The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (3 page)

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War kills more civilians than soldiers. In fact, the army is usually the safest place to be during a war. Soldiers are protected by thousands of armed men, and they get the first choice of food and medical care. Meanwhile, even if civilians are not systematically massacred, they are usually robbed, evicted, or left to starve; however, their stories are usually left untold. Most military histories skim lightly over the massive suffering of the ordinary, unarmed civilians caught in the middle, even though theirs is the most common experience of war.
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The Ascent of Manslaughter

Where do we start? People have been killing each other ever since they came down from the trees, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find bodies stashed up in the branches as well. Some of the earliest human bones show fractures that must have come from weapons. Early inscriptions boast of thousands of enemies slaughtered. The oldest holy books record battles in which the followers of one angry god smite the followers of some other angry god; however, the small tribes and villages caught in these ancient wars didn’t have enough potential victims to be killed on a scale that could compare with today. It took many centuries of human history before people were gathered in large enough populations to be killed by the hundreds of thousands, so the earliest of history’s one hundred worst atrocities didn’t occur until the Persians built an empire that spanned the known world.

SECOND PERSIAN WAR

Death toll:
300,000
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Rank:
96

Type:
clash of cultures

Broad dividing line:
Persians vs. Greeks

Time frame:
480–479 BCE

Location:
Greece

Major state participants:
Persian Empire, Athens, Sparta

Who usually gets the most blame:
Xerxes

Prequel: The First Persian War

When the land-based Persian Empire, which had conquered everyone it could reach, from Pakistan to Egypt, came up against the seafaring Greeks, the Persians scooped up several Greek colonies on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Many years of quiet subservience passed, but then the Greek ruler of the Ionian city of Miletus got ambitious. He threw off Persian rule and asked for help from free Greek cities overseas—first Sparta (which refused), then Athens (which agreed). A joint Greek army of Ionians and Athenians marched inland and attacked the Persian provincial capital at Sardis, which they briefly occupied and accidentally burned down. Within a couple of years, however, the revolt was put down, and the Athenians hurried home to lie low and hope that the Persians hadn’t noticed them.

Shah Darius of Persia, however, had not gotten where he was by letting insults pass unpunished, and he assigned a servant to remind him every day to remember the Athenians. Darius decided he needed to conquer the independent Greek states on the European mainland that were stirring up trouble among his Greek subjects; however, the first assault directly across the sea failed. The Athenians beat his army badly and drove it away at the Battle of Marathon.

Second Persian War

Ten years later, a new shah, Xerxes, gathered levies (peasant draftees) from all over the empire into the largest army ever seen,
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too large to move by boat. Taking the overland route up through the Balkans and down into Greece, he forced his way past all barriers, man-made and natural. He crossed the Dardanelles strait on a floating bridge made of boats; then his engineers dug a canal across the dangerous Acte Peninsula, home of Mount Athos.

With the Persians bearing down on them, a scratch army of 4,900 Greeks under Spartan leadership tried to slow them at the mountain pass of Thermopylae, while the Greek fleet stopped an amphibious end run at the nearby strait of Artemisia. The Greek phalanx, the traditional Greek battle formation in which heavily armored spearmen lined up into a human wall of shields and spearheads, easily held against repeated Persian assaults. After a few days of tough fighting, however, the Persians found another way around Thermopylae, so they outflanked and slaughtered the last defenders blocking their way. The Persian army moved into the Greek heartland, taking Athens after the inhabitants had fled to nearby islands.

When all seemed lost, the Athenian fleet met the Persian warships in the narrow channel between the island of Salamis and the mainland. In the confusing swirl of galleys darting, ramming, and splintering, the Persians lost over two hundred ships and 40,000 sailors. With the Greeks now in control of the sea, the huge and hungry Persian army was cut off from supplies.

Xerxes returned to Persia with part of his army, leaving behind a smaller force to live off the land and finish the conquest. This army hunkered down for the winter in northern Greece and then moved south again in the spring, reoccupying Athens. After frantic diplomacy by the displaced Athenians, the Greek city-states finally agreed to combine their armies. The two forces met at Plataea, where the Greek phalanx overwhelmed the Persians. The survivors made their long, painful retreat back to Persia, losing thousands along the way. Meanwhile, the Athenian fleet shot across the Aegean Sea and finished off the remaining Persian ships with an amphibious attack on their naval camp at Mycale in Ionia.
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Legacy

Almost every list of decisive battles or turning points in history begins with something from the Persian Wars, so you might already know that Greek victory rescued Western Civilization and the concept of individual freedom from the faceless Oriental hordes who are the villains of Victorian histories and recent movies.

On the other hand, let’s not get carried away. Being conquered by the Persians would not have been the end of the world. By the standards of the day, the Persians were rather benign conquerors. For example, they were one of the only people in history to be nice to the Jews. They allowed the Jews to return to Palestine and rebuild their temple, instead of massacring or deporting them as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Spaniards, Cossacks, Russians, and Germans did at various other junctures of history. Even with a Persian victory at Salamis, free Greeks would have remained in Sicily, Italy, and Marseilles. Greek civilization would later prove vibrant enough to survive—and eventually usurp—a half millennium of Roman rule. There’s no reason why the Greeks couldn’t get through a few generations of Persian rule intact.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Death toll:
500,000 died, including 250,000 civilians massacred
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Rank:
70

Type:
world conqueror

Broad dividing line:
Macedonians vs. Persians

Time frame:
ruled 336–325 BCE

Location:
Middle East

Who usually gets the most blame:
Alexander III of Macedon

T
HE BATTLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST WENT IN TWO PHASES. THE PERSIAN
Wars decided that the West would survive, but Alexander the Great ensured that the West would dominate.

Alexander’s father, King Philip II of Macedon in northeastern Greece, redesigned the phalanx by strengthening the solid infantry block with longer spears and covering its flanks with archers and cavalry. He conquered Greece with his new army but was assassinated before he could turn against the Persian Empire. His twenty-year-old son, Alexander III, then took over and put down a couple of immediate revolts with what would come to be characteristic ruthlessness—one revolt to the north by the tribes of Thrace; then one to the south by the strongest Greek city, Thebes. Having covered his back, Alexander crossed into Asia Minor (Turkey) and destroyed the Persian provincial garrison when it tried to block his path at the Granicus River. He then began an epic march across the Middle East.

Alexander was recklessly direct, as shown in the story of the Gordian knot, a mystical tangle of rope kept in a temple in Asia Minor. A prophecy foretold that whoever could undo the knot would rule Asia, but Alexander refused to be distracted by the impossibility of the task. He simply drew his sword and cut through the knot. His characteristic battle strategy was similar. He aimed for what appeared to be the strongest part of the enemy line and attacked straight into it. The tactic was risky, and he accumulated an impressive collection of battle wounds from a variety of weapons, but Macedonian kings were expected to lead by personal example.
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After maneuvering through the pass between Asia Minor and Syria, Alexander discovered that Shah Darius III of Persia had slipped his full army behind him, cutting the Macedonians off at Issus. With hardly a thought, Alexander spotted a weakness in the Persian line and charged into it with his cavalry. The Persians broke ranks and were slaughtered as they ran, abandoning their baggage train to the Macedonians, including the Persian empress and her daughter.

Alexander moved south to capture the ports that allowed the Persian fleet to threaten his lines of communication. The Phoenician port of Tyre had been built safely on an offshore island, beyond the reach of countless earlier armies. The Macedonians, however, settled in and spent the next several months building a causeway out to the island. Once Alexander connected the mainland to the island, Tyre fell to assault. Alexander massacred the men and sold the women and children into slavery.

When Alexander visited Egypt, he was hailed as a god, and he no doubt agreed. In 331 BCE, at the mouth of the Nile River he laid the groundwork for Alexandria, a new city of culture and learning that would soon be the home of the greatest library in the ancient world, the greatest lighthouse, the original Museum (Temple of the Muses), and just about every scholar for the next several centuries.

At Gaugamela in northern Mesopotamia (Iraq), the Persians threw their largest army yet again against Alexander’s smaller army on flat open ground where their numbers should have had the advantage. The Persians had gathered elephants, scythed chariots, and several hundred thousand exotic levies from all across the Middle East. Alexander defeated them anyway. He then seized the royal Persian city of Persepolis, which he burned in a drunken accident, and hounded the fugitive Darius to his death deep in the wilderness.
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Alexander disappeared off the edge of the map, fighting tribes in their mountain strongholds in central Asia. With those taken, he moved south into India and beat the native kings and their war elephants. Finally, his exhausted soldiers realized he would not turn around until he reached the edge of the world. The army mutinied and forced him to return home.

Alexander took his soldiers home the hard way, across the scorching desert on the coast of Iran. Some say it was a brilliant move to stay resupplied by the navy while taking the most direct route possible. Others say he was punishing his men for making him go home. In any case, two-thirds of his army died by the time they returned to civilization.
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