The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (132 page)

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"The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones." (William Shakespeare,
Julius Caesar
, Act 3, Scene II)

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For example, standard reference works such as
The World Almanac
and Wikipedia meticulously list the number of American soldiers, sailors, and marines killed in each of America's wars, while ignoring civilian deaths among merchant seamen, passengers, refugees, runaway slaves, and, of course, Indians and settlers along the frontier.

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No one knows how many. Herodotus reported that the force numbered 2,640,000 soldiers and sailors, including 1,700,000 infantry, but no one believes it.

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If not
the
worst, then tied for first place with the loss of Kublai Khan's fleet by storm off the coast of Japan in 1281, which reportedly also killed 100,000.

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What made the Roman army so successful? First, the Romans were meticulous organizers who standardized every aspect of war-making—camping, supply, marching, pay, rewards, discipline—so that no mistakes or delays would keep them from getting at the enemy.

Second, they broke the solid phalanx that most armies used at that time into smaller blocks of several hundred men (maniples at first; cohorts after a major reorganization in 107 BCE) that could maneuver and adjust to circumstances on the battlefield more flexibly. These blocks were then assembled into legions of around 5,000 men apiece.

Roman soldiers usually began a battle by advancing calmly, tossing a volley of heavy javelins (
pila
; singular:
pilum
) into the massed enemy and then closing in with swords. The pila were so heavy that even if an enemy soldier blocked it with his shield, it would still imbed and drag the shield down with its extra weight.

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No one knows for sure what the thumb signals were. They are commonly labeled "thumbs up" and "thumbs down," but for all we know, they might have been "thumb extended" and "thumb retracted" instead. The direct evidence is vague. (Desmond Morris,
Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution
[New York: Scarborough, 1980], pp. 186–193)

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This ritual survived for centuries, oddly, in the Vatican, where a dead pope was traditionally tapped on the forehead with a silver hammer to make sure he's really dead.

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The highest elected official in the Roman Republic, a consul served as chief executive and supreme commander. There were always two consuls, and both were replaced every year so that they couldn't accumulate too much power. Other Roman magistrates (tribune, quaestor, aedile, praetor, for example, in roughly the ascending order of power) were also elected for one year and assigned lesser duties.

Everyone who served a term as a magistrate automatically earned a lifetime seat in the Senate, where the ultimate authority of the government lay. This meant that every member of the Senate had had at least one year of practical experience overseeing the unglamorous daily activities that kept the city and the empire operating smoothly, such as building and maintaining roads and sewers, collecting taxes, judging lawsuits, and commanding frontier garrisons.

This system kept power divided between many hands. It churned out large numbers of experienced administrators who could readily be assigned any task—military, civil, or judicial—with plenty of replacements on hand if they failed. Unfortunately, it also meant that there was no single head of state to keep ambitious politicians from killing each other to get ahead (literally—Roman politics was brutal). Over time, power in Rome tended to coalesce around factions and personalities rather than constitutional offices.

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Among the Roman forces in the southern theater, Lucius Cornelius Sulla emerged as a leader to rival Marius. They would eventually fight their own civil war over who ran Rome, and each would end up as dictator for a while.

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The Roman Senate officially assigned Caesar only four legions. After that, Caesar raised new legions himself, financed with the loot from Gaul.

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A possibly too detailed explanation of Chinese emperors' names:

First things first. In the Far East, the family name comes first. Wang Mang's father was Wang Wan. Mao Zedong's brother was Mao Zetan.

Emperors usually began life with a personal name, such as Liu Xiu, meaning Xiu of the Liu family. Later, as reigning emperors, they were known simply as the emperor or something like that. After they died, historians gave them a formal name by which they are known to posterity, such as Emperor Guangwu. The formal name often means something descriptive in Chinese, in this case "Complete-Martial." In every history book I've seen, these formal names pass into English without translation—Yuan, Cheng, Ai, Ping—but it might be easier for you to keep the characters straight if you think of them translated—Primary, Successful, Lamentable, Peaceful.

If it helps, just think of European history played out by characters named the Sun King and the Virgin Queen instead of Louis and Elizabeth.

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Not spades and knives
literally
. The ancient Chinese minted coins that were shaped like shovel heads and knife blades before settling on modern disk-shaped coinage.

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The other side of this wall is the third holiest site in Islam, so people will probably be fighting over it for the rest of human existence.

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The Chinese like precise numerical lists. We will see this tendency several times in this book.

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I never claimed popular imagination was very accurate.

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No account of the fall of Rome is complete without noting the irony of the last emperor being named after the founder of Rome plus the first emperor.

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Why did this shift take place? There is no easy answer. It would be nice if a new invention suddenly made cavalry superior to infantry, like maybe stirrups, which gave horsemen a sturdier platform for fighting, allowing them to shoot arrows with greater stability and to brace themselves to attack with a lance. Ancient cavalry lacked stirrups, but medieval horsemen had them—indeed, knights couldn't joust without stirrups. This means the stirrup arrived at some point in the early Dark Ages. If we could somehow prove that the Huns brought the stirrup to Europe, this would easily explain their military superiority and the fall of Rome in one simple lesson (stirrups!), which means we could knock off class early. This line of thought has tempted some historians into trying to identify stirrups in every stray scrap of metal found in Hunnish graves; unfortunately, adequate evidence of the stirrup doesn't show up in Europe until a few centuries too late for the Huns. (Otto Maenchen-Helfen,
World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973], pp. 206–207; Hildinger,
Warriors of the Steppe
, p. 19)

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Wendi translates as the "Civil" (
wen
) "Emperor" (
di
), but you'll find it easiest to remember his name if you pronounce it like the girl in
Peter Pan
or the fast-food hamburger chain.

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His formal posthumous name means the "Slothful" (
yang
) "Emperor" (
di
). Obviously, at some point, he annoyed the wrong Chinese historian.

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The main distinction being that it was usually illegal to rape your mule.

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I will discuss the details of the abolition movement in the chapter on the Atlantic slave trade.

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Ironically, because the Khitan briefly ruled part of China when the West first took an interest in the Far East, the English language originally named China after these non-Chinese people:
Cathay
.

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Probably not.

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This episode of cannibalism seems to be both the one thing that almost all Muslims know about the Crusades and the one thing that almost no Christians know about the Crusades. Once you understand that discrepancy, you will begin to see how difficult it is to write unbiased history. People retell the stories they like and forget the rest. By the way, this story isn't mere propaganda. At least three contemporary sources describe it, most plausibly in a report to the pope by a commander in the field. Most crusader cannibalism seems to have been the work of an armed mob of mad guerrilla pilgrims known as the
tafurs
, who often did this sort of thing just to be tough.