The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (16 page)

JUSTINIAN

Death toll:
zillions

Rank:
59

Type:
despot

Broad dividing line:
Romans vs. barbarians (rematch)

Time frame:
ruled 527–65

Location:
Mediterranean

Major state participants:
Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, Gothic kingdom, Vandal kingdom

Who usually gets the most blame:
Justinian and Theodora

Life at Court

Procopius, the official historian in the court of Emperor Justinian in Constantinople, kept two sets of books. By day he wrote public histories that showered praise on the emperor, but at night he would pull out his secret history and describe what
really
happened. Much of what we think we know about this era depends on whether you consider Procopius a liar.
¹

Justinian was born in 483 to a peasant family somewhere in the Balkans, and he always spoke the Eastern Empire’s Greek
with a barbarous accent. Justinian would have passed unknown to history if his Uncle Justin hadn’t joined the palace guard in Constantinople and worked his way up through the ranks to become commander. From there, Uncle Justin easily made himself emperor in 518 when the old emperor died childless.

Having no children himself, Justin adopted his nephew Justinian as his chief assistant and heir. As Justin tottered into senility, Justinian became the true ruler of the empire long before he officially inherited the throne at the age of forty-four.

Justinian’s wife, Empress Theodora, has been reviled across history for her sexuality. According to Procopius, she worked her way up from being a child prostitute to performing live sex acts on stage, eventually becoming a high-class courtesan, where she caught the eye and other anatomical parts of the heir apparent. Procopius spares us no detail of her sexual escapades. When Edward Gibbon wrote his chapter dealing with Theodora, he was too embarrassed to actually describe her activities in common English. Instead, he cloaks her tales from innocent eyes with quotations in raw Greek and commentary in Latin.
²

According to less interesting (and probably more accurate) historians, however, she was an ordinary actress with a talent for comedy and uninhibited sexy roles. The daughter of the circus bear keeper, Theodora was in her mid-twenties, with at least one child out of wedlock, when she became involved with the middle-aged Justinian. When he ascended the throne, she moved up with him. Justinian considered her a valuable partner, and all imperial edicts were issued in both their names.
³

Life among the high and mighty in Constantinople involved the usual collection of plots, schemes, and assassinations. Theodora set a standard of easy sexuality among the ruling class, and she was the only person at court to show a backbone when the Nika riots swept the capital and left tens of thousands dead. Thanks to Procopius, we have a vivid record of it all, and it would make a great television series; however, most sober, sensible history books concentrate on the less sordid asp
ects of Justinian’s reign:

•
He thoroughly codified Roman law, which has formed the basis of European law ever since.

•
He built the Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople, one of the architectural marvels of the world.

•
He put the finishing touches on orthodox Christianity and erased the last traces of Mediterranean paganism.

•
Bubonic plague arrived in Europe for the first time and in just a few years wiped out as much as one-fourth of the people in the Mediterranean area.

But since this book deals with massive man-made death and destruction, let’s skip all that and follow his armies west. Justinian maintained an aggressive foreign policy designed to turn back the clock to the glory days of the Roman Empire, and that’s where he racked up his highest body counts.

Western Wars (535–554)

Justinian has a reputation among historians for picking extremely talented assistants, seemingly from out of the blue. Early in his reign, he began to favor a junior officer on the Persian front, Belisarius, with promotions over more experienced officers. Belisarius never let him down. Now Belisarius launched an armada against the Vandal kingdom in North Africa, with 15,000 ground forces, 32,000 sailors, his wife Antonina as his right-hand administrator, and the historian Procopius as his spymaster.

The Romans landed on the desert coast, far from the center of Vandal power, but Belisarius quickly rolled over all resistance and took Carthage. He crossed the first enemy kingdom off his list and returned home to bask in the appreciation of his sovereign.
⁴
In Belisarius’s triumphal parade he carried the solid gold menorah that Titus had taken to Rome and the Vandals had relayed to Carthage. Afraid of the curse that seemed to follow the temple treasury everywhere it went, Justinian returned it to Jerusalem, and that’s the last anyone has heard of it.

The Gothic War

Within a year, Belisarius was back in the West to put down a mutiny of the troops he had left in charge of Africa. Then he turned toward the Gothic kingdom of Italy and systematically worked his way northward. Palermo was taken with a sea assault. Naples fell soon afterward when the Romans snuck past the Gothic defenses and into the city through an abandoned aqueduct.
⁵

The pope threw open the gates of Rome to Belisarius, but in December 536 the Goths arrived and besieged the Roman force inside Rome. Neither side had enough troops to cover the twelve miles of walls that surrounded the city, so the siege was rather Homeric, with skirmishes and sorties on the open land outside guarded gates, while spies and agents could easily sneak in and out to gather intelligence and arrange betrayals.

The Roman position inside the city deteriorated as supplies dwindled, but so did the condition of the besieging Goths. The siege could have gone either way, until Antonina and Procopius recruited fresh troops in Naples and hurried north to reinforce Belisarius. In February, Gothic King Witigis called a time-out to negotiate a compromise, but Belisarius stalled and used the three-month armistice to move troops within striking distance of the Gothic capital at Ravenna.

Justinian now worried that his general was getting too powerful, so he sent another army from Constantinople under the eunuch Narses to coordinate with Belisarius. Although Narses had no military experience, he proved surprisingly adept. He fought his way up the Lombard plain and took Milan, which he then left in the hands of a subordinate.

Unfortunately, having two headstrong generals in joint command of the same army confused their subordinates. When a Gothic counterattack besieged Milan and brought it to the brink of starvation, the nearby Roman relief force wouldn’t budge until orders arrived from both Belisarius and
Narses
.

By then it was too late. Gothic King Witigis had offered safe passage to the Roman general inside Milan if he surrendered, but this offer did not extend to the city’s civilians, whom Witigis planned to punish for betraying him. The Roman general tried to reject the offer, but his soldiers were hungry and forced him to accept. As the Roman garrison abandoned Milan, the Goths moved in and destroyed the city, slaughtering all of the men—300,000, according to contemporary histories—and dragging off the women.

Another Gothic War

By now Italy was so devastated that it needed time to recover before anyone would consider
it worth fighting over again. Everyone with weapons came to an agreement about who got control of what, and they all returned to their corners to catch their breath.

In 541, Totila, Gothic king of Italy, resumed the war and scored a three-year winning streak, so Justinian sent Belisarius back to Italy for a second round. As the armies attacked back and forth, the city of Rome switched hands several times, until finally in 548, Belisarius got caught on the wrong side of palace intrigues in Constantinople and was pushed into retirement.

The eunuch Narses arrived to take over the war in 552. He killed Totila in battle and retook Rome. The next king of the Goths was also defeated and killed the next year. Taking advantage of the chaos, the Franks and Alamanni invaded Italy from the north in August 553. Narses defeated them as well and settled the remnant of the invading horde in Italy. Finally, with the Romans in control of the situation, the war came to an end.

Death Toll

Procopius claimed that Justinian killed a myriad myriads of myriads in total across his entire reign, which, when translated literally from Greek, means 10,000
³
, or 1 trillion people.
⁶
Since a myriad cubed is over a hundred times the population of the planet today, Procopius is probably mistaken. In the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, Edward Gibbon suggests that one of those myriads accidentally snuck in and should be ignored, reducing the total dead from war, pestilence, and famine under Justinian to a mere 100 million.

Generations of historians have accepted
Gibbon’s compromise as true, and I found nineteenth-century authors who put Justinian into the standardized list of monsters in history.
⁷
However, the original population of the Eastern Roman Empire wasn’t big enough to lose 100 million. Modern historians believe it began with around 26 million people (not counting Italy and Tunisia), and much of the authenticated population decline under Justinian came from bubonic plague.
⁸

Procopius also claims that raiding by Slavs and Avars into the Balkans removed 200,000 inhabitants from the Eastern Roman Empire every year, through either death or slavery, which would come to a total toll of 6.4 million people throughout Justinian’s thirty-two-year reign. Gibbon, for one, doubts that number since the area under attack probably couldn’t even support that many people.
⁹

According to Procopius, 5 million died in the African war and 15 million in the Italian war. Every historian—even the ones who are ca
utious about throwing numbers around—agrees that Italy was devastated by the reconquest. For the sake of ranking, I’m blaming Justinian’s western wars for three-quarters of a million deaths. This comes to 15 percent of the 5 million people who probably lived in Italy and Tunisia.
¹⁰
It’s just a guess.

GOGURYEO-SUI WARS

Death toll:
600,000
¹

Rank:
67

Type:
wars of conquest

Broad dividing line:
Sui China vs. Goguryeo

Time frame:
598 and 612

Location:
Korea

Who usually gets the most blame:
China

A
FTER A FEW CENTURIES OF DIVISION, CHINA WAS REUNITED UNDER THE
Sui dynasty, but the northern Korean kingdom of Goguryeo decided to raid across the border one last time before the new rulers got organized. The Chinese emperor responsible for the reunification, Wendi,
*
was furious and retaliated in 598 with a massive invasion designed to conquer Korea all the way down to the tip. He sent an army of 300,000 across the Liao River, Goguryeo’s Manchurian border, and down the Korean peninsula toward the capital at Pyongyang. The invasion went very badly. The Chinese apparently forgot that July and August are the rainy season in Manchuria. The roads were muddy and the fleet that accompanied the army was battered by storms. Whenever the Chinese ships docked, Goguryean troops attacked them, until finally the Goguryeo navy sailed out and smashed the Chinese armada. Meanwhile, Korean guerrillas harassed the Chinese army all the way in, and then all the way out, and the Chinese lost most of their men along the way.
²

It took awhile for China to recover from the disaster, but Wendi’s son, Yangdi,
*
his successor and probable assassin, tried again in 612. He recruited a million soldiers and many times that number of support personnel. He repaired and expanded the Grand Canal that connected the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in order to bring men and supplies from south to north. He established massive stockpiles and gathered coastal transportation to shadow the army as it moved over land. As long as his army stayed within an easy wagon ride of the coast, the Chinese navy could keep the forces supplied.

The Chinese crossed the Liao River again with 305,000 troops, but when progress slowed, the fleet zipped ahead and landed a large force of marines to take Pyongyang castle. After scattering the defenders, the Chinese marines broke ranks to loot, which left them exposed to a Goguryeo ambush in which the marines were slaughtered and chased off. Only a couple of thousand made it safely back to the fleet.
³

The Chinese army, meanwhile, pushed onward. For a time, the Goguryeo and Sui commanders played mind games, trying to lure one another into negotiations in order to spring a trap or gather intelligence. Finally, the Goguryean commander Eulji closed this phase by sending a rude poem to his Sui counterpart, and the campaign resumed. After pushing south, the Chinese began crossing the Salsu River. The Goguryeans, however, had secretly dammed the river above the crossing, and when the Sui army was halfway across the deceptively shallow water, the Goguryeans released the flood. Thousands of Chinese drowned, and the rest fled. Of the 305,000 Chinese soldiers who had invaded Korea, only 2,700 returned.
⁴

The repeated defeats in Korea fatally weakened the Sui dynasty. It didn’t last much longer and would shortly be replaced by the Tang dynasty.