlands for several decades. Apostates were hunted down. Relapsed or stubborn Cathars were burned—the last of them in 1321.
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