The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (98 page)

MISCELLANEOUS IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICTS:
2 million.

ETHNIC MULTICIDES:
74 million.

ECONOMICS:
154 million.

APPENDIX 1:
DISPUTING THE TOP ONE HUNDRED

Definition

What does it take to get on my list? I’ve put this off to the end because any useful definition will be so pedantic and confusing that it will scare you if I put it up front.

But here goes:

I count all of the deaths of living, breathing individuals that result from a specific outbreak of coordinated human violence and coercion, both directly (war, murder, execution) and indirectly (aggravated disease, avoidable famine), as long as they are the obvious result of the event. I count all deaths the same, whether military or civilian, malicious or accidental, negligent or authorized. I count only deaths that occur immediately or follow closely—no cancer deaths, no long-term complications from wounds, no suicides among haunted veterans, no unexploded ordinance that blows up farmers fifty years later.

I use a broad definition because I find it unseemly to bicker about whether some victims deserve more pity than others. If I counted only the deliberate killing of civilians while excluding the accidental killing of civilians, then I would be spending all my time trying to decide whether malice was intended. I might also find myself wondering why killing three thousand teenage conscripts in battle is morally acceptable while shooting a half-dozen political troublemakers in prison isn’t, or why deliberately shooting a few dozen prisoners of war is illegal while haphazardly bombing ten thousand civilians isn’t. That would change the subject of this book from history to philosophy. If you want philosophy, it’s two shelves over that way.

Runners-up and Disqualified

Some of you will wonder why certain terrible events don’t appear on my list. One of my guidelines is that I won’t be the first person ever to estimate a death toll, so a mere suspicion that a lot of people died carries less weight with me than a number—any number—suggested by a previous historian.

To head off these questions, here are some candidates that I’ve heard about over the years, along with a few that came close but didn’t make the final cut. Either they fell short of the minimum necessary death toll (300,000), or the numbers are unverified, or they simply don’t belong on the same list as Hitler, Idi Amin, and Chinggis Khan.

Trojan War:
According to an account supposedly written by a Trojan survivor named Dares, 866,000 Greeks and 676,000 Trojans were killed in the war.
¹
Archaeology has uncovered nothing to suggest that a war that large was fought on that site.

Sack of Seleucia (167 CE):
Avidius Cassius, a Roman general under Marcus Aurelius, is said to have massacred 300,000 to 400,000 residents of this Mesopotamian city; however, there are not enough supporting details.
²

Gothic War (269 CE):
Claudius II defeated the Goths, of whom 320,000 were slain.
³
This number is from the “notoriously unreliable”
⁴
Historia Augusta
.

Probus’s German War (277 CE):
During a crisis in the Roman Empire, several tribes of Germans moved across the border into Gaul. After driving them out, the new emperor, Probus, informed the Senate that he had killed 400,000 Germans. Also from the
Historia Augusta
.
⁵

Battle at Comnor (385 CE):
According to Mormon tradition, 2 million men (plus their women and children, which would bring the total to at least 6 million) were killed in a battle between Shiz and Coriantumr on the hill Comnor in upstate New York.
⁶
There is absolutely no evidence that this event happened, or that Shiz and Coriantumr even existed. See chapter 16 of Mark Twain’s
Roughing It
for a witty debunking.

Muslim Conquest of India (1000–1700):
In
The Story of Civilization
, Will Durant wrote that “the Mohammedan conquest of India was probably the bloodiest story in history.”
⁷
Koenraad Elst, “an acknowledge[d]—albeit controversial—scholar on the conservative Hindu Movements in India,”
⁸
has cited estimates that 50 million Hindus died in the Muslim conquest,
⁹
but that’s probably an exaggeration. Regardless of the death toll, this conquest is too long and sporadic to count as a single event.

Reconquista (1085–1492):
A long, nasty series of wars, the reconquest of Spain by the Christians of the north probably killed a lot of people; however, except for confusing references in old religious essays, I’ve never seen an estimate of the death toll.
¹⁰

Battle of Rio Salado, Portugal (1340):
It was said that 400,000 Moors were killed.
¹¹

Black Death (1347–51):
Bubonic plague was introduced to Europe when Mongols flung infected corpses over the wall of a besieged city; however, that’s not enough to count it as man-made.

Some Other Ghastly Thing in South Asia:
A lot of history has been forgotten, so probably some events are missing from my list simply because the records have been lost. Because India is the biggest region with the most poorly recorded history, it is the most likely venue for completely unknown megadeaths that killed millions.

Some Other Dreadful Thing in Pre-Colonial Africa or America:
One of the advantages of living in a society without a written language is that you don’t leave a paper trail when you commit crimes against humanity.

Sengoku Jidai (Age of Warring States in Japan, 1467–1603):
I looked into it, but all of the authorities describe the Samurai Wars as ritualistic, in which only the warrior caste was killed. Useful people, like peasants, craftsmen, and geishas, were left alone.
¹²

Waldenses (1545):
Protestant polemicists of the nineteenth century accused the Catholics of killing 900,000 Waldenses in thirty years, and the claim still shows up now and then,
¹³
but
The Cambridge Modern History
estimates a total of 3,000 massacred and twenty-two villages destroyed.
¹⁴

Witch Hunts (fifteenth to eighteenth century):
In the nineteenth century, it was commonly claimed that 9 million or so witches were killed across Europe in the witch hunts. This was based on taking the worst-known events in Germany and extrapolating for the entire continent. Modern research has shown that the continent-wide total was much lower, probably mere tens of thousands, but you still see the estimate of 9 million sometimes.
¹⁵

Franco-Dutch War (1672–78):
This was one of Louis XIV’s wars. Jack Levy (
War in the Modern Great Power System
) estimated a death toll of 342,000,
¹⁶
but his numbers tend to be higher than most for the wars of that era. Other sources (such as André Corvisier and John Childs,
A Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War
)
¹⁷
suggest this war was one-fourth as deadly as the War of the Spanish Succession, which would indicate a death toll of 175,000 or so.

War of the Grand Alliance (aka Nine Years War, aka War of the League of Augsburg, 1688–97):
This is another one of Louis XIV’s wars. Jack Levy estimated a death toll of 680,000,
¹⁸
but (see above) this is probably too high. Other sources suggest this war was one-third as deadly as the War of the Spanish Succession, which would indicate a death toll around 233,000.

Circassians (1763–1864):
The Russians fought a long, nasty war of conquest against the Circassians in the Caucasus Mountains, and hundreds of thousands were driven into exile. The surviving Circassians scattered around the world claim that anywhere from 300,000 to 1.5 million died, but I can’t find any reliable support or widespread agreement for these claims. I ran
circassian
and
genocide
through a giant news database and got no unbiased hits—no book reviews, no background to recent conflicts, no travel features, nothing.
¹⁹

Australian Aborigines (1788–1920):
The native population of the island continent is usually estimated as 300,000 originally, which then plummeted to 60,000 by 1920. That’s not quite enough to put it into my top one hundred, but less common estimates suggest that 600,000 natives may have died, most by disease.
²⁰

Thugs (until the nineteenth century):
The traditional number of victims murdered by this Indian cult of thieves is 2 million; however, Mike Dash’s recent book plausibly estimates only 50,000 victims.
²¹

Turks (1821–1921):
In response to Greek and Armenian accusations of genocide, the Turks have (a) denied doing anything wrong, and (b) counter-accused the Greeks and Armenians of genociding millions of Turks. Justin McCarthy
²²
claims that 5.5 million Ottoman Muslims were killed by various Christian oppressors in the last century of the Ottoman Empire. The massacres certainly went back and forth in each ethnic uprising, but there’s no convincing evidence that more than a few thousand noncombatant Turks were killed by angry minorities. I can find no unbiased historian who takes accusations of 5.5 million seriously. James J. Reid’s
Crisis of the Ottoman Empire
²³
has a brief rebuttal.

Irish Potato Famine (1845–49):
The causes of this famine are too complex to definitely call it an atrocity. I don’t usually count peacetime, non-Communist famines as full-fledged atrocities unless especially coercive circumstances set one apart from the rest. As far as I’m concerned, the only stand-alone, man-made famines worth discussing in this book are the famines of British India and the Iraq sanctions, but I’m setting my limit at two—no more.

Philippine-American War (1899–1901):
When the United States took the Philippines from Spain, the natives put up a fight. A few—
very
few—estimates of the death toll during the conquest/insurgency go into the neighborhood of 1 million or so. Most books on the subject blame it for something around 200,000 to 250,000 civilian deaths and around 20,000 combatants killed.
²⁴

Spanish Flu (1918–19):
Because the first outbreaks of the disease were spread via troop movements, some people want to add all of the flu deaths to the battle deaths of World War I, thereby raising the war’s death toll from 15 million to more than 35 million; however, I have never seen an actual, published history of the First World War do this. Epidemiologists seem to be the major proponents of this attitude, perhaps because it makes the flu an integral part of history rather than a sideshow, as it is usually depicted. My opinion is, yes, we should (and do) count the soldiers and refugees who died of the flu in the war zone, but obviously not the millions in China or India who died far from any battlefield long after the armistice.