The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (36 page)

Canaanites:
maybe 100,000 were killed around 1200 BCE.

According to the Bible, the Israelites under the leadership of Joshua swarmed across the Jordan River into Canaan. Under direct orders from Yahweh, they systematically slaughtered the inhabitants of every town they took, beginning with Jericho. The Bible specifically mentions that all 12,000 residents at one city were killed, and then goes on to list eight more cities that were utterly destroyed in the same campaign.
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Dacians:
as a rough guess, 100,000 may have been killed from 101 to 106 CE.

After conquering the homeland of these 800,000 people, the Romans emptied the land, hauled away a half-million captives, and replaced them with Roman settlers. Dacia ceased to exist, and the locale became “Romania,” the Land of the Romans, with inhabitants that today speak an offshoot of Latin. The conquest is proudly illustrated in gory detail on Trajan’s Column in Rome.

Guanches:
all 80,000 were wiped out between 1402 and ca. 1520.

These native inhabitants of the Canary Islands have been called “the first people driven over the cliff of extinction by modern imperialism.”
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Herero and Nama:
75,000 were killed from 1904 to 1907.

In putting down a rebellion in their colony of Southwest Africa (now Namibia), the Germans drove these tribes into the desert and nearly to extinction.
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Midianites:
over 60,000 women and boys were killed around 1250 BC.

Under orders from Moses, the Israelites killed every man, boy, and married woman among the Midianites, leaving only 32,000 unmarried girls to be distributed as war booty.
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Trojans:
10,000?

Did it really happen? The legends tell us that when the city fell to the Greeks, old men (Priam) and young boys (Astyanax) were slaughtered, while women were either enslaved (Cassandra) or died in the sacking (Creusa).

Erie:
maybe 5,000 were killed from 1654 to 1656.

This Indian tribe of the Ohio valley was wiped out by the neighboring Iroquois.

Tasmanians:
5,000 were killed after 1803.

In one of the most thorough genocides in history, every pure-blooded native of the island of Tasmania was hunted down and exterminated by white settlers. A handful lingered under the protection of charities, but the last one died in 1877.
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Greenland Norse:
3,000 died (?) in the early 1400s.

For several centuries, 3,000 to 5,000 Norse colonists lived on the coast of Greenland, but then without explanation, they were all gone—forgotten, dried up, and absorbed by the cruel northern wilderness. Although most modern scholars prefer to blame an act of God (a plague or a new ice age) or the victims themselves (a stubborn refusal to adapt to the harsh environment), the few remaining records clearly describe fights with hostile natives—Skraelings. In the fourteenth century, a Norse visitor, Ivar Bardarson, reported to the bishop of Bergen that “now the Skraeling have [destroyed] the whole of the Western Settlement. There are only horses, goats, cattle, and sheep all wild, but no inhabitants, neither Christian nor Heathen.” Soon afterward the Eastern Settlement was under attack, and eventually visitors arriving from Europe found no survivors.
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Chatham Island:
2,000 died.

Maori invaders from New Zealand conquered this South Pacific island in 1835, killing, eating, or enslaving the native Moriori people. Only 101 Moriori were left alive by 1862, and the last pure-blooded Moriori died in 1933.
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Easter Island:
2,000 died.

In 1862, Chilean slave raiders kidnapped 1,000 native Rapanui, half the population, most of whom soon died. Disease, murder, and overwork further reduced the number of remaining natives to only 110 in 1877.
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Banu Qurayza:
600 were killed in ca. 624 CE.

Muhammad accused this tribe of Arab Jews of betrayal. All of the men were killed, and the women and children were sold into slavery.
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Melos:
ca. 500 were killed or enslaved in 478 BCE.

The Athenians completely wiped out this Spartan colony during the Peloponnesian War. This is not the first genocide in recorded history, but it may be the first to be recalled with regret and shame by the perpetrators.
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The ancient historian Xenophon reported that when the Athenians ultimately lost the war to Sparta, “there was mourning and sorrow for those that were lost, but the lamentation for the dead was merged in even deeper sorrow for themselves, as they pictured the evils they were about to suffer, the like of which they themselves had inflicted upon the men of Melos.”
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BURMA-SIAM WARS

Death toll:
“many millions”
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Rank:
54

Type:
hegemonial wars

Broad dividing line:
Burma (Myanmar) vs. Siam (Thailand)

Time frame:
1550–1605

Location:
Southeast Asia

Who usually gets the most
blame
glory:
Bayinnaung, Naresuan

A
WEB OF LARGE RIVERS FLOW SOUTHWARD THROUGH THE JUNGLES OF
the Southeast Asian mainland. Traditionally each river valley was the center of an ethnically and culturally distinct kingdom of rice paddies and pointy Buddhist temples. These were lands where the women wore colorful sarongs and the kings rode elephants. Listing them from west to east (left to right on a map), the Burmese live along the Irrawaddy River; the Karen and Shan, along the lower and upper Salween River; the Thai, along the Menam River; the Khmer, along the Mekong River. Beyond that is the Pacific coast, home of the Vietnamese. Upstream lie mountains and wilderness inhabited by barbarians.

There’s more geography than that—including alternative names for everything—but that’s enough to get through this chapter and most others set in Southeast Asia.

Burma Ascendant

An alien dynasty of Shan (mountain people from the border between Siam and Burma) had run Burma for many generations, until the native Toungoo dynasty threw them out. The first two Toungoo kings consolidated control over Burma and set up a new capital at Pegu. The third Toungoo ruler, Bayinnaung, spent his first year suppressing rebellions in the kingdom he inherited. Once that was settled, he attacked north and conquered all of the Shan states inland from the Burmese heartland. He systematically attacked in every direction, eventually establishing an empire that reached across inland Southeast Asia, from Manipur in the west to Laos in the east.

In 1567 Bayinnaung sent his army (said to number a million and a half) to take Ayutthaya, capital of Siam. The siege took two years and cost him a third of his force.
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In the end, he reduced Siam to vassaldom and installed an allied Thai king, Phra Maha Thammaraja from the independent upriver city of Phitsanulok, on the throne of Ayutthaya, but he took the king’s children back with him to Pegu as hostages in 1569.

Bayinnaung stiffened his army with Portuguese mercenaries, who had trouble pronouncing his name and called him “Braginoco.” He is renowned as the most glorious empire builder in Burmese history, but the Burmese didn’t get much of a chance to enjoy being masters of Southeast Asia because as soon as Bayinnaung died in 1581, Siam got
their
most glorious empire builder right next door.

Siam Ascendant

The Black Prince, Naresuan, son of the king of Siam, spent his youth as a hostage in Pegu to be executed if his father got out of line. Legend says he became the best friend of Bayinnaung’s principal grandson, a boy his own age named Min Chit Swa; however, after many years of rivalry in various contests of strength, skill, and endurance, they had a final falling out when Naresuan’s game bird beat Min Chit Swa’s in a prestigious cockfight.

At the age of sixteen, Naresuan returned to Ayutthaya to rule as a vassal of Bayinnaung. Then in 1583, two years after the death of Bayinnaung,
he declared himself sovereign and drove out the Burmese garrison. The Burmese army returned in full force under the crown prince, his childhood friend Min Chit Swa. Legend has the two of them fighting a climactic duel on war elephants. After the great beasts rammed and toppled each other, the two princes stood face-to-face with swords. The fight continued until Naresuan split Min Chit Swa in half from shoulder to waist. With their prince killed, the Burmese army broke and ran, leaving 200,000 men dead on the field.
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Naresuan’s older sister, Princess Suphankalaya, had remained in Pegu as a hostage and member of the royal harem.
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When news of Prince Min Chit Swa’s death arrived, his grief-stricken and angry father, King Nanda Bayin of Burma, had her brought to him and killed, even though she was pregnant with the king’s child.
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Naresuan invaded Burma several times during his reign, devastating the countryside and spreading famine. During his siege of Pegu in 1596, starvation drove the defenders to cannibalism, and King Nanda Bayin ordered all Siamese residents of the city butchered to feed the Burmese. Even as Pegu’s population plunged from 150,000 to 30,000, Naresuan camped outside with dwindling supplies and lost 100,000 of his own soldiers to hunger. Eventually, he had to retreat before the city fell. By 1600, a Jesuit visiting Burma reported seeing “the ruins of gilded temples and stately edifices, lying along the banks of rivers; the roads and fields full of the skulls and bones of wretched Peguers, killed or famished; and their bodies thrown into the streams in such multitudes as to hinder the passage of vessels.”
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As Burma deteriorated and descended into civil war, Pegu was abandoned as the capital.

Meanwhile, Naresuan secured independence for the Shan as a buffer state against potential Burmese aggression. He and his brother had befriended the Shan prince of Hsenwi when all three of them were hostages in the Burmese court. The Siamese brothers were leading two columns of troops totaling 200,000 against the Burmese in Shan territory when Naresuan died, either covered in pustules from a skin disease (the Thai version) or rushing to save the life of the prince of Hsenwi in battle (the Shan version).
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