The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (106 page)

3.
Riasanovsky,
History of Russia, p. 156.

4.
Dunning,
Short History of Russia's First Civil War,
pp. 43–44.

5.
Harold Fisher,
The Famine in Soviet Russia, 1919–1923: The Operations of the American Relief Administration (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), p. 475.

6.
Riasanovsky,
History of Russia, p. 160.

7.
Dunning,
Short History of Russia's First Civil War, pp. 150–158.

8.
Ibid., pp. 164–166.

9.
Ibid., p. 277.

10.
Ibid., p. 45.

11.
Ibid., pp. 83–90.

12.
Ibid., pp. 75–82; Riasanovsky,
History of Russia, pp. 157–160, 172–174.

Thirty Years War

1.
Pratt,
Battles That Changed History, pp. 158–159.

2.
Fuller,
Military History of the Western World, p. 74.

3.
Schiller,
History of the Thirty Years' War, p. 144.

4.
Hollway, "Thirty Years' War: Battle of Breitenfeld."

5.
Britt et al.,
Dawn of Modern Warfare, pp. 44–45.

6.
Ibid., pp. 47–48.

7.
Fuller, in
Military History of the Western World, estimated 350,000. Corvisier and Childs, in
A Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War, p. 469, estimated 600,000 military deaths.

8.
Wedgwood,
Thirty Years War, pp. 399–401.

9.
Ibid., pp. 399–400.

10.
J. F. (John Frederic Charles) Fuller,
The Conduct of War: A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, and Russian Revolutions (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p.15.

11.
Wedgwood,
Thirty Years War (1938): Population declined from 21 million to 13.5 million.

12.
Geoffrey Parker,
The Thirty Years' War (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 188: Population declined from 20 million to 16 million or 17 million.

13.
A glance at some tertiary sources will show the relative support for the different numbers: Davies,
Europe, p. 568 (lost 8 million); Richard S. Dunn,
The Age of Religious Wars 1559–1715, 2d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979) (lost 7 million to 8 million); McFarlane,
Savage Wars of Peace (7.5 million); John Landers,
The Field and the Forge (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 352 (5 million to 6 million); McEvedy,
Atlas of World Population History, p. 68, "Germany" (modern boundaries) (2 million). For what it's worth, if we use the trick discussed elsewhere, the geometric mean of the highest (12 million) and the lowest (3 million) numbers is 6 million.

14.
Michael Burger,
The Shaping of Western Civilization: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 232–236; Scott A. Merriman,
Religion and the Law in America: An Encyclopedia of Personal Belief and Public Policy, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), pp. 84–89.

Collapse of the Ming Dynasty

1.
Spence,
Search for Modern China, pp. 21–22.

2.
Paul E. Schellinger and Robert M. Salkin, eds.,
International Dictionary of Historic Places, vol. 5:
Asia and Oceania (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1996), p. 424; Henry Smith Williams,
The Historians' History of the World: A Comprehensive Narrative . . . , vol. 24 (New York: Trow Press, 1909), p. 554.

3.
Spence,
Search
for Modern China, pp. 20–21.

4.
Frederic Wakeman Jr., "The Shun Interregnum of 1644," in Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Willis, eds.,
From Ming to Ch'ing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 43–52.

5.
Spence,
Search for Modern China, p. 24.

6.
Clements,
Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, pp. 99–108.

7.
Frederic Wakeman Jr.,
Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of the Imperial Order in Seventeenth Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 507.

8.
Spence,
Search for Modern China, p. 22.

9.
"Skeletons of Massacre Victims Uncovered at Construction Site,"
Shanghai Star, April 11, 2002, app1.chinadaily.com.cn/star/2002/0411/cn8-3.html.

10.
Spence,
Search for Modern China, p. 37.

11.
Ibid., p. 38.

12.
"Chang Hsien-chung," in
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 3, p. 83.

13.
McEvedy,
Atlas of World Population History; McFarlane,
Savage Wars of Peace.

14.
See Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai,
Kagemusha,
Ran,
The Hidden Fortress,
Throne of Blood,
Yojimbo, and
Rashomon. Really. Go see them. They're great films.

15.
Spence,
Search for Modern China, p. 23.

Cromwell's Invasion of Ireland

1.
David Lawrence Smith,
A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603–1707: The Double Crown (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998), p. 416 (population declined from 2.1 million in 1641 to 1.7 million in 1672); Fuller,
Military History of the Western World, vol. 2, p. 112 (500,000 lives lost).

2.
Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches: Including the Supplement to the First Edition. With Elucidation. by Thomas Carlyle, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859), p. 493.

3.
Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches: With Elucidation. by Thomas Carlyle, vol. 1 (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845), pp. 383–384.

4.
Garth Stevenson,
Parallel Paths: The Development of Nationalism in Ireland and Quebec (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006), p. 29.

5.
Norman Davies,
The Isles: A History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 594.

Aurangzeb

1.
Two million by famine, plus 100,000 soldiers annually for twenty-six years. Originally estimated by Niccolao Manucci (
Mogul India, p. 96), a Venetian mercenary, physician, and diplomat living in India at the time.

2.
Gascoigne,
Great Moguls, p. 229.

3.
Keay,
India, pp. 342–343.

4.
Ibid., p. 361.

5.
Ibid., p. 353.

6.
Ibid., p. 357.

7.
Manucci's estimate (
Mogul India, p. 96) is repeated with almost no skepticism by Wolpert,
New History of India, p. 167; Hansen,
Peacock Throne, pp. 477–478; and Clodfelter,
Warfare and Armed Conflicts, vol. 1, p. 56.

Great Turkish War

1.
Levy,
War in the Modern Great Power System.

2.
Goodwin,
Lords of the Horizon, pp. 228–236; Palmer,
Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 8–15.

3.
"Hungarian Hero to Be Commemorated,"
Turkish Daily News, September 12, 2005.

4.
Robert A. Selig, "Carlowitz, the Rakoczi Revolt, and the Origins of German Settlement in Hungary,"
German Life, March 31, 1999.

Peter the Great

1.
Sequential censuses showed a decrease in the tax-paying population of Russia during Peter's reign of around 20 percent, but there's no agreement on how to turn this into absolute population figures. According to George Vernadsky (
Kievan Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), pp. 103–104), Russian historian Pavel N. Miliukov estimated that the population of Russia declined from 16 million in 1676 (rough guess) to 13 million in 1725 (well documented), but another Russian historian, P. P. Smirnov, disputes the beginning population of 16 million, arguing instead for a stagnant population of 13 million throughout Peter's reign rather than an actual decline.

2.
Klyuchevsky,
Peter the Great, pp. 112–120.

3.
Ibid.,
p. 143.

4.
Ibid., pp. 149–150.

5.
Ibid., pp. 145–146.

6.
Ibid., pp. 39–44.

7.
Farquhar,
Treasury of Royal Scandals, pp. 115–119.

Great Northern War

1.
Three hundred thousand military deaths, including 70,000 killed in battle (Urlanis,
Wars and Population, pp. 45, 226) plus 70,000 civilian Finns. Clodfelter, in
Warfare and Armed Conflicts, vol. 1, p. 94, goes even higher and estimates that the war killed 350,000 Swedes and Finns, soldiers and civilians—plus even more among the other participants.

2.
Rick Tapio and Laitala Vincent, "War and the Great Wrath,"
Finnish American Reporter 8 (February 28, 1995), p. 23; Eric Solsten and Sandra W. Meditz, eds.,
Finland: A Country Study (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office for the Library of Congress, 1988).

3.
Fuller,
Military History of the Western World, vol. 2, pp. 161–186; Fuller,
Strategy and Power in Russia; Klyuchevsky,
Peter the Great, pp. 62–71.

War of the Spanish Succession

1.
Urlanis, in
Wars and Population, estimated 700,000 soldiers dead (p. 226), including 235,000 killed in combat (p. 45); Corvisier and Childs, in
Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War, estimated 700,000 military dead on all sides (p. 469), or 500,000 French lives, including both military and civilian (p. 470). Bodart, in
Losses of Life in Modern Wars (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1916), p. 30, estimated 400,000 military dead. Clodfelter, in
Warfare and Armed Conflicts, vol. 1, p. 73, agrees that 400,000 died.

2.
Rowen,
History of Early Modern Europe, p. 538.

3.
Bell,
First Total War, p. 25.