The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (40 page)

About 350,000 soldiers died in the Thirty Years War,
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but civilian deaths outnumbered these by 20 to 1. Compare that to World War II, where civilian deaths outnumbered military deaths by a mere 2 to 1 even though the extermination of peoples and the destruction of cities was open policy. How was it possible for so many civilians to have died in the Thirty Years War when the number who died in the Sack of Magdeburg, 25,000, stands out as uniquely horrible? Simple. Armies lived off the land.

Seventeenth-century Europe was extremely rural, and most people lived off what they grew themselves. Farmers produced a slight surplus to sell in market towns, so only a few tradesmen in any community could survive without growing their own food. Introducing an army into an area disrupted this delicate balance of producer and consumer. It was like the spontaneous eruption of a brand new town inhabited entirely by 15,000 hungry but unemployed hoodlums. They confiscated food, slaughtered the livestock, abused the women, and ripped apart buildings for firewood. Afterward, they destroyed any leftovers or surplus to keep them out of enemy hands. Every army, both friend and foe, left starving peasants in its wake.

Desolation was everywhere. Jesuits investigating the smoking ruins of Eichstatt found unclaimed children in the cellars, eating rats, so they bundled them up and carried them away to feed, house, and educate them. An English ambassador reported arriving at the deserted town of Neunkirchen and finding one house burning and two bodies in the street but no one else. As he traveled farther he found more ghost towns; Neustadt was “pillaged and burnt miserably”; at Bacharach, the starving people were found dead with grass in their mouths.
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Columns of refugees were thinned b
y starvation and the plague, and they were barred from entry into one town after another. In cities that accepted refugees, the citizens stepped over fresh bodies every morning. Eventually refugees would be expelled—7,000 from Zurich, for example—because there was no food or room for them. Often the only available food was taboo. At one gypsy camp, feet and hands were found in a cauldron. Near another town fresh human bones were found, flesh scraped away, cracked for the marrow. Fresh corpses disappeared from graveyards.
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As if war and famine weren’t enough, witch burning peaked around the time of the Thirty Years War. The bishop of Wurzburg is said to have burned 9,000 witches between 1625 and 1628. A thousand were burned in the Silesian principality of Neisse in 1640–41.
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Contrary to common perception, the great witch hunts were not a relic of medieval superstition and ignorance. They grew mostly from the passions inflamed by religious conflict in the Early Modern Era. Over the centuries of holy wars, communities all across Europe rooted out and exterminated the dangerous infidels among them, both real (Protestants, Catholics) and imagined (witches, demons).

French Phase

Like most big, messy civil wars throughout history, the war in Germany was sucking in all of the neighboring states, and it eventually became part of a larger contest between the two alpha nations of Europe at the time, Spain and France. Spain was run by a side branch of the Hapsburg family, and its holdings included Belgium, Burgundy, and about half of Italy. Spain was willing to assist its Austrian cousins in crushing their Protestant enemies in Germany, but in exchange they wanted Austrian assistance in crushing the Protestant enemies of Spain in the Netherlands. The French, being natural enemies of Spain, subsidized all of the enemies of the Hapsburgs, regardless of race, religion, or national origin.

The Swedish army designed by Gustavus Adolphus continued scoring victories on autopilot for the next few years, until the empire smashed them at Nordlingen in 1634. Since the Scandinavians had failed to win the war in G
ermany, the French now intervened directly. Although they were Catholic, the French feared the emergence of a strong united Germany (on their eastern border), dynastically linked to Spain (on their southern border), which had armies in the Netherlands (on their northern border). In fact, the intervention of the French into the Thirty Years War in 1634 represents probably the exact moment that the Age of Religious Wars ended, and Europe went back to fighting wars just for the heck of it.

Although the Swedes continued fighting throughout the center of the empire, the focus of the war now shifted to the Spanish Road, the path of possessions and allies that Spain used to move troops from the Mediterranean and the Catholic mercenary recruiting grounds in Italy, across the Alps and down the Rhine to the battlefields in the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium). Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of France, set out to break this pathway once and for all, but it was a hard war. With annual convoys of silver steadily arriving from mines in its New World colonies, Spain was the only country in Europe capable of maintaining a full-strength, full-time national army.

War sputtered through the Rhineland for a few years as French-subsidized German and Dutch armies harried the Spaniards, and small French forces nibbled at the southern border of the Spanish Netherlands. Finally, in 1643, a French army that had been built up to Spanish standards cornered and destroyed the main Spanish force at the Battle of Rocroi. It took a full day of grim and systematic killing, but when it was done, the Spanish army was in no condition to lend soldiers to its Austrian cousins. Spain needed to keep its remaining forces clos
e to home to keep the advancing French at bay.

Results

Estimates of the number killed in the Thirty Years War have been falling over time. Shortly after the war, it was said that Germany was almost depopulated, and that over 12 million inhabitants, or three-fourths of the population, had disappeared. Then, as historians studied church, tax, and court records, they often discovered that the people who had disappeared from one section of Germany turned up somewhere else, alive and well—or at least alive. By the 1930s, the preferred estimate was that one-third of the population, or 7 to 8 million people, had died.
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An estimate that has become popular in the past few decades gives a death toll of half that—3 or 4 million.
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Even so, the middle estimate is still the most common. This would make the Thirty Years War the deadliest event ever to hit Germany, killing more Germans than the two world wars combined.
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The final Treaty of Westphalia signed in 1648 made a lot of adjustments to the borders and relationships among the princes of Germany, but most of those have faded into irrelevance. It was a long time ago, and you don’t have to worry about them. The most long-lasting outcome of the Thirty Years War is that Europe finally realized how stupid it was to fight over religion. In less than a century, religious conflicts had devastated France, Germany, England, and Holland. Eventually, many exhausted nations decided to allow the choice of faith to be a private matter, and this became one of the cornerstones of Western Civilization.

Nowadays fighting over religion is considered so ridiculous that many Western historians are too embarrassed to admit it even happened. It’s like having a great-grandfather who owned slaves. Probably half of the historians in recent generations have preferred to describe the Wars of Religion as secular power struggles hiding behind a pretense of religion; however, this projects modern sensibilities backward onto the past. Most human societies don’t separate religion from public policy. Belief governs how people act. Religion structures their society and guides their decisions. Doubting the nation’s religion is an insult against the core values of the nation, and impiety risks annoying whichever god watches over the people. Western Civilization is unique in making religion a private matter, and this is based on the hard lessons learned in the era of religious wars.
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COLLAPSE OF THE MING DYNASTY

Death toll:
25 million

Rank:
5

Type:
failed state

Broad dividing line:
every man for himself

Time frame:
1635–62

Location:
China

Who usually gets the most blame:
two rebels (Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong), a rogue general (Wu Sangui), and Dorgon the Barbarian

Another damn:
Chinese dynasty collapsing

T
O MANY IN THE WEST, THE MING DYNASTY IS KNOWN PRIMARILY FROM
slapstick comedy as producers of expensive and fragile vases, but historically they were producers of fine everything—porcelain, silk, art, and poetry. Although nowadays it’s considered bad manners among historians to pass judgment on the past, the Ming (“Brilliant”) dynasty is widely considered the peak of Chinese civilization. It was the most culturally and technologically advanced era before the Europeans interfered, and the last time China was ruled by an ethnically Chinese emperor.

Den of Thieves

Li Zicheng had trouble finding the right career before he settled on warlord. After a childhood spent herding sheep, he worked awhile in a wine shop; then he apprenticed to an ironworker. Later, he was laid off from a job as a post-station attendant. Finally, in 1630, he signed up with the Chinese army.

At the time, north China was in the grips of a deadly famine. Even the army was living at the edge of starvation, so one day, when supplies failed to arrive as scheduled, Li Zicheng’s unit mutinied and went into business for itself as bandits. The government eventually captured several of the
renegades—Li among them—in 1634. They worked out a deal to go back to duty with the frontier army, but then the local magistrate went ahead and executed thirty-six of the rebels. Li and his men struck back and then took to the hills.

Many bandit gangs infested the Chinese foothills in those days, and the bigger ones were
virtually sovereign. Eventually Li Zicheng became the crime boss of three provinces in the highlands that backed up against the northern edge of the Tibetan plateau, stretching from the Yangtze to the Great Wall. He was called the “Dashing King,” not for being especially debonair, but for the speed of his attacks.

Li squabbled with other bandits as much as he did with the authorities. Several of the gangs looted the Ming d
ynasty’s tombs and imprisoned the attendants. As they were splitting the loot, Li demanded the eunuch musicians as part of his share, and the rival rebel Zhang Xianzhong complied but smashed all of the instruments just out of spite. Li then spited Zhang one better and killed the musicians.
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Zhang Xianzhong had also turned to banditry during the famine of 1628. He marauded a bit and then moved into the big inland valley of Sichuan, where he took Chengdu, the provincial capital, with a general slaughter of the population. He was known by the nickname “Yellow Tiger.” Eventually, Li and Zhang made a deal that split China between them.

Li Zicheng set out to expand his holdings eastward into Hunan with an army that numbered between 60,000 and 100,000. In April 1642, he besieged the city of Kaifeng for several months, driving the defenders to desperation and cannibalism. Finally, an imperial army arrived in September. Afraid to meet Li head-on in battle, the army tried instead to drive him away by breaching the dikes that held back the Yellow River. The plan worked after a fashion; Li abandoned the siege, but the resulting flood devastated the city. Of the 370,000 residents of Kaifeng, only 30,000 survived.
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In any case, the setback at Kaifeng did nothing to stem Li’s ambition. On New Year’s Day, February 8, 1644, Li Zicheng pro
claimed himself lord of the Shun dynasty, which certainly didn’t go over well with the current ruler of China, Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming dynasty.

The Last Emperor

On April 22, 1644, frantic courtiers found the door to the emperor’s suite mysteriously jammed shut. After breaking inside, they discovered Emperor Chongzhen in tears. Not only was Li’s army closing in on the capital at Beijing, but also the government was bankrupt and couldn’t pay the imperial armies. A combination of famines, epidemics, bandits, pirates, and frontier wars had drained the treasury, while a naval war between the Catholic Portuguese (China’s major trading partner) and the Protestant Dutch and English disrupted the influx of silver and left the imperial exchequer without ready cash.
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Emperor Chongzhen couldn’t decide whether to flee Beijing southward for the safer city of Nanjing. If he ran, he would lose legitimacy, and the crown prince would take this as an abdication, but if he stayed, one of his opportunistic kinsmen could rally the southern lands and declare himself emperor instead. Two days later, Li’s rebel army entered the suburbs of Beijing.

The emperor’s panic may have been unnecessary. Li apparently was willing to accept vassalage rather
than the throne itself. Li even sent a message ahead, offering to bypass the capital and throw his army against the Manchus north of the Great Wall if the emperor would only recognize and legitimize Li’s rule of the southern provinces. The message apparently did not reach the emperor, who never responded. Li kept coming.

Eventually, Emperor Chongzhen decided to stay and await his fate. He got drunk and stumbled around the palace with a sword, killing his chief concubine and youngest daughters to keep them from falling into the hand of the rebels. Then he tried to kill his oldest daughter, but he only chopped off her arm when she tried to block the blow. She ran down the hall trailing blood.

Disguising him
self as a eunuch, the emperor tried to slip out of the capital, but his guards fired on him as he approached the gates. He retreated to his chambers and rang a bell to summon his ministers for advice. When none came, he calmly walked out to the garden and hanged himself from a tree below a hill.
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Barbarians at the Gate

Let’s introduce another set of characters. The Manchus were a Jurchen people, closely related to several other barbarian peoples who hovered in the lands north of China and occasionally came crashing down against the Great Wall; however, they were not the same branch of the Jurchens that established the Jin (“Golden”) dynasty in north China in the twelfth century, which later fell to the Mongols (see “Genghis Khan”).

If this is confusing, think of the Jurchen as being like the Australians, New Zealanders, English, and Scots. To us, it’s obvious that these Anglophonic white people are entirely dissimilar, but in four hundred y
ears few will remember or care what the differences between the Americans and Canadians used to be.

In their native state, the Manchus lived as nomadic herdsmen and fought as horse archers like the Mongols before them. Eventually, however, contact with the Chinese rubbed off on them, and they padded their armies with Chinese-style battalions of massed pikemen and musketeers. Because these forces required less training and could be raised as needed, they were more suitable to peasant societies.

In 1584, a twenty-five-year-old barbarian named Nurhachi inherited leadership of one of the four subordinate tribes of the Manchus. Through the usual combination of charisma, cunning, and ruthlessness, he united the four tribes into one mighty federation. He then embarked on a lifetime of war against every neighbor he could reach. Finally, his invasion of the neighboring Yehe tribe put him in direct conflict with the Ming. Now a grizzled fifty-nine-year-old veteran, N
urhachi beat the Chinese in their first encounter at Sahu in 1619. Soon he was plunging toward the Chinese capital at Beijing, until he ran up against an entrenched garrison with artillery. Nurhachi died shortly thereafter from a festering cannon wound.

Firearms

Yuan Chonghuan, the Chinese general who beat Nurhachi, had picked up his knowledge of Western firearms from his cook, who had been hanging around with Europeans.
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Although the Chinese had known the principles of gunpowder for centuries, a new invention from the West, the matchlock musket, was strengthening infantry’s return to the battlefield.

Although inferior to bows
and arrows in almost every way—weight, accuracy, range, and rate of fire—these primitive muskets had one crucial advantage. They required almost no skill to operate: just load, point, and ignite. Fighting a battle using bows—even if you won—would erode the number of skilled archers, and it would take years to train a replacement for each one killed. On the other hand, after winning a battle using muskets, an army could just pick up all of the guns lying scattered among the dead musketmen, then take a few days to train replacement peasants to load, point, and ignite.

General Yuan Chonghuan had handed the Manchus a temporary setback, but he would not remain in their way for
long. In a fit of jealousy, General Yuan had recently executed a talented subordinate, so friends of this subordinate conspired with palace eunuchs for payback. Yuan was accused of treason, dragged away, and executed by the traditional Chinese manner of having many pieces systematically sliced off in the central market of Beijing.

New Alien Overlords

Several traditionally Chinese provinces beyond the Great Wall in Manchuria were demarcated from the surrounding barbarians by the Willow Palisade, which, as you can probably guess from the name, was not quite as formidable a barrier as the Great Wall. After Nurhachi conquered these lands, the Manchus acquired a few decades of experience ruling Chinese.
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Among the little rules that would become important lat
er, Nurhachi required his male Chinese subjects to shave their heads but keep a long braided queue, the traditional Manchu sign of servitude. Of more immediate usefulness, the Manchus learned the sacred importance of the emperor to the Chinese, so Nurhachi’s son and successor, Hong Taiji, proclaimed a proper new dynasty, the Qing (pronounced “ching” and meaning “pure”).

Hong Taiji also added to earlier acquisitions—Inner Mongolia in 1632, Korea in 1638. These were impressive conquests certainly, but they only added more barbarians. To earn a name in the history books, a conqueror has to overrun the center of the civilized world. Although the Manchus had been at constant war with China for several decades, they hadn’t been able to decisively crack the frontier defenses.

In 1643, Hong Taiji died, and the surviving members of his house began to jostle for position. A complicated compromise between the factions produced a child khan and two rival co-regents. One of the regents, Nurhachi’s sixteenth son, Dorgon, was really the man in charge.
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The bandit revolts of Li and Zhang in Ming China opened up an excellent opportunity for the Manchus to invade, but they weren’t sure whether to pillage and ride back home with saddlebags stuffed with loot or to settle in for a long, profitable stay. Dorgon is said to have offered Li Zicheng a deal dividing China between them, but nothing came of it. Maybe this messenger was lost in transit as well.