The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (22 page)

Eastern Roman Empire (514–18)

When Emperor Anastasius appointed Monophysite bishops (who believed that the divine and human aspects of Christ were separate) rather than Chalcedonian bishops (who believed that the divine and human aspects of Christ were unified), General Vitalian (a Chalcedonian) rose in rebellion against him. Sixty-five thousand people died in what Edward Gibbon called the first religious war.
¹³

Witch Hunts (1400–1800)

Sixty thousand accused witches were burned or otherwise executed all across Europe.
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Thuggee (until the nineteenth century)

This mystical cult of thieves and stranglers may have sacrificed around 50,000 travelers to the goddess Kali.
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In God We Trust

If we categorize the entries in this list according to which religions came into conflict, we get this simplified breakdown:

Christian vs. Christian:
9

Muslim vs. Christian:
3

Christian vs. Jewish:
3

Eastern vs. Christian:
3

Jewish vs. pagan:
2

Muslim vs. Chinese:
2

Muslim vs. Muslim:
2

Human sacrifice in India:
2

Human sacrifice in Mexico:
1

Ritual killing in Rome:
1

Muslim vs. Hindu:
1

Manichaean vs. Taoist:
1

We can probably go even farther and group them into four larger categories: indigenous human sacrifice (4), monotheistic religions fighting each other (17), heathens fighting monotheistic religions (8), and heathens stirring up trouble all by themselves (1). In early history, the majority of religious killings involved sacrificing people to bribe and placate the dangerous forces of the universe. Then, Judaism and its of
fshoots, Christianity and Islam, devised a worldview where a single all-powerful god required a strict, uncompromising belief rather than tangible offerings. After that, religious killings tended to arise from the friction of incompatible beliefs.

Notice that followers of Eastern religions haven’t often killed each other over who has the better god. Nor have pagans, shamanists, and animists. These relatively flexible religions usually keep calm until they bump up against rigid monotheists.

Although most of us favor religious tolerance, tha
t is a losing strategy in the end. Monotheism’s intolerance of rival beliefs is one of the main reasons why it has succeeded in replacing the more relaxed indigenous religions of Europe, Africa, America, and the Middle East.

FANG LA REBELLION

Death toll:
2 million
¹

Rank:
37

Type:
peasant revolt

Broad dividing line:
Song dynasty vs. rebels

Time frame:
1120–22

Location:
China

Who usually gets the most blame:
Chu Mien

Another damn:
Chinese peasant revolt

L
IKE NERO AND HITLER, EMPEROR HUIZONG OF CHINA WAS AN ARTIST,
except that Huizong was a rather good one. His art still hangs in museums around the world. He savored the finer things in life—poetry, birdsong, scented palaces with lacquered furniture, gardens of fine stones, rare flowers, and fountains. To please him, his ministers scoured the country seizing the most splendid objects for the emperor’s enjoyment. They plundered tombs and broke into wealthy villas to search for hidden treasure. One very greedy procurement officer, Chu Mien, was especially bad at squeezing the populace, and his agents seized a grove of lacquer trees that belonged to Fang La.

Fang La lived in the town of Muzhou in the coastal province of Zhejiang. Noted for his generosity, F
ang La was the community leader of the local Vegetarian Demon Worshippers, which is what the Chinese called the Manichaeans.

Founded by the prophet Mani in Persia in the third century CE, Manichaeism is an extinct religion that believed in an eternal conflict between the forces of good and evil. Christianity probably lifted the whole notion of heaven and hell from them, this being neither Jewish nor Greco-Roman, but very Manichaean. Because Manichaeans believed that good and evil were equally strong and evenly balanced, their enemies accused them of playing both sides of the street and worshipping the devil. The Persian authorities threw Mani in jail for the rest of his life after he came up with this religion. Despite persecution, Mani’s teachings spread along the caravan routes throughout Asia and into China.

The indigenous religions of China tend to fall into two traditions. Confucianism (based on the teach
ings of Confucius) is a code of social behavior, while Taoism (based on the teachings of Lao-Tzu) is a mystical cosmology that tries to explain the universe. Both originated in China’s semi-mythical past of the fifth century BCE. Neither religion expects their followers to follow one faith to the exclusion of all others, and it has been said that traditional (pre-Communist) Chinese were Confucianist in public and Taoist in private.
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Buddhism, the other common religion of China, originated in India (also in the fifth century BCE), but easily adapted and attached itself to the native Chinese culture without much fuss.

Emperor Huizong was not only a patron of the arts but also a devout Taoist and one of the fe
w Chinese emperors to go out of his way to outlaw Buddhism, which he considered an unhealthy foreign influence. The emperor had also been trying to eradicate Manichaeism for the same reason. Chinese officials discouraged several practices associated with this Persian religion, such as vegetarianism and the wearing of white. When Fang La was shaken down by Chu Mien, he found a deep well of Manichaean resentment to tap and a religious network that could be used to organize and plan a revolt.

The rebels succeeded at first with hit-and-run tactics against the local militia, but then veteran troops from the frontier arrived under the eunuch general Tong Guan. These professional soldiers easily beat Fang La’s army in several open battles, so the rebels retreated to caves where they resisted all assaults. To deflate popular support for the rebels, Tong Guan renounced the government’s authority to seize property on a whim. Finally, in May 1121, a local woman led the imperial troops into the caves, and they captured Fang and his family. The rebellion continued for a couple of years after this, but the imperial forces eventually mopped up the remaining resistance.

Unfortunately,
pulling troops off the frontier had fatally weakened the empire, and Jurchen barbarians from Manchuria broke through the Great Wall to overrun north China. The Song dynasty retreated and regrouped in the south, only half as big as it was when the dynasty began.
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GENGHIS KHAN

Death toll:
40 million
¹

Rank:
2

Type:
world conqueror

Broad dividing line:
Mongols vs. civilization

Time frame:
lived ca. 1162–1227, but didn’t strike out against the world until 1206

Location:
Asian interior (the largest contiguous empire ever created)

Who usually gets the most blame:
Genghis Khan

Another damn:
Mongol invasion

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
He couldn’t have been this destructive, could he?

H
IDDEN AWAY IN THE BACK OF BEYOND, MONGOLIA IS A HARSH, DUSTY
wilderness that’s synonymous with remote. It’s where you find dinosaur bones and shaggy nomads and none of the major fast-food franchises. Modern Mongolia is a tiny football-shaped country that has been kicked around by larger countries for hundreds of years, but the Mongolians comfort themselves with the knowledge that once upon a time they produced the absolutely baddest badass in human history: Genghis Khan.

Of course, the Mongolians can’t actually brag about his wholesale butchery—in fact, they vigorously deny it—so they emphasize his courage, his audacity, his splendor, his cunning, his occasional acts of charity, along with the admitte
dly useful feat of temporarily bridging East and West into a single political entity. They point out all of the helpful inventions (such as pasta and gunpowder, maybe) that passed back and forth across this vast, unprecedented empire. They proudly use him to decorate their banknotes, vodka bottles, beer bottles, shops, hotels, street signs, and chocolate bars.
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Some Westerners buy into this. When a recent genetic study indicated that Genghis Khan might have 16 million living descendants, many reports descr
ibed him as a “prolific lover,” not a serial rapist.
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³
Throughout the best-selling
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
, Jack Weatherford often writes like a defense counsel picking away at the prosecution’s case: “Although the army of Genghis Khan killed at an unprecedented rate . . . they deviated from standard practice of the times in an important and surprising way. The Mongols did not torture, mutilate, or maim.”
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After an arrow from the walls of the besieged city of Nishapur killed his son-in-law, Genghis Khan allowed his widowed daughter to decide the fate of the city: “She
reportedly
decreed death for all. . . . According to widely circulated
but unverified stories
, she ordered soldiers to pile the heads . . . in three separate pyramids—one each for the men, the women, and the children. Then she
supposedly
ordered that the dogs, the cats . . . be put to death so that no living creature would survive the murder [
sic
] of her husband” (emphasis added).
⁵

Personally, I find it unsettling to see the victims of Genghis Khan shrugged off as easily as Holocaust-deniers ignore the Jews, and then to realize th
at hundreds of years from now, some historians will be rehabilitating Hitler’s reputation.

But it’s not really a black or white issue. No world leader can get as far as Genghis Khan without a certain amount of charisma, adaptability, and co
mpetence. If we spend several generations stereotyping a ruler as a dim-witted, bloodthirsty savage, then sooner or later iconoclastic researchers will realize that there’s more to the story than our simplistic stereotypes.

Angry Orphan

Who was this man named Genghis Khan? Well, for starters, that’s not his name; it’s a title meaning “Universal Leader.” It isn’t even a very good transliteration into English because we tend to pronounce both of the g’s the same. Across the centuries, the “Universal” part has been rendered in English as Zingis (1700s), Jenghiz (1800s), Genghis (1900s), and Chinggis (2000s), and even though my spell-checker prefers Genghis, we should start getting used to Chinggis.

But let’s begin with Temujin, since that was
his actual name. He was born insignificantly, somewhere in Mongolia, sometime around 1162, to one among several rival tribes on the steppe. When Temujin was nine, a rival tribe, the Tatars, murdered his father, and the family had to flee into exile. Temujin had to fight for supremacy within his family; he killed his older half-brother, ostensibly for stealing the game he took in a hunt. Temujin got married at the age of sixteen, but a rival tribe kidnapped his wife. Although he got her back quickly, she turned out to be pregnant, so the paternity of that son, his eldest, was always in doubt. Eventually, Temujin linked up with a chieftain who was most notorious for occasionally boiling the flesh off live prisoners in a cauldron.

Personally charismatic, Temujin gathered followers from among other dispossessed individuals, which meant that these followers owed everything they had to him, not to an accident of birth.
⁶
Temujin valued loyalty so highly that even when disloyalty among his enemies worked to his advantage, the culprit was punished. At one city, the soldiers of the garrison snuck down and opened the gates for his army to flood in. Chinggis Khan had them executed for their treachery.

Temujin heard of the legendary beauty of a Tatar princess, so he had his followers hunt her down. His soldiers swooped in and chased away her fiancé. They carried the princess back to Temujin, who took her as one of his many wives. Some time later, at a court gathering, he saw his bride go white with terror. Glancing around, Temujin saw only one unfamiliar face in the crowd, so he had this man seized and interrogated. It was the former fiancé, who just wanted to look at her one more time. Temujin had him beheaded.

When Chinggis Khan finally beat the Tatars, he is said to have lined up all of the men and boys alongside a wagon and ordered his followers to kill every Tatar male who stood taller than the lynch pin of the wagon wheel; however, this attempt to exterminate the tribe that killed his father was either pure myth or less than successful. Tatars eventually formed such a major part of his armies that the terms
Tatar
and
Mongol
became almost interchangeable among Europeans.
⁷

Most of Temujin’s career was spent consolidating the tribes of the Mongolian grasslands into a single fighting nation. Temujin incorporated conquered tribes into his army by scattering them across his organiz
ation. The Mongols came to be more of an army than an actual ethnicity, a fusion of diverse clans that abandoned their petty feuds and grudges and subordinated themselves to Temujin. After many hard years of killing, a gathering of the freshly unified tribes of Mongolia in 1206 proclaimed Temujin to be Chinggis Khan, ruler of the world. The title was only a little bit premature.

Steppenwolves

War colleges and polemophiles
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have a special warm spot for the Mongols. These horsemen combined the big-sky freedom of cowboys with the shock and awe of a blitzkrieg. Like a modern army, Mongol horse archers relied on mobility and projectiles to annihilate their enemies, so they inspire more professional admiration and daydreams than do plodding lines of peasant pikemen.

Among the nomadic herdsmen of the Eurasian steppe, boys old enough to walk were old enough to ride, so they became expert horsemen at an early age. Because the management of a herd was so much like battle itself, all men were trained in the arts of war by default. The herdsmen would circle their herds of sheep, cattle, and goats on fast ponies, leading a herd in a chosen direction, splitting it into smaller sections, and selecting a few head of livestock to pick off for the day’s meal. The techniques for slaughtering cattle and sheep worked just as well for slaughtering people. The archers rode up close enough to send a volley into the massed enemy, and then veered off before the enemy could retaliate. They would keep this up all day, thinning the enemy ranks and creating gaps that could be slowly widened, wedging the mob apart into smaller, bite-sized groups.
⁸

Adding to the tactical skills of the nomads was their amazing long-distance mobility. Peasant armies were tied to the land—both defending it and working it
—and they could spare only a handful of their adult males for long-distance campaigning. The nomads, however, lived in carts and tents and lived off cattle, goats, and sheep. They could simply uproot their entire nation and drag it along wherever they went. In the quiet times between battles, they could still tend their herds and their families, thriving wherever there was enough pasture to support them.

This ability to hurry from place to place made Mongol armies seem much larger than they really were, which is why the word
ordu
, originally a Mongol military unit, has come into English as
horde
, a huge mob.

Many historians openly admire Chinggis Khan’s mastery of psychological warfare. By wiping out every population that resisted him, Chinggis Khan hoped to terrify future enemies into immediate submission, thereby saving countless lives—well, except for the thousands he originally massacred to make his point, obviously.
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And excluding the towns that bravely tried to stand up to him; obviously they got massacred as well. And sometimes a town surrendered without a fight, but then Chinggis Khan decided that leaving behind a garrison was too much trouble, so he just killed everyone instead. And of course, many, many refugees—terrified of these propaganda stories—died of hunger, disease, and exhaustion while fleeing the Mongol onslaught. So when you add it all up, his propaganda probably didn’t save nearly as many lives as some historians say it did.

Mongol weapons were the finest of their kind anywhere in the world, and the composite bow was the deadliest weapon known to man for many centuries. It originated in distant antiquity, but the Mongols became the masters of it.

Bend a stick over your knee until it breaks. That is the kind of pressure a bow is put through every time you shoot an arrow. The best solution is to build the bow with materials that enhance the performance and counteract the specific problems facing critical points along the curve. Inside the bend needs a material that compresses and recoils sharply without breaking. Horn is ideal for that. The curved outside of the bend needs an elastic material that stretches without losing its snap. That would be sinew, the tough connective tissue joining muscle and bone. Then bind all of the parts tightly with glue (from boiled hooves) that can take the repeated strain, and you’ve got a composite bow, made entirely from materials the Mongols could get from their herds.
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