The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (41 page)

Li Zicheng’s bandit army camped in the palace, enjoyed the emperor’s harem, and looted Beijing, while two hundred miles away, along the Great Wall, the last Ming army in the north hesitated. Ming General Wu Sangui was torn between avenging his dead emperor or advancing his career by recognizing Li as the new emperor of China, but ultimately his duty was to guard the northern frontier. He remained at his post. Li discovered General Wu’s father, an elderly courtier, among his prisoners from the Ming court and tried to negotiate a deal. Wu the Younger agreed to surrender in exchange for the release of his father, and rode south toward Beijing; however, Li grew tired of waiting. He executed Wu’s family, raped Wu’s favorite concubine, and marched north with his army. When Wu heard the awful news, he went back to the Great Wall and flung open the gates for the Manchus to pour through.
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Li met Wu’s forces at Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the sea. Wu lined up his forces and traded unsuccessful frontal assaults with Li’s rebels for several exhausting hours. Then Dorgon’s Manchu cavalry suddenly attacked out of a blinding sandstorm on Li’s left flank. The surprise and the defeat were
total.

Li retreated in good order for a few hundred miles back toward his original base of operations, fighting several large defensive battles against his pursuers. Eventually, the strain was too much for the rebels and Li’s army disintegrated. Li was reported dead in the summer of 1645, either by suicide or by being beaten to death by some peasants he was trying to rob—although other stories have him escaping to live out his life as an anonymous monk.
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In December 1644, the other major rebel, Zhang Xianzhong, the Yellow Tiger, pulled back into Sichuan, and set up the Great Western Kingdom, headquartered at Chengdu.
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Left on his own, Zhang grew increasingly cruel and capricious. He mutilated and beheaded thousands of scholars and their families. He decimated regiments of his army as punishment for imagined insults. His cruelty was so well known that, in 2002, when workers excavating the foundation of a new building in Chengdu uncovered one hundred very old skeletons jumbled together in the dirt, the archaeologist who investigated the site immediately suspected that Zhang was the one who put them there.
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Zhang abandoned Chengdu in late 1646, burning much of it to the ground. He retreated deeper into the mountains, devastating the countryside behind him, until the Manchus caught and killed him in January 1647.

Mopping Up

The surviving Mings regrouped in the south, at Nanjing, the secondary capital in central China. At first Dorgon offered to split China with them provided the Mings renounced their claims on the north. No deal.

The Manchu armies moved out. At the southern terminus of the Grand Canal, the supremely rich city of Yangzhou put up a stiff resistance when
the Manchus arrived, so the city was thoroughly and bitterly pillaged for ten days after it finally fell. Learning a lesson from this, Nanjing surrendered without a fight in June, and for once the city changed hands
without
a massacre, which, as we shall see, is unusual in Nanjing’s long unhappy history. The Qing hauled the current Ming emperor into oblivion.

Ming royalty, however, had bred like bunnies, so the Qing were forced to hunt and execute a long string of princes who tried to establish rival kingdoms in the south. The last of the Mings was the youngest grandson of an earlier emperor, his mother’s baby who had been pampered and coddled throughout childhood, so you know his story will end badly. Known as the prince of Gui, he established a rival court in the deep south, filled with “all manner of betel nut chewers, brine-well workers, and aborigine whorehouse owners.”
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Eventually, beginning in December 1650, the Qing armies chased him all over the southern borderlands and finally into Burma. The Burmese promised him sanctuary, but then changed their minds and massacred most of the renegade court. The prince was imprisoned in a small estate until a few years later when the turncoat General Wu Sangui invaded. The Burmese bought off General Wu by surrendering the last of the Mings. The prince of Gui and his only son were taken back to China and discreetly strangled in 1662.
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With the final demise of his masters, the last Ming admiral, Zheng Chenggong,
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gathered his fleet and sailed off to a life of piracy. In 1661, he seized Taiwan from the Dutch and probably would have moved against the Spanish in the Philippines if he hadn’t died shortly thereafter. This was the last throe of the Ming dynasty’s glorious maritime traditions, which had once sent massive fleets all over the world, as far as East Africa. After the passing of Zhe
ng Chenggong, the oceans became the exclusive domain of the Europeans.

Plague and Pestilence

How many people died in this age of chaos? A hint of the devastation can be found in the
Ming Shi
, the official history of the era compiled a century later, which accused Zhang the Yellow Tiger of killing 600 million people during his insane rule. As this is more people than were alive in the world at the time, the impossibly large number is probably just their way of saying “a lot.”
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The most common estimate fro
m modern demographers, based on tax records and archaeology, is that the original Chinese population of 150 million fell by one-sixth (or 25 million) in the mid-seventeenth century.
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As always, famine and disease swept through the plundered and battered population, killing huge numbers of anonymous civilians.

You may have noticed that a disproportionate number of my top one hundred events occurred in the late 1500s and the1600s. In Europe, the Thirty Years War was the deadliest conflict until World War I (see “Thirty Years War”). Russia sank into the chaotic Time of Troubles. The Manchu conquest of China was responsible for one of the top population collapses in East Asian history, while Aurangzeb’s invasion of south India (see “Aurangzeb”) caused the highest single-war body count in South Asian history. Even in the smaller, outlying islands off the continental coasts, the dogs of war were barking louder than they ever had before. Britain was being torn apart by the English Civil War, and Japan’s shoguns were vying for power in what would later become the setting for just about every film by Akira Kurosawa.
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All of this was ravaging a world with a population of 500 million, only one-fifth the number of people alive in the middle of the twentieth century. In fact, the seventeenth century is a serious contender for worst century in human history.

The main cause of this was a quantum
leap in military technology. The development of efficient muskets and artillery brought entire civilizations under the command of single dynasties, creating so-called gunpowder empires. Although in later centuries these new empires would be a stabilizing influence, they began by destroying ancient power balances and unleashing chaos.

Of course the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse do their best work when they cooperate, and seventeenth-century body counts were boosted by a resurgence of bubonic plague. The most famous outbreak was the London Plague of 1665, but the plague also swept all of the trade routes of Eurasia, wherever the rat populations were big enough to support it. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the Black Death three hundred years earlier, but China was hit particularly hard: “At first the bodies were buried in coffins, and next in grasses, but finally they were left on the beds.” An eyewitness described a town ravaged by the plague: “there were few signs of human life in the streets and all that was heard was the buzzing of flies.”
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This era was also the peak of the Little Ice Age. World temperatures had been falling for a few centuries and would not begin to climb again for many decades. This was squeezing agriculture into shorter, drier growing seasons, and famines followed.

On the other hand, no matter how fascinating it is to study the impact of disease and weather on history, we can get carried away trying to match every historic upheaval to a concurrent natural event. In the long term, societies adjusted to the new weather patterns, and in the short term the climate change was sporadic. Weather is always erratic, so when we talk about, for example, drier summers, we don’t mean there was no rain for years on end. We mean less rain than average in most years, but perfectly normal rain the rest of the time. Drought and famine have been so common in human history that most societies have emergency plans and plenty of old-timers who remember how they got through it the last time. Only when compounded by an extra dose of bad luck or human stupidity does bad weather destroy the fabric of society.

CROMWELL’S INVASION OF IRELAND

Death toll:
400,000
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Rank:
81

Type:
ethnic cleansing

Broad dividing line:
English vs. Irish

Time frame:
1649–52

Location:
Ireland

Major state participant:
English Commonwealth

Who usually gets the most blame:
Cromwell

I
N THE ESCALATING QUARREL BETWEEN KING CHARLES OF ENGLAND AND THE
Puritans of Parliament, the Catholics of Ireland were Royalists. In 1641, just before the outbreak of hostilities in England, a rumor swept through the Irish Catholics that Parliament was planning to crack down on them at any minute. The Catholics decided to strike first and destroy the Ulster Protestants who would be the foot soldiers in any such oppression. Three thousand Protestants were massacred in a sudden uprising, and another 8,000 died after they were driven homeless out into the cold.

Civil war broke out in England before any retaliation could take place. Unfortunately for the Irish, the Englis
h Civil War ended with the king dead and the commander of the parliamentary army, Oliver Cromwell, as dictator of England. In August 1649 Cromwell crossed over to Ireland to settle scores. “Misery and desolation, blood and ruin . . . shall befall them,” Cromwell promised, “and [I] shall rejoice to exercise the utmost severity against them.”
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He besieged the town of Drogheda on the east coast of Ireland, and when the English breached the walls after several fierce assaults, Cromwell’s Roundheads gave no quarter. The English massacred 3,500 people, including all of the soldiers in the garrison and 1,000 government officials, priests, and other dangerous civilians. The royalist governor of the town was beaten to death with his own wooden leg by soldiers who had heard a rumor that the leg would split open and spill hidden gold coins. Survivors of the massacre were shipped out and sold to plantations in Barbados.

“This is a righteous judgmen
t of God upon those barbarous wretches that have imbued their hands in so much innocent blood,” Cromwell declared. “And that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future.”
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Cromwell then moved south, where resistance from the port city of Wexford led to another slaughtered garrison and plundered town. As more towns fell to English sieges, the Irish people turned to guerrilla warfare. Called
“tories,” from the Irish
tóraidhe
, meaning “pursued man” (and later applied as an insult to all opponents of progress, such as American supporters of the Crown or the most conservative English political party),
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these insurgents stretched the war out until 1652. Cromwell left his army to clean up and returned to London.

Parliament now decided to break the Catholic hold on Ireland once and for all. English commissioners arrived to jail or execute rebels and priests and to confiscate their lands. Public practice of Catholicism was outlawed. The English drove the Irish off the fertile land, westward into the rocky part of the island, and redistributed the best land to Protestant landlords and retired veterans from England. Almost 40 percent of the farmland switched hands.
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The island’s population plummeted by 20 percen
t as hundreds of thousands of Irish died of hunger and disease during this upheaval. For the next three hundred years, Ireland remained a world of landless native peasants under the thumb of alien gentry.