The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (133 page)

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Confusing the issue is the ambiguity of Hitler's religion. In public, Hitler was a Catholic. He spoke kindly of Christ and was never excommunicated. Many of his followers proudly considered themselves to be Christians fighting against godless Communism. Whatever Hitler's long-term plans for Christianity may have been, he treated it more gently and with more respect than he did Communism, Judaism, or homosexuality.

Hitler's personal religion is hard to nail down. Hard-core Nazis preferred to label themselves
gottgläubiger
, "god-believers," as a formal break from Christianity, and the broad category that best fits Hitler is Deism, the belief in an impersonal higher power, based on reason and nature, without revelation or miracles. This puts him in the same general belief system as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson, although clearly at the other end of the moral spectrum.

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Recent scholarship tends to treat the Thugs mostly as bandit gangs with a lot of superstitions rather than as cultists; however, the traditional view considers human sacrifice to be the Thugs' primary motivation, so I have included them on this list. (Mike Dash,
Thug: The True Story of India's Murderous Cult
[London: Granta Books, 2005])

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Keep in mind that even with 16 million descendants, Genghis Khan hasn't replaced the number of people he killed.

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Don't look it up. It's not a real word. From the Greek,
polemos
, "war," and
philos
, "beloved," it means a nonprofessional who frequently reads, watches, and discusses war books, films, and articles—or more succinctly: a guy.

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For example, even though South Africa is a relatively hospitable habitat for horses, two-thirds of the half-million horses that the British army used to fight the Boers in 1899–1902 died in that war, most of them from overwork, disease, and malnutrition. (Keegan,
History of Warfare
[1993], pp. 187–188) During the American Civil War, approximately three horses died for every two men who did, even though this was an infantry war in which few horses were exposed directly to battle. (Margaret Elsinor Derry,
Horses in Society: A Story of Animal Breeding and Marketing, 1800–1920
[Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006], p. 121)

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And Kublai Khan wanted to capture this profitable region intact, so he was less destructive than his grandfather.

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His father admired the French, and nicknamed his son after them.

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In Joan's entourage rode Gilles de Rais, marshal of France, earning glory as one of his nation's greatest warriors, but he eventually earned greater fame as one of the deadliest serial killers in human history. After retiring from military service to his estates in 1435, he began kidnapping, sodomizing, and disemboweling young boys. When he was caught in 1440, he confessed in vivid and convincing detail to 150 murders. He was quickly tried, convicted, and strangled, although the heresy and ritual blasphemy he committed during his murders shocked his contemporaries more than the murders themselves. All in all, a savage footnote to a savage era. (Wilson,
Mammoth Book of the History of Murder
, pp. 51–59)

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Timur was unique in allowing women to fight in his army, but probably not too many. (Marozzi,
Tamerlane
, p. 102)

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Like most quotes from history, we don't have this on tape or written in Simon's own hand, so half the historians you ask will swear he never said any such thing.

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However, this is not why we call a padded footstool an ottoman.

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Most of the big, tasty animals in the Americas went extinct as soon as the first people arrived. There's probably a connection.

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The gold was actually panned from river deposits.

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Shells were used as currency in Africa. Some people today might take the attitude of how silly it was to sell humans in exchange for worthless trinkets like shells, but when you get down to it, shells are no more intrinsically worthless than, say, gold. After all, aside from being pretty and shiny, what good is gold? In fact, shells have a lot in common with gold. Both are easy to identify, hard to fake, rare enough to be valuable, but common enough to be used as a medium of exchange.

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This sounds like wage labor was even more cruel than slavery. Well, yes, it was, except that free laborers were allowed to get married, keep their children, fight back, go to court, go to school, go to church, avoid church, save money, spend money, drink beer, drink whiskey, drink too much, read, move, and own their own pants. But, yes, aside from all that . . .

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For the record, the Southern Baptists are no longer in favor of slavery. They renounced it in 1995.

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The key word is
usually
. This is not a list of who
deserves
the most blame. Custer is the most notorious Indian killer in American history, but he was hardly the worst. He has come to exemplify the American side of the Indian Wars, but his unpardonable sin wasn't shooting up the odd Indian village here and there; it was getting beaten. Andrew Jackson killed more, but he won all of his battles, so he's on the twenty-dollar bill.

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Did the Europeans deliberately spread smallpox among the Indians? Most rumors of this appeared long after the alleged events. The only actual documentation of such a thing is an exchange of letters among British authorities in 1761 exploring the possibility of giving the enemy tribes blankets from smallpox patients. Whether they actually went through with this scheme is not recorded. A smallpox epidemic certainly hit the target Indians soon after, but the very fact that there were convenient smallpox patients in the hospital shows that the disease was already on hand, spreading through traditional human contact.

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In the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the UN defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Keep in mind that this definition was created for legal, not academic, purposes. It was enacted to enable prosecutions, not to understand the phenomenon.

For my purposes, the UN definition is too broad in theory (almost every conflict in history can be described as "intent to destroy, . . . in part, a national . . . group . . . [by] [c]ausing serious bodily . . . harm to members") and too narrow in practice (every decision to officially label an atrocity as "genocide" has to clear an almost hopeless number of political hurdles—only the Holocaust and the mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda have been recognized by international courts as genocides).

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Nanda Bayin has become legendary for his dangerous mood swings. There are Internet claims (for example, Wikipedia and Snopes as of September 2008) that he literally died laughing in 1599 when a visiting Italian merchant told him that Venice was a kingdom without a king, but according to George Sale's
Universal History
(1759, vol. 7, p. 111), the hilarity of this discovery merely caused a coughing fit that "for some time hindered him to speak."

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A second outcome of Henry's jousting accident is that a few lines of mystic gibberish by an astrologer visiting at court seemed to have predicted it. This brought the author of the verse, who went by the name Nostradamus, instant fame as everybody scrambled to search his verses for other useful predictions such as winning lottery numbers.

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The nobility of Poland preferred to choose weak foreigners as their kings in order to keep any local family from gaining a political advantage. Catherine de Medici had lobbied to get her unemployed son this cushy job.

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God only knows who his father was.

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Anabaptism is exactly the kind of Christianity you would expect from peasants. It preaches equality, peace, simplicity, sharing, and other ideas that appeal to people on the bottom of the social pyramid. Obviously the authorities can't allow dangerous notions like this to spread. Anabaptists are rare today. We met them in an earlier chapter as the Mennonites, one of the first groups to speak out against slavery. Only a million or so Mennonites exist worldwide.

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This is an important, though often overlooked, aspect of empire-building. History is replete with uprisings that could have been avoided if the conquerors had simply known in advance all of the odd little taboos and quirks of their subject population and thereby avoided unintentionally offensive behavior such as exposing the wrong body part or trying to feed the wrong kind of animal to a native. It's always a good idea to get some practice running a small starter colony before you set out for world domination.

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I'm trying to keep these narratives readable by not naming every place or player in the story. I wouldn't want you to get overwhelmed. Sometimes it's a tough call deciding whether to label "the chief minister" or "the general's wife" generically, or to give them names.

In any case, the most important thing to remember about Dorgon is that, unlike his fellow Manchus, he has a great name for a barbarian warlord. Go on; say it out loud: "Dorgon the Barbarian."

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Zheng Chenggong is known in Western literature as Coxinga, based on his nickname, Guoxingye, "Imperial Namekeeper."

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These cavalrymen actually wore gigantic wings as part of their uniform. It was the era in which looking awesome was more important than practicality.

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There's a tendency by later generations and by foreigners at the time to treat Peter's beard laws as a joke, but hair and clothing are key expressions of culture. Forty years ago, long hair on a male was a stomping offense in some places, and more recently I heard that "a Nevada school district agreed to pay $400,000 to a Muslim girl and her friend over allegations that other students threatened to kill her in the stairwell for wearing a religious head scarf and the staff did nothing to stop it." (Fox News, April 8, 2009)

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More examples of a family tree that didn't branch: his mother's parents were first cousins; his mother's father's parents were first cousins; his father's father's parents were uncle and niece. I found eleven distinct paths (probably more) by which he was descended from Joanna the Mad of Castille, which couldn't have been a good sign.

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Now it looks like the most boring answer has been right all along, and the missing dauphin had simply died in prison. In 2000, a desiccated heart that had been spirited away during a 1795 prison autopsy of a young prisoner and passed around royalist circles for two centuries proved to have the same mitochondrial DNA as a preserved lock of the queen's hair. This should have clinched it, except that gaps in the chain of evidence have left enough room for suspicions that the heart might have once resided inside some other member of the royal family instead. (Jan Bondeson,
The Great Pretenders: The True Stories behind Famous Historical Mysteries
[New York: W. W. Norton, 2004]; Nadya Labi, "Requiem for a Dauphin. DNA Analysis Reveals That the Young Heir to the French Throne Left to Die in Prison Was No Impostor,"
Time
, May 1, 2000)

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If you're American, you've heard of Zuo Zongtang (Tso Tsung-t'ang in old-style transcription). He's General Tso of take-out fame. No one knows why little chunks of deep fried chicken are named after this Qing general. The more entertaining but less likely possibility is that Chinese refugees settling in America in the late nineteenth century displayed a bit of gallows humor concerning the traditional Chinese form of execution—the Death by a Thousand Cuts. (You would look like this chicken when General Tso was done with you.) Unfortunately, it's more likely that the dish was invented in Manhattan in the 1970s and named randomly after a famous Chinese hero. (Michael Browning, "Who Was General Tso and Why Are We Eating His Chicken?"
Washington Post
, April 17, 2002)

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The earth was crawling with emperors in those days. They ruled Russia, Brazil, Japan, Austria, China, and other places, which meant that a mere queen like Victoria, ruler of the most powerful nation on earth, wouldn't be allowed to sit at the big table if they all got together. It got even worse in 1871, when the lowly king of Prussia was proclaimed emperor of a freshly united Germany. As Victoria fell further behind in the title race, this insulting state of affairs had to be corrected, but they couldn't just bump England from kingdom to empire with a snap of the fingers. Disraeli had to find Victoria something big and impressive to become empress of. Aha! India! It took effect on January 1, 1877.