The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (5 page)

There was more to come. Most of the stories of King Zheng’s youth involved him narrowly surviving or cleverly discovering assassination plots. One assassin, the courtier Jing Ke, was revealed when a dagger fell out of the map he was unrolling. A blind lute player, Gao Jianli, tried clobbering Zheng with a lead-weighted lute when he got close enough, but he missed. A lesser man than King Zheng would have turned reclusive and twitchy by this point, but a lesser man would never have earned a place in history by uniting the Warring States.

By the age of thirty, Zheng had become the undisputed master of his kingdom. His mother was helpless in exile. Prime Minister Lu Buwei had been forced to commit suicide. All other ministers were cowed. In one final, busy decade, the kingdom of Qin swept the board clean. Han fell in 230 BCE, Wei in 225 BCE. Qin then conquered Chu (223 BCE), Yan and Zhao (both 222 BCE), and Qi (221 BCE), completing the unification of China. Zheng took a new title, First Emperor; his story continues in a later chapter (see “Qin Shi Huang Di”).

FIRST PUNIC WAR

Death toll:
400,000
¹

Rank:
81

Type:
hegemonial war

Broad dividing line:
Rome vs. Carthage

Time frame:
264–241 BCE

Location:
western Mediterranean

Who usually gets the most blame:
Carthage (a classic example of the winners writing the history books)

Another damn:
Roman conquest

A
BOATLOAD OF UNEMPLOYED MERCENARIES CALLED THE MAMERTINES
seized Messina in Sicily, murdering the town’s leaders and taking their women for themselves. That was bad enough, but then the Mamertines began raiding some of their neighbors for loot and extorting from the rest. Sicily was mostly under the local control of tribes and city-states, but Carthage and Syracuse had staked out large spheres of influence, and Roman-ruled Italy was within shouting distance across the straight from Messina. All three major powers in the region wanted to drive the Mamertines out and restore the peaceful status quo, but politics complicated the situation. When Syracuse moved to attack the freebooters, Carthage naturally took the other side. Then the Mamertines worried that the price for Carthaginian help was too high, so they asked Rome to help them get rid of the Carthaginians. This quickly escalated into a general war for control of Sicily.
²

The Roman army—veterans toughened by the conquest of Italy—won almost every land battle in Sicily, but the Carthaginian navy was far superior in numbers, seamanship, and boatbuilding to anything the Romans could launch. As a result, they could land fresh mercenary armies anywhere on the island and intercept Roman reinforcements being shipped over from the mainland. It created a stalemate.
*

The Romans soon came up with new naval tactics that played to their strengths. They turned sea battles into land battles by inventing the corvus (crow), a pivoted and hinged gangplank located at the front of the boat. Rather than rely on the difficult tactic of ramming enemy ships, the Romans used grappling hooks to drag their ship alongside a target ship. Then the corvus dropped, its spike crashing down and hooking through the deck of the enemy ship. Then heavily armed Roman soldiers rushed across the plank to slaughter the crew.

In 255 BCE, after securing Sicily and clearing the Carthaginians off the sea, the Romans landed an army in North Africa, but they were stopped by the powerful walls around the city of Carthage. Then a freshly hired army of Greek mercenaries and war elephants landed and beat the Romans. The Romans evacuated the survivors from Africa, but a sudden storm hit, sinking 248 ships of the Roman fleet off Cape Pachynus, sending 100,000 rowers, marines, and soldiers to the bottom.
³
It was the worst maritime disaster in human history.
*

The war then returned to Sicily. Now the Romans had the advantage on both land and sea, but two more unexpected storms destroyed two more Roman fleets in quick succession, giving the Carthaginians an opportunity to hold the Romans to a stalemate. Finally, in 241 BCE, by the Aegates Islands off western Sicily, the Romans destroyed the Carthaginian fleet, which was bringing supplies to the army. With their last army trapped and starving, Carthage agreed to peace on Roman terms, which included reparations, ransom, and Sicily.

QIN SHI HUANG DI

Death toll:
a million
¹

Rank:
46

Type:
despot

Broad dividing line:
First Emperor vs. tradition

Time frame:
221–210 BCE

Location:
China

Who usually gets the most blame:
Qin Shi Huang Di (born Zheng)

The First Emperor

Once Zheng became lord of all China, he invented a brand new title by which he is known to history: First (Shi) August (Huang) Emperor (Di) of China (Qin).

At his side, Prime Minister Li Si set new standards for all of the conniving, ruthless chief counselors in history. Li Si had very definite ideas on how to remodel China into a peaceful and orderly empire for all eternity. He had the ear of the First Emperor and plenty of suggestions. For the most part, these reforms spread Qin’s well-established totalitarian system into the newly conquered lands.

To keep power out of the hands of ambitious nobles, Shi Huang Di broke up the old aristocracy and abolished feudalism. After collecting weapons from the defeated nobles, he divided his domain into thirty-six commanderies run by officials he appointed. For each commandery, the First Emperor had three autonomous officials running part of the government: a governor running the civil branch, an independent military commander, and an inspector to spy on the other two. For lower jobs, he created a professional civil service that was filled by applicants who had passed impartial tests of their education.

To spread unity across the previously warring states, the First Emperor reduced all regional variations to one official version of everything. He standardized Chinese writing to the system in use today. He reissued money and decreed one system of weights and measurement. He required all wagons to have the same axle length so they would fit on the new roads he built all over China, roads that made it easier for him to rush his armies to any hot spot.

Whenever Shi Huang Di tried to make changes, academics fussed and insisted that there was no precedent—the law forbade it. Well, the obvious solution was to remove all those pesky precedents and start from scratch. He ordered every book in China brought to him, and he had all of them, except for a few technical manuals, burned. When scholars howled at this, he buried 460 of them alive so he wouldn’t have to listen to their howling anymore. Many years later, after Shi Huang Di was safely gone, scholars gathered and tried to write down whatever they could remember of the lost literature.
²

Sealing Himself In

The First Emperor needed to protect the northern frontier against raids by the nomadic horsemen known as the Xiongnu (who were once believed to have been forerunners of the Huns, but now are not). He connected several local walls that blocked strategic passes into one big wall dividing the known world into Us and Them. To build this wall, he sent a general to the frontier with 300,000 soldiers and a million conscripted laborers, most of whom were said to have died in the construction. A steady flow of workmen traveled north to replace the dead. Legend says that every stone in the wall cost a human life.

The purpose of the Great Wall wasn’t to keep the Xiongnu from crossing. It was easy enough for them to prop a ladder up against any long unmanned stretch. But they couldn’t get horses up the ladder and over the wall, so they would have to invade China on foot, without the military advantage that made them so formidable.

Although Shi Huang Di was the first to build
a
Great Wall of China, he didn’t build
the
Great Wall of China. The wall has been expanded, dismantled, neglected, and rebuilt so many times in the past two thousand years that the current wall stretching across north China is newer—a mere five hundred years old or so—and often follows a very different path than the original.
³

Search for the Secret of Eternal Life

When he gave himself the title of First Emperor, Shi Huang Di intended that all subsequent emperors would continue the naming scheme. His son would become Er Shi Huang Di (Second Emperor), followed by the Third, Fourth, and so on. However, deep down, Shi Huang Di really wanted to become the Only Emperor. He spent a great deal of effort seeking immortality.

The court alchemist told the emperor that mercury was the key to eternal life, and provided him with potions that would grant him eternal life. Shi Huang Di also sent the Taoist sorcerer Xu Fu to search eastward for the secret of immortality. The Eight Immortals, Taoist saints who had learned the secrets of the universe, were said to live on Penglai Mountain beyond the eastern seas. Xu Fu was given a fleet of sixty ships, five thousand crewmen, accompanied by three thousand virgin boys and girls because it was believed that their purity would aid the quest. Several years after he had disappeared over the horizon, Xu Fu returned and reported that a large and frightening sea monster blocked the way, so Shi Huang Di sent a boatload of archers to kill the monster. Then Xu Fu tried again, but he was never heard from again.

Modern historians trying to make sense of this tale suggest that Xu Fu simply discovered Japan and settled down. Archaeology shows that Chinese culture began to appear in Japan around this time.
⁴

Failure in the Search for Eternal Life

When Shi Huang Di died in 210 BCE on a tour of the provinces—possibly poisoned by the mercury in his magic elixirs—Li Si kept the news secret for two months until he could return to the capital and tie up some loose ends. Among them, he had to strip command from a dangerously conservative general and to force Shi Huang Di’s eldest son to commit suicide. To keep the empire from dissolving into chaos, Li Si kept up a pretense of a live ruler by arriving at the emperor’s carriage every day and ducking behind the curtain to consult with him. A wagonload of fish joined the entourage to disguise the smell of the emperor’s corpse.
⁵

The First Emperor had begun building his tomb many years earlier, employing seven hundred thousand workmen on the project and working many of them to death. The tomb complex measured three miles across, reputedly protected with booby-trapped crossbows. To protect the secret locations, the men who installed these were locked in the tomb as well. In 1974, excavation uncovered an underground army of eight thousand terra cotta statues of soldiers guarding the tomb, and that may be only a small part of treasures buried there. The tomb is reputed to contain a replica of the world floating in a sea of mercury, and a 2006 soil analysis suggests that a substantial amount of mercury is still buried in the unexcavated section.
⁶

Once Li Si removed all of the conservatives from any possible influence over the succession, he announced the death of the emperor and allowed the throne to pass to a prince who agreed with all of the radical changes of the previous decade. Er Shi Huang Di (the Second Emperor), however, ruled only a few years before China fell into civil war.

How Bad Was He?

As with most ancient individuals, there are only a handful of original sources, all filtered through centuries of copying and recopying, censoring, fictionalizing, moralizing, and sensationalizing, so there’s a very good chance that everything we know about Shi Huang Di is wrong, or at least more complicated than we are led to believe. If you go around burying scholars alive, you won’t fare well in the writings of subsequent scholars.
⁷

We can’t be certain how many people he killed, but for the sake of ranking, I’m following the common accusation of a million.