The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (21 page)

The Crusades into the Holy Land coincided with a couple of other efforts to expand Christendom: the Christian reconquest of Muslim Spain and the Teutonic conquest of the pagan Baltic Sea. All three efforts exchanged personnel and learned from one another. The Second Crusaders even stopped in Spain on the way to Palestine and helped the local Christians by capturing Lisbon from the Moors.

Second Crusade

Almost a half century passed, and the crusaders were settled comfortably into four crusader states: Edessa, Tripoli, Jerusalem, and Antioch. The Holy Land was firmly in control of the children of the First Crusaders, but then the new Saracen ruler, Zengi, consolidated an empire in Syria and reduced the crusader states to three by capturing Edessa, the inmost outpost of Christendom. Europe organized a second crusade to take it back (1147), and this time kings jumped on the bandwagon—Philip Augustus of France, Conrad III of Germany. However, the royal dilettantes of the Second Crusade were not as dangerous as the hungry, landless adventurers of the First Crusade, so they didn’t make a dent in the surrounding Saracens.

Third Crusade

After Zengi’s death, the empire was passed around to several young Zengids until Saladin, a Kurdish general acting as regent, decided to rule in his own name instead. At first, Saladin maintained peaceful relations with the Christians on the Levantine coast, but then a crusader lord, Reginald of Chatillon, ambushed a Muslim caravan and seized Saladin’s sister. Saladin avenged the offense with a new jihad that climaxed in a massive Saracen victory at the Battle of Hattin. This opened the way for Saladin to capture Jerusalem along with many Templar prisoners, whom he put to death.

Losing Jerusalem convinced Europe to get serious about crusading again. In 1190, Richard the Lionheart, the brand new king of England, set out from Marseilles with King Philip II of France.
The Holy Roman Empire in central Europe was supposed to supply the backbone of the expedition, but shortly after crossing into Asia Minor, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa slipped in a river he was fording and was pinned underwater by the weight of his armor, drowning.

History likes the Third Crusade. This was the classy crusade, where wise and virtuous kings hacked each other apart with honor and style. There was none of that wading through rivers of blood after capturing every city. In the Third Crusade, all of the rivers of blood came from people who jolly well knew what they were getting into. After an especially good fight, a victor might simply salute his stunned and helpless opponent instead of sliding a dagger into the eye slot of his helmet to finish him off.

OK. It probably wasn’t nearly as sporting as later stories imagine, but both sides in the Third Crusade received good press. Saladin is one of the most beloved warlords in Muslim history, and many otherwise somber historians describe him in unusually affectionate language; “when he smiled, he could light up a room” is an actual quote from a recent history.
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Dante imagined Saladin in the minimum-security wing of Hell, where decent heathens are merely quarantined rather than boiled in lava. Richard the Lionheart, meanwhile, has gone down as one of the most beloved kings in English history (with one of history’s greatest nicknames) based entirely on his crusading. He barely even visited his own kingdom, which he impoverished to support his holy war. Philip II stuck around only long enough to earn his points with the pope, and then he hurried home to France.

In reality, Saladin’s sense of honor was flexible. After Hattin, two leading crusaders were brought before him in chains. He fed the first one, explaining that the rules of hospitality now forbade him from killing a prisoner who had been given food and drink by his captor. The other prisoner—Reginald of Chatillon, whom Saladin was planning to kill for breaking the truce—lunged for a cup of wine and downed it before anyone could stop him. Reginald thought, Aha! I’m safe! But Saladin killed him anyway because no one likes a smart-ass.
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Richard, too, was not completely chivalrous. After taking Acre from the Muslims, Richard gave Saladin a week to come to terms. When the deadline passed, Richard dragged his 2,700 Saracen prisoners of war outside the city gates and beheaded them, along with 300 of their family members. Freed from this encumbrance, the full crusader army rode off to battle.

The two titans fought only one p
itched battle. After a frustrating campaign of maneuver, the armies finally met at Arsuf. Richard held his anxious knights back under a shower of Arab arrows until the right moment presented itself. Then, the Lionheart released a cavalry charge that broke the enemy ranks and slaughtered them. The victory, however, went nowhere because Richard had to hurry home to save his wobbly throne from his brother and save his fiefs in France from his onetime comrade, Philip II. Jerusalem would remain in Muslim hands.

Fourth Crusade

By now, Christendom had realized that Palestine could not stand alone; its larger neighbors, Egypt and Syria, conquered it too easily. No empire in recorded history has ever been anchored on Palestine, so the next wave of crusaders (mobilized by Pope Innocent III) decided to take Egypt by sea and build on that.

When this new batch of crusaders arrived in Venice, it turned out that they didn’t have enough money to pay
for their trip to the Orient. Being businessmen above all else, the Venetians said, No problem, the crusaders could earn the money by taking the Adriatic port of Zara away from Hungary. The city was duly assaulted and turned over to the Venetians.

The pope immediately excommunicated the entire crusader force for this assault on fellow Christians, and several leaders backed out of the enterprise, but the bulk of the crusaders pushed on. Faced with crusader stubbornness, the pope backed down and took the crusaders back into the church.

Because every wave of crusaders had, like locusts, left a trail of desolation as it made its way through the Byzantine Empire, the Byzantines were reluctant to let the crusaders pass again. The crusaders themselves had mixed feelings about the Byzantines. Sure, these Greeks were Christians, but they were also schismatics who practiced their own alien version of the religion in defiance of the pope. Rather than negotiate rights of passage this time, the crusaders found an exiled Byzantine prince who claimed the throne, and in 1204 they seized Constantinople on his behalf. When he turned stingy about paying them for their support, however, the Franks installed one of their own as king. Thus, the last city left unlooted from the Ancient Era was thoroughly ransacked, and many precious books, pieces of art, and archives from the Greco-Roman zenith disappeared—burned, trampled, melted, smashed, or stolen.

As payment for ferrying the crusaders into battle against Byzantium, Venice took four big bronze horses to decorate Saint Mark’s Square, plus a scattering of easily defensible islands to control the trade of the eastern Mediterranean.

While western Europeans occupied the strategic core of the Byzantine Empire, three backwater provinces remained under Greek rule. Over the next few decades these parts painfully reassembled themselves into the Byzantine Empire, finally retaking Constantinople from the Franks in 1261.

Somewhere in the midst of all of t
his activity, the whole business of attacking the Saracens completely slipped everyone’s mind.
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Children’s Crusade

In 1212 a new outbreak of crusading fever swept Europe as a couple of wandering child evangelists stirred up the youth of France and Germany with impassioned pleas and sermons. Enthusiastic mobs of young people followed them in devotion from town to town. As with most medieval history, we have only a few sentences written at the time and many pages of embellished tales written a generation later as our source of information, so no one is sure exactly what happened, but apparently thousands of children—teenagers, more likely—ran away from home and took to the road, determined to free the Holy Land after their elders had failed. Many never made it out of Europe, and most were never seen again.

The most common story is that a column of 20,000 eager French children descended on the port of Marseilles, where they were told transportation awaited them. They embarked on ships and sailed off to do God’s bidding—except that it was a trick: the shipmasters sold them all in Mediterranean slave markets instead. Another wave of 30,000 German youngsters made the hazardous crossing over Alpine passes; many were lost along the way. Some drifted over to Genoa, where they gave up and settled down. Others pressed on. When the survivors gathered in Rome to be blessed by the pope, he thanked them for their piety, but seeing their pitiful condition, sent them home.
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Fifth Crusade and Beyond

By now, the crusader movement was fizzling out, and the European presence on the Levantine shore was down to three coastal enclaves—Acre, Tripoli, and Antioch. A new outburst of crusaders under King Louis of France (later Saint Louis) tried to conquer Egypt. They took the port of Damietta and won some battles as they moved deeper into Egypt, but in the end, they simply lacked the stamina to keep moving forward. While withdrawing from Cairo, the king and his army were captured and held for ransom.

The next C
rusade, the Sixth, was a disappointment for everyone involved. With Mongols bearing down on the Muslim world from the Far East, the Saracens had to keep their armies freed up and ready to meet the next raid from the east. They needed to keep the crusader states in their rear quiet, and the price for this was returning control of Jerusalem to the Franks.

So the crusaders got Jerusalem back, but they got it through diplomacy and didn’t get to kill anyone. Even so, it was a temporary measure and Jerusalem was shortly back in Muslim hands. Meanwhile, the crusader state of Antioch fell to the Mongols.

In 1289, Tripoli fell to the Egyptians, leaving only Acre in crusader hands. Then in 1291, a band of Chris
tian pilgrims from Acre brawled with Syrian merchants, and the sultan of Egypt demanded compensation for the Muslims killed. When the price proved beyond the means of the Christian community, the sultan attacked and removed this last crusader state from the map.

Legacy

Some historians say that the Crusades drove a wedge between Christianity and Islam that still exists to this day, but let’s be realistic. Neither of these religions gets along with
anybody
. It would be difficult to find any time in history when their followers weren’t killing each other—and even if you could, that would only be because they were resting up and getting ready for another round.

However, by putting huge numbers of western European aristocrats in close contact with the sophisticated Orient, the Crusades were able to jump-start Western Civilization—in
a happy history book that would be the main legacy of the Crusades. For our purposes, however, the main legacy was a harshening of the Christian religion. For the next five hundred years—until the Enlightenment tamed it—western Christianity had an unfortunate tendency to direct violence against unbelievers.

We will see other religious wars in this book, but those will be wars about people— people trying to impose their beliefs, people wanting to be left alone, people being punished, people being rescued. The Crusades were about a place: the Holy Land.
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While fighting ove
r land is quite common, the land in dispute usually provides some practical resource—minerals, crops, harbors, farms, strategic location, exploitable labor, or sheer size. Palestine has none of these. The sole resource of the Holy Land is heritage. There’s no gold, no oil, very little fertile land, and few natives, nothing but sacred sites, so in essence, the Crusades killed 3 million people in a fight to control the tourist trade.

RELIGIOUS KILLING

T
HE STRANGEST THING ABOUT RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS IS THAT SOME PEOPLE
deny they ever happen. They will say the Crusades were about economics and the Inquisition was a consolidation of power. They will deny that anyone fights over religion, despite the fact that the participants freely admit to fighting over religion.

Obviously, no war is 100 percent religious (or 100 percent anything) in motivation, but we can’t duck the fact that some con
flicts involve more religion than others. So how can we decide when religion is the real cause of a conflict and not just a convenient cover story?

Well, for starters, if the only difference between the two sides is religion, then it is a safe bet that the conflict is religious. Serbs, Croats, and Bosniacs are basically the same people except for religion. Ditto the Dutch and the Flemings. In the French Wars of Religion, the partition of India, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the war in Lebanon, people who looked alike, spoke the same languages, and lived in the same communities were at each other’s throats only because they followed different religions.

Another consideration: How easily can you describe a conflict without mentioning religion? The American Civil War certainly had religious elements to it—John Brown’s fanaticism, Lincoln’s inaugural address, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—but you could easily write a detailed history of the war without mentioning any of these. Contrast that with, for example, the Crusades. Could you even get one paragraph into it without mentioning the pope, the Holy Land, or Jerusalem? You can argue that the Crusades were about something other than religion, but try writing two pages without bringing it up.

Finally, if the parties declare religious motives, we should at least consider the possibility that they are telling the truth. Religion is so central to a person’s worldview that most big decisions have some sort of religious consideration. Even if the warmonger-in-chief is using religion only as a convenient and cynical excuse to stir up the masses, the main reason he does that is because
it works
. You never see warmongers rallying armies to destroy an enemy that spells or shaves differently, because those are stupid reasons to fight a war. A different religion by contrast is usually accepted as a perfectly fine reason to kill someone. If it weren’t, why would people rally behind it?

Still, not every conflict between different religions is a religious conflict, especially when there are multiple differences between the conflicting groups. In the European conquest of the Americas, the desire to convert the natives fell far behind the desire to rob them. The Pacific war between the Japanese and the Americans is easily explained as a geopolitical power struggle. When the Turks pushed into Europe, religion played a role in motivating both attackers and de
fenders, but it was secondary to the simple empire-building that was occurring along
all
the borders of the empire.

For this list, let’s count only conflicts and oppressions in which religion is widely considered the
primary
reason for th
e conflict, along with human sacrifices and ritual killings.

The Thirty Deadliest Religious Killings

Taiping Rebellion (1850–64)

Twenty million died in a messianic uprising of Chinese Christians.

Thirty Years War (1618–48)

Seven and a half million died as Catholics and Protestants fought for control of Germany.

Holocaust (ca.1938–45; see “Second World War”)

Nazi Germany killed 5.5 million Jews all across Europe. Even though the Nazis claimed to be killing Jews for racial reasons, the only substantive difference between the victims of the Holocaust and those left untouched was their ancestral religion. It was the climax of several centuries of European anti-Semitism.
*

Mahdi Revolt (1881–98)

Five and a half million Sudanese died during this fundamentalist Muslim uprising.

Gladiatorial Games (264 BCE–435 CE)

Perhaps 3.5 million gladiators were killed to honor the Roman ancestors.

French Wars of Religion (1562–98)

Three million people died in the wars between the Catholics and Protestants of France.

Crusades (1095–1291)

For two hundred years, European Christians tried to wrest control of the Holy Land from the Muslims. Perhaps 3 million people died in these wars.

Fang La Rebellion (1120–22)

Two million died in a peasant revolt in China that started with friction between a Taoist emperor and a Manichaean minority.

Aztec Human Sacrifice (1440–1524)

The Aztecs sacrificed some 1.2 million people.

Albigensian Crusade (1208–49)

Around 1 million people in the south of France were killed in this war to exterminate the Cathar heresy.

Panthay Rebellion (1855–73)

A rebellion of Muslims in southeast China killed a million.

Hui Rebellion (1862–78)

Another rebellion of Muslims in northwest China killed 640,000.

Partition of India (1947)

Mob violence killed 500,000 Hindus and Muslims.

Cromwell’s Invasion of Ireland (1649–52)

Cromwell killed 300,000 to 500,000 Irish in his invasion.

Roman-Jewish Wars (66–74 and 130–136 CE)

A series of messianic revolts against Roman authority led to maybe 350,000 deaths.

The Bible

There are two sides to the debate about the atrocities described in the Bible: (1) God is merciful and everything described in the Bible is absolutely, inerrantly true, but the number of people slaughtered by the Israelites was wildly exaggerated, and those people deserved it anyway. (2) The Bible was written by mere mortals who made plenty of mistakes so you can’t believe everything you read there, but look at all of the people killed by so-called holy men in so-called holy wars in the so-called Holy Land.

Consider, for example, the city of Ai. The Bible states quite clearly that Joshua killed all 12,000 people in the city at the orders of God. If you are a fundamentalist, you have a lot of explaining to do, but if you are a heathen, you can simply point out that Ai means “ruin,” and archaeologists have determined that the town was destroyed long before the Israelites arrived in Palestine, so the Bible is wrong. This means neither side in the debate can comfortably use the Bible to support their interpretation of history.

Be that as it may, if we total the nasty bits of scripture, we’ll find 1,167,000 mass killings by humans specifically enumerated in the Bible. Perhaps a quarter of these (ca. 300,000) are historically plausible and religiously motivated.
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Japan (1587–1660)

During the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38, the Christian rebel force of 20,000 fighting men and 17,000 women and children was wiped out, leaving only 105 survivors. Overall, the Catholic Church counts 3,125 named and 200,000 to 300,000 unnamed martyrs in Japan from this period.
²

Bosnia (1992–95)

When the predominantly Muslim republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina broke away from Yugoslavia, local Christian Serbs and the government in Belgrade tried to stop them. Two hundred thousand people died in the ensuing civil war.
³

Sati (outlawed in 1829)

The sacrifice of a widow on the funeral pyre of her husband was common practice in India, particularly in Bengal, where authorities recorded 8,000 satis between 1815 and 1828. Perhaps 60,000 or so widows were burned alive all across India during the preceding century, and a couple of hundred thousand since the Middle Ages.
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English Civil War (1642–46)

In the struggle between the Puritans of Parliament and the High-Church supporters of the King, 190,000 Englishmen died, including, at the end, the king himself.
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Lebanon (1975–90)

The country of Lebanon was originally carved out of French Syria to give local Christians a country where they could be a (slim) majority. By 1975, the national majority had shifted to the Muslims, so a civil war erupted over power sharing. One hundred fifty thousand people were killed.
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Algeria (1992–2002)

Up to 150,000 died in a civil war that began when the military junta refused to hand over the government to Muslim fundamentalist parties that had won the recent elections.
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Vietnam (1820–85)

A total of some 130,000 Catholic missionaries and converts were killed under persecution by several generations of Vietnamese rulers.
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Russia (1919)

As many as 115,000 Jews were killed in pogroms by anti-Bolshevik soldiers in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War.
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Byzantine Empire (ca. 845–55)

The Byzantine empress Theodora (not Justinian’s wife, this Theodora was the widow of Emperor Theophilus, the regent for Michael III, and a saint) hunted down and killed 100,000 Paulicians, followers of a Gnostic heresy.
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Dutch Revolt (1566–1609)

The Protestants of the northern Netherlands rebelled against their Spanish rulers. The Spanish duke of Alva boasted of executing 18,600 rebels after he was sent to put down the uprising. In all, 100,000 people died in the revolt, including 8,000 in the sack of Antwerp. The Protestant lands became the independent Dutch Republic, while the Catholic south stayed loyal to Spain and eventually became Belgium.
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Ukraine (1648–54)

During a rebellion against Poland, Cossacks under Bogdan Chmielnicki massacred as many as 100,000 Jews and wiped out three hundred Jewish communities.
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