The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (38 page)

The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Mass
acre horrified Europe. Even Ivan the Terrible in Russia denounced it. It changed the nature of the French Religious Wars from a gang fight to a war of extermination.

Fourth War

When war resumed, the king’s younger brother, Henry, led a Catholic army to break the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle. A fierce siege stretched for months, from 1572 into 1573. Sappers tried to undermine the fortifications and explode barrels of gunpowder, while artillery pounded the walls without effect. It started to look like the army outside the walls would run out of food and ammunition before those inside would. Then Prince Henry was elected king of Poland,
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which gave him an excuse to lift the siege without losing face.

Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Wars

King Charles had been haunted by guilt since authorizing the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and his health deteriorated. When he died in 1574 at the age of twenty-three, the throne went to his twenty-two-year-old brother, King Henry of Poland. Henry snuck out of Poland with the Polish national treasury hidden in his baggage train and escaped to Paris to accept his promotion.

The new King Henry III was Catherine de Medici’s favorite and most intelligent son. He was a devout, cross-dressing Catholic who sometimes showed up at official functions in drag. Henry had an e
ntourage of handsome young men called his Darlings (Mignons). He collected little dogs and hid from thunderstorms in the cellar.
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Catherine unsuccessfully tried to tempt Henry into heterosexuality by offering him naked serving girls at special parties she arranged for his amusement, but that didn’t work.

More dangerous, however, was Henry’s intermittent tendency toward Catholic fanaticism when he sought atonement for his sexual eccentricities. At those times, Henry endangered his health with extreme fasting and mortification. Finally Catherine had the friend (and suspected Spanish agent) who encouraged her son in these rituals murdered in an alley.
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In the manner of most leaders facing civil wars all across history, everything King Henry did seemed to backfire. When the king restored freedom of worship for the Huguenots, Henry of Navarre took advantage of this new climate of legal tolerance to flee the court and reconvert to Protestantism once he was safely out of reach. Meanwhile Henry of Guise, angered at the king’s weakness, formed an independent Catholic League with Spanish support.

King Henry III was running out of money, so the king summoned parliament in hopes of a tax hike. Parliament refus
ed to raise taxes, but King Henry scraped up enough soldiers for a few small campaigns around the Loire River.
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Too Many Henrys

Because the current king was so very gay, the next king would probably not be springing from his loins. The succession pointed to the youngest Valois brother, Francis, but in 1584 he died of fever while plotting against Protestants in the Netherlands. With no further males descended from King Henry II, the law backed up to find some other direct male line branching off from an earlier king. When royal genealogists followed the new branch forward to find the senior-most descendant, it turned out that the next in line for the throne of France was the king’s brother-in-law, Henry of Navarre, leader of the Huguenot Bourbon family.

Thus began the War of the Three Henrys, in which King Henry III and Henry of Guise tried to force Henry of Navarre to renounce his right of succession. Because the throne was at stake, the battles were especially bloody. Two thousand Catholics were killed at the Battle of Coutras, another 6,000 at the Battle of Ivry. The Huguenot losses were comparable, and neither side gained an advantage.

By now the endless wars had cut the population of France by 20 percent.
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In a report home, the Venetian ambassador described the stat
e of France after a generation of fighting: “Everywhere one sees ruin, the livestock for the most part destroyed . . . stretches of good land uncultivated and many peasants forced to leave their homes and to become vagabonds. Everything has risen to exorbitant prices . . . people are no longer loyal and courteous, either because poverty had broken their spirit and brutalized them, or because the factions and bloodshed have made them vicious and ferocious.”
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The Catholic League hated King Henry for not crushing the Huguenots. As far as the league was concerned, a moderate Catholic was no better than a Protestant. It agitated the Parisian citizenry, who piled up barricades and drove Henry III from the city. In rural exile, the king was forced into calling parliament for advice on the succession. When parliament suggested an heir who was obviously a puppet of the Guises, King Henry decided to work out his problems with Guise once and for all.

Two days before Christmas, King Henry III invited Henry of Guise to stop by for a chat, but when Guise stepped in the room, the doors were suddenly slammed and bolted shut behind him. Soldiers rushed up; Guise drew his sword and fought gamely, but the king’s soldiers still cut him down. His brother, a Catholic arc
hbishop also visiting the king, was killed the next morning. They were cut apart and shoved into a roaring fireplace. The king then allied with the Bourbons against the Catholic League.

More War

Catherine de Medici died in 1589, and her last son followed shortly thereafter. In July of the same year, a Dominican friar angered by King Henry’s betrayal of Catholicism stabbed him in the stomach. After Henry III’s slow, lingering death from internal bleeding and infection, the Protestant Henry of Navarre became king of France. “I rule with my arse in the saddle and my gun in my fist,” he declared and rode out to take his capital back from the Catholic League.
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The siege of Paris that began in May 1590 was brutal. For month after month, the 220,000 residents of the biggest city in Europe were loc
ked inside with dwindling supplies. As time pressed on, dogs, cats, and rats disappeared from the streets. “Little children disguised as meat” showed up in the markets.
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Before it was over, 40,000 to 50,000 Parisians had starved to death. Navarre bombarded the city with cannon from the high ground,
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but in the end the city held and the siege was lifted in early September.

The Catholic League then called a parliament in Paris to pick a Catholic king to set up against Henry of Navarre, but when the Spaniards offered up their own princess, daughter of a Valois sister, many Frenchmen were appalled. It started to dawn on them that being French was probably more important than being Catholic. Maybe a Bourbon king was better than allowing France to become a Spanish satellite.

Suddenly, in 1593, Henry of Navarre, who had led the Protestant armies through many hard battles, announced that, well, if it really meant that much to them, he would go ahead and convert to Catholicism. He didn’t want to cause a fuss.

“Paris is worth a mass,” he is rumored to have explained.

This cleared the way for him to be a properly accepted and consecrated king, and before anyone could come up with any new objections, peace broke out. In 1598, King Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes, declaring toleration for all Christian faiths. His new Bourbon dynasty wanted to start with a blank slate: “The recollection of everything done by one party or the other . . . durin
g all the preceding period of troubles, remain obliterated and forgotten, as if no such things had ever happened.” Or in the words of Monty Python’s King of Swamp Castle, “Let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who.”
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RUSSO-TATAR WAR

Death toll:
500,000
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Rank:
70

Type:
clash of cultures

Broad dividing line:
Russians, Tatars

Time frame:
1570–72

Location:
Russia

Major state participants:
Crimean Khanate, Muscovy

Who usually gets the most blame:
Tatars

Another damn:
Mongol invasion

I
N 1570, WHILE TSAR IVAN THE TERRIBLE WAS BUSY FIGHTING A WAR NEAR
the Baltic, Tatars of the Crimean Khanate raided the southern borderlands of Russia and found them lightly defended. The next May, they launched a full invasion to plunder Russia for everything they could carry off. They looted and burned the towns and sent 150,000 residents southward into slavery.
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The Tatars wiped out all of the small, scattered garrisons that Ivan had stationed there.

Arriving in the outskirts of Moscow, the Tatars set fire to the suburbs, and these individual fires fused and swept into the city. The inhabitants of Moscow fled in panic, crowding against the farthest gate of the city wall, pressing and trampling o
ne another, compacting into a mass of corpses three layers deep. Others jumped into the river to escape the fire and drowned instead. The powder magazine in the Kremlin exploded.

The city was in ruins, and tens of thousands of people were dead. The Moscow River was choked with more bodies than it could hold, and it took more than a year to clear all of the corpses out of the city. For ten days, the Russian nobles were afraid to tell Ivan of the disaster.
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Finally, in July, Ivan’s army caught up with the Tatars at Molodi, south of Moscow. The 60,000 Russians thoroughly defeated the 120,000 Tatars and deterred them f
rom invasion for a long time to come.

THE TIME OF TROUBLES

Death toll:
5 million
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Rank:
22

Type:
failed state, dynastic dispute

Broad dividing line:
peasants vs. nobility

Time frame:
1598–1613

Location:
Russia

Major state participants:
Muscovy (Russia), Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Kingdom of Sweden

Number of Dmitris: 4

Who usually gets the most blame:
Russia’s cutthroat nobility, Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, and Cossacks

Lesson learned:
Always insist on seeing a photo ID before you proclaim someone emperor.

John the Fearsome

When it comes to insane tyrants, Ivan the Terrible is the standard against which all others are measured. He was short-tempered, superstitious, and erratic, and few of his inner circle outlived him. With the death of his father in 1533, Ivan became tsar of Russia at the age of three and spent the next ten years as a pawn of the boyars (noblemen). Over the course of Ivan’s childhood, various close confidants were beaten to death, skinned alive, imprisoned, and starved by rival factions of nobles. His mother was poisoned. Ivan himself remained withdrawn and helpless, amusing himself by torturing dogs and cats. Finally, the thirteen-year-old Ivan asserted his authority and threw the top boyar, Prince Andrei Shuisky, to a pack of hungry hunting dogs.

For a while, Ivan’s marriage to Anastasia Romanov calmed his erratic behavior, and his enlightened rule brought peace and prosper
ity to Russia for the first time in many years. Then, when Anastasia died, Ivan went fully mad. He accused the boyars of having poisoned his beloved Anastasia, and many were killed in revenge by slow and ingenious torture.

Among some of his more notable monstrosities, he killed one of his wives when he discovered she had lied about her virginity. He pe
rsonally killed his eldest son and heir in a fit of anger. Ivan once accused the city of Novgorod of treason and started to systematically wipe out the inhabitants, day after day, week after week, giving his personal attention to many of the deaths, but then he changed his mind halfway into it and just went away. At one point in his reign, he tired of power and arranged to retire to a monastery, but no one believed it, and he soon changed his mind anyway. He empowered a special class of thugs, the
oprichniki
, to kill, rape, or steal with absolute impunity. Ivan died suddenly in 1584, and a Soviet-era autopsy revealed too much mercury in his system, suggesting that he was poisoned either by an enemy or by the mercury in the medicines commonly used at the time to treat advanced syphilis.
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The death toll of Ivan’s reign is unknown—certainly tens of thousands, possibly a hundred thousand—but it doesn’t qualify for my top one hundred list. Ivan concerns us only because when his mad reign was over, Russia’s great families had been devastated, and the only sons to survive him were too young or feeble-minded to have attracted his anger.

The Last Real Dmitri

When Ivan died, the throne went to his simple-minded son Fedor. Always popular with the people, Tsar Fedor presided over sixteen welcome years of peace and calm. The real power in the land, however, was Boris Godunov, the brother of Fedor’s wife Irina.

One potential glitch in the imperial succession was the existence of Fedor’s younger half-brother Dmitri. He was the son of Ivan’s fifth or maybe seventh wife (everyone lost track), but Eastern Orthodoxy allowed only three wives before they figured enough is enough, so there was some doubt as to whether Dmitri was illegitimate or not. It shouldn’t have mattered, but Fedor and Irina were not producing children that survived.

Although Fedor was quite fond of Dmitri, Godunov found an excuse to exile Dmitri to the town of Uglich, about one hundred miles north of Moscow on the Volga River. Dmitri was already starting to take after his father and torture small animals. After a few years, in 1591, word came back to Moscow that nine-year-old Dmitri had died mysteriously of a cut throat. Rumor and Dmitri’s mother fingered Godunov, and a rioting mob in Uglich lynched Dmitri’s Boris-appointed guardian in anger.
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Godunov himself seemed authentically baffled by Dmitri’s death. He secretly sent Vasily Shuisky, a young Russian nobleman and childhood playmate of Dmitri’s, to investigate. Shuisky was no flunky of the court. He had only recently been released from prison, where he had been held for plotting against Godunov. He reported back that Dmitri had accidentally cut his own throat by having an epileptic seizure while playing with a knife, a story no one believed. Dmitri’s mother was then stashed in a convent before she could complain.
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This left no obvious heirs, so when Fedor died in January 1598, the Rurik dynasty that had ruled Russia since the dawn of recorded history went extinct. In the shock that accompanied this terrible news, Boris Godunov stepped up and volunteered to be tsar. He gathered an assembly of compliant nobles who voted him into power. At first, his nation hated him because they suspected that he had done away with their beloved Dmitri. Then some Mongols invaded, and he drove them back from the gates of Moscow against all odds, so he was a hero. Temporarily.

The First False Dmitri

Around 1600, the dead Prince Dmitri reappeared, healthy and ready to take back his rightful throne. No one knows who this young man was, but it really doesn’t matter. He’s gone down in history as Dmitri, and that’s good enough for now. After he attracted a large following, neighboring Poland took him under its wing and invaded Russia on his behalf.

By this time, the Russ
ian people had forgotten the details of how Ivan the Terrible earned his nickname. All they remembered was that he had crushed the boyars without mercy, and the average Russian hated living under the oppressive thumb of the boyars. They also remembered that Ivan had gloriously attacked all of Russia’s enemies, but they seemed to forget that his wars were costly and not always successful. Regardless, the Russians thrilled and rallied to the idea of a true son of Ivan coming to Russia’s rescue.

Russia at the time was in the grips of a deadly famine as one bad harvest followed another, from 1601 to 1604. “Dead bodies were found with hay in their mouths and human flesh was sold in pies in the markets.”
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Boris started relief programs for the hungry in Moscow, and the cities were flooded with refugees. He also paid for burial shrouds for the dead when the food ran out. In Moscow alone, 100,000 died of starvation. Many considered the famine to be divine punishment of the usurper Boris.
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Dmitri’s army fought a tough, bloody campaign toward Moscow, but he showed mercy to defeated enemies, while Boris’s armies were prone to inflict cruel reprisals against communities that welcomed the pretender. Then, in April 1605, Boris fell ill and died. Some people say he was poisoned, but some people say that about everyone. His twelve-year-old son, Fedor, then inherited the cursed throne of Muscovy.

Almost all of the support for the Godunovs evaporated with Boris gone, so a popular uprising of Muscovites seized the Kremlin and imprisoned the royal family. As Dmitri took control of the city, Tsar Fedor II and his mother were quietly strangled in their cells.

Tsar Dmitri ascended the throne in 1605. Vasily Shuisky disavowed his earlier investigation into the Dmitri’s death and signed off on the new official version, which was that Dmitri had evaded Godunov’s assassins, who had killed a substitute child instead.

When Dmitri married the Polish princess Marina Mniszech in May 1606, too many Catholic Poles for Russian tastes attended the wedding. Orthodox Muscovites quickly soured on the imperial couple and their odious foreign entourage. Quarrels, fistfights, and riots escalated between the foreigners and n
atives in the capital. Finally, on May 17, a mob attacked the palace and burst into the tsar’s bedroom. Dmitri broke his leg as he scrambled out of the window, and they shot him dead as he tried to hobble away. His carcass was dragged off by a rope tied around his feet and genitals, and then put on display for the people to poke with sticks. Dmitri was then buried, exhumed a week later, and burned. His charred corpse was blown from a cannon back toward Poland, where he belonged. During a general purge of Poles in the city, about 420 were killed and the rest were chased away.
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The Second False Dmitri

The leader of the assassination conspiracy was Vasily Shuisky, the childhood friend of the original Dmitri who had led the investigation of Dmitri’s first death. He then became Tsar Vasily. In order to prove that the previous tsar had been an impostor, Tsar Vasily acquired the corpse of a young boy and declared it to be the real Dmitri from the grave in Uglich. He hauled it to the capital, and after the remains were credited with the requisite number of miraculous cures of lepers and cripples, Vasily bullied the church into declaring the boy to be definitely Dmitri, dead and a saint.
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In 1607, a well-educated drifter was jailed for impersonating a nobleman.
Under torture, however, he recanted his claim of being that particular nobleman, and instead claimed to be the lost Dmitri. He was unchained, brushed off, and proclaimed tsar. The Poles arranged a mercenary army to carry him to Moscow. As the army won battle after battle, Russians hailed the return of Dmitri. Russian noblemen abandoned Tsar Vasily and joined Dmitri, but then, he was stopped short of his goal by Muscovite resistance.

Dmitri established a temporary court in the city of Tushino, a few miles from Moscow. The court of Tsar Vasily began to bleed supporters as more and more boyars moved from Moscow to Tushino. Trying to undermine support for the pretender, Tsar Vasily released Marina Mniszech, widow of the first false Dmitri, from prison on the condition that she absolutely not throw her support to the new Dmitri. For a while she complied, but as the winds shifted away from Vasily, she escaped to Dmitri’s camp, where she publicly acknowledged him as her dead husband Dmitri, now recovered from his earlier injuries.

At this point, Shuisky arranged an alliance with the Swedes to rescue his failing throne.

I know what you’re thinking: Swedes? The Volvo-driving, snowy blond socialists who hand out Nobel prizes and avoided both world wars? Those Swedes? This gives you an idea of how much Europe has changed since the seventeenth century when Russia was being kicked around by Poland and Sweden rather than vice versa, but both countries were much larger in those days. Sweden controlled most of the Baltic region, including Finland, Latvia, and Estonia. Poland was united with Lithuania, and it sprawled halfway into Belarus and Ukraine.

In any case, Poland took this open intervention by an outside state as an affront. For the Swedes to conspire behind the scenes was perfectly acceptable diplomatic practice, but actually sending an army into battle crossed the line. Now the Poles entered the fray officially and directly instead of hiding behind Dmitri. Their army crossed into Russia in September 1609 to break the alliance with Sweden and elevate a new Polish candidate to the Muscovite throne. This in turn undermined much of Dmitri’s support, both among Russians (who blamed him for the Polish invasion) and among his Polish entourage (who left him and rejoined the real Polish army). Dmitri broke his camp at Tushino and retreated.