The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (42 page)

AURANGZEB

Death toll:
maybe 4.6 million in the Deccan War
¹

Rank:
23

Type:
despot

Broad dividing line:
Muslims vs. Hindus

Time frame:
ruled 1658–1707

Location:
India

Major state participant:
Mughal Empire

Who usually gets the most blame:
Aurangzeb

Presumptive Heir

When Shah Jahan, the Mughal emperor of India and builder of the Taj Mahal, was unable to urinate for three days, the backup in his system sent him into a serious sickness. His oldest and favorite son, Dara, kept the illness secret and his father hidden so as not to panic the empire. Palace rumors quickly reached the ears of Shah Jahan’s other sons. They suspected that Dara was scheming. He was clearly behind their father’s mysterious disappearance, and they assumed that they were next, so they fled and began to raise armies in the provinces.

Shah Jahan recovered from his illness soon enough, but his sons were in open civil war by then. Dara easily beat the youngest in battle and chased him into exile, which left Aurangzeb (third) su
pporting Murad (second) for the throne. As these two gradually gained the upper hand, Aurangzeb invited Murad to his tent to work out the details of their partnership. Murad dined and drank fine wines while his strict Muslim brother stayed sober. Murad dozed pleasantly while a slave girl gave him a massage. Then he woke up imprisoned.

Aurangzeb eventually captured the capital and locked his father in his suite in the palace. After a hard campaign, Aurangzeb captured his brother Dara and put him on trial. As far as Aurangzeb was concerned, Dara had always seemed too tolerant of Hindus, so Dara was found guilty of apostasy and beheaded. The head was taken to his imprisoned father to prove that Aurangzeb was now completely in charge.

Aurangzeb was always mindful that he had come to power by overthrowing his father, so he kept a tight leash on his own children. Every one of them was imprisoned for a few years at some point or another
during his long reign.

Faith-Based Initiatives

The Mughal dynasty had begun in Afghanistan as an offshoot of Timur’s dynasty, which swept over the mountains into India. In a steady line from father to son for five generations, one glorious conqueror after another expanded and consolidated the empire; however, the Mughals preferred to show off with magnificent art and architecture rather than martial prowess. The Mughals invested heavily in public works such as roads, postal carriers, and granaries as a precaution against famine.

Although generous and pious patrons of Islam, the Mughals traditionally had been tolerant of Hinduism. Throughout their domain,
Hindus had been allowed to freely practice all their rites and customs. Previous Mughals had even entrusted Hindus with the command of armies and high offices at the palace.

Aurangzeb, however, was a Muslim ascetic who banned every vice he could, and personally avoided almost everything else. He did not wear silk. He prohibited music wherever he could. Unlike previous Mughals, Aurangzeb adhered to the Muslim prohibition of images, so without the patronage of the court, painters had to leave the country to find work. Having no interest in any writing other than scripture, Aurangzeb also withdrew imperial patronage of poets and scholars.
²
He prohibited Hindus from riding horses or litters. He reintroduced the head tax non-Muslims had to pay.

Aurangzeb relentlessly destroyed Hindu temples all across India. In 1661, he demolished the Kesava Deo temple in Mathura that marked the birthplace of Krishna. The Kashi Vishwanath temple in the holy city of Varanasi, one of the most famous temples dedicated to Shiva, was demolished in 1669. He destroyed the Somnath Temple in Saurashtra in 1706.
³
This list probably means nothing to you, but it leaves Hindu historians wincing just as Westerners do whenever they read about a great landmark of Greco-Roman civilization being destroyed. All you need to remember is that thousands of Hindu holy sites were flattened throughout India and replaced with mosques. To this day, Hindu nationalists are itching for an opportunity to burn down these mosques and rebuild the lost Hindu temples.

When Guru Nanak Dev founded the Sikh religion in the 1500s, he had originally hoped to bring peace to India and reconcile Islam and Hinduism by reducing the rival faiths to their common moral elements and fusing them into a single pacifistic religion. Unfortunately this only created an awkward third religion for everyone to fight over. The Sikhs infuriated Aurangzeb by converting Muslims, and he sw
ore to put a stop to this poaching. In 1675, he threw Guru Tegh Bahadur, leader of the Sikhs, into jail and tortured him a bit to see if he would change his mind about religious tolerance. When the guru stuck to his original opinion, Aurangzeb had him beheaded. After this, the Sikhs shifted away from their original pacifism and withdrew to mountain fortresses, where they became a warrior people who carried ritual swords and daggers at all times.
⁴

Marathas

During the seventeenth century, a motley collection of Hindu highland clans called the Marathas evolved into a warrior nation bent on resisting Muslim encroachment. The chief Maratha, Shivaji, became the legendary leader of the resistance, a hero to generations of Hindus, famous for his daring escapades. During a parley with one Muslim general, he unexpectedly disemboweled the general with hidden steel tiger claws; then his troops rushed out of hiding to massacre the leaderless enemy. Later, he snuck into a fortress by blending into a royal wedding procession. He then killed the guests in their sleep. In 1663, he topped that by breaking into Aurangzeb’s harem and causing mayhem.

Aurangzeb fired the general in charge of hunting Shivaji and sent his own son south. It didn’t help. Shiv
aji stayed one step ahead of the Mughals, and he seized and looted the city of Surat in 1664. Finally, a new Mughal general, Jai Singh, took over and beat Shivaji into submission in three months. Shivaji agreed to travel to the capital, Agra, and offer his personal allegiance to the emperor, so Aurangzeb sent a magnificent caravan of elephants, litters, and attendants at Mughal expense to bring him to the city in 1666. Once there, however, Shivaji felt snubbed by the emperor and ran away to resume the war. He promoted himself to king and expanded the reach of his raids.
⁵
In 1680, Shivaji died of dysentery, and leadership of the Marathis went to his son Sambhaji.

In the same year, Aurangzeb sent one of his sons, Akbar, south to put down a rebellion of Rajputs (Hindu aristocratic clans), but Akbar joined the revolt instead. He declared himself emperor and un
successfully attacked northward. Akbar had a large enough army that he should have won at least a few of the preliminaries, but he blew the first battle and had to flee farther south, beyond the reach of his father. He eventually hopped a ship to Persia.

Deccan War

Finally deciding that he had to conquer the south himself, Aurangzeb rode out with an army reputed to number a half million. Not just an army, the traveling party included his entire court and a tent city of colorful pavilions, animal herds, wagons, corrals, and bazaars. For the remaining twenty-six years of his life, he would never again return to the north.

In 1686–87 he overran the independent Muslim kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda, whom he considered decadent and hedonistic. Then he turned his full attention against the Marathas on the mountainous rim of the Deccan plateau in west-central India. When the Mughals finally captured the Maratha king Sambhaji in 1689, Aurangzeb had him gradually dismantled over the next three weeks—cutting out his tongue the first day, eyes the next, then his limbs one by one. Finally Sambhaji was reduced to an unrecognizable fraction of his former self and was beheaded.

Although Aurangzeb systematically captured one Maratha hill fort after another, new ones continually sprang up somewhere else. Maratha forts usually surrendered as soon as Aurangzeb arrived, but then resumed their revolt as soon as he was safely gone.
⁶
The Marathas became experts at guerrilla warfare, so Aurangzeb tried to root them out by destroying the
villages and crops that supported them.

As the war dragged on, southern India was devastated. According to contemporary sources, 100,000 of Aurangzeb’s men and 300,000 beasts of burden (horses, camels, asses, oxen, and elephants) died every year during the quarter century of war in the Deccan. When drought, plague, and famine hit the war-torn lands in 1702 to 1704, two million civilians died within a few years.
⁷

The long war never quite accomplished its ultimate purpose. By the end of Aurangzeb’s life, the Mughals had come close to conquering the entire subcontinent of India, but the farthest tip of the peninsula still remained outside their grasp. Mughal power reached its peak under Aurangzeb, but the problem with a peak is that it’s all downhill after that. Years of fighting had exhausted
the empire. The treasury was depleted. The Mughal Empire quickly crumbled away after Aurangzeb died.

GREAT TURKISH WAR

Death toll:
384,000
¹

Rank:
89

Type:
clash of cultures

Broad dividing line:
Turks vs. Holy League

Time frame:
1682–99

Location:
southeastern Europe

Major state participants:
Austria, Ottoman Turkey

Minor state participants:
Venice, Poland, Papacy, Russia

Quantum state participant:
Hungary

Who usually gets the most blame:
Kara Mustafa

Siege of Vienna

When its king and nobility were wiped out by the Turks at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, Hungary ceased being a viable nation. The leaderless land was partitioned between the Austrians in the northwest and the Ottoman Turks in the southeast, but a century later, Hungarians under Imre Thokoly tried to drive the Austrians out of their half of Hungary. After suffering a string of defeats, Thokoly realized he couldn’t do it alone. Hoping to play one great power against the other, he turned to the Turks for help.

His request came at the right time. The elite Turkish infantry, the Janissaries, were looking for a war in order to pick up some quick loot, and a twenty-year truce between Turkey and Austria was set to expire. Kara Mustafa, the latest vizier produced by the Koprulu family and the power behind the throne of Ottoman Turkey, seized the opportunity. He organized a massive spearhead to drive against Vienna. Although the Turks issued their declaration of war in August 1682, preparing their invasion force of over 140,000 troops and four hundred cannon delayed the offensive until the next spring.

Although they knew the Turks were coming, the Austrians dithered about preparing Vienna for a siege. A hundred years of peace had led them to neglect their fortifications. Bastions had eroded. Houses and trees had sprung up in what was supposed to be an open field of fire. At first, Emperor Leopold I couldn’t decide whether his place was with his troops or safe from harm, but he finally snuck out of the city just before the Turkish vanguard arrived, leaving a mere 12,000 regular troops to coordinate the militia’s defense.

Fortunately for Christendom, the Turks dithered as well. When they surrounded Vienna in July 1683, they dug trenches and waited, occasionally raiding but never attacking in force, even on a couple of occasions when a useful breach appeared in the enemy defenses. Under the laws of war at the time, common soldiers could legally plunder a city seized by assault for three days without restraint, but a peacefully surrendered city belonged to the sultan. Kara apparently preferred to wait and take Vienna intact for the empire, rather than taking it quickly and seeing his soldiers destroy it. Instead, the Turks stayed busy by terrorizing the surrounding countryside, such as massacring 4,000 villagers in nearby Perchtoldsdorf.

The siege dragged on long enough for the emperor to hire 81,000 east European mercenaries to save Vienna. The backbone of this army was 25,000 men under King John III Sobieski, the last great king of Poland. Sobieski and his Polish Winged Hussars
*
swooped down on the rear of the Turkish camp. Overconfident of their success, the Turks hadn’t fortified their rear against such an attack, and their camp was overrun. The entire host fled, abandoning huge stockpiles of supplies, provisions, and treasure.
²

Damage Control

Looking to find someone to blame for his defeat, Kara Mustafa arrested Imre Thokoly, the Hungarian rebel who had talked him into this mess. The arrest of their leader insulted the Hungarian troops, who now switched over to the Austrian side, taking all of the fortresses in Turkish Hungary with them. Only Imre’s wife stayed on the Turkish side to prove her husband’s loyalty, and she held her lone fortress against the Austrians for a three-year siege until she finally surrendered and was hauled off to captivity.
³

Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV, however, had another scapegoat in mind. He ordered Kara Mustafa strangled for his failure, and the vizier’s stuffed head was sent back to the sultan in a velvet sack to prove that the order had been fulfilled. The head traveled around for several centuries until eventually it ended up in a trophy case at Vienna’s city museum, but in 1970 the city fathers got all delicate and moved the head to the basement where tourists couldn’t gawk at it.

The sultan barely outlasted his vizier. The failure at Vienna sparked a coup in Constantinople, and Mehmed was locked in a dungeon while his brother was raised to the throne; however, the new sultan soon died (natural causes), as did the next. Eventually the empire came up with a sultan who lived long enough to negotiate peace.

With the Turkish side in chaos, the Austrians surged forward across the Hungarian plain. They took Budapest in 1686 and scored a major victory at Mohacs in 1687, which erased the stain of the Christian defeat on the same site so many generations earlier.

The Serbs and other Balkan Christians welcomed liberation from the Turks; however, before the Austrians could fully consolidate their new territory, their troops were withdrawn and sent west to fight France in an unrelated war. Undefended, Kosovo fell to the Turks again, and the native Serbs fled Turkish retaliation. Then the Turks moved Muslim Albanians into the empty land, which would lead to another war, three hundred years later in 1999.
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While the Austrians advanced overland against the Turks, a Venetian fleet conquered southern Greece from the Ottomans. When the Venetians besieged Athens, the Turkish garrison stored its gunpowder in the largest, driest, sturdiest building in town—the Parthenon. Graceful, perfectly proportioned, and decorated with superb sculptures, this temple had survived the previous two millennia largely intact, but now a Venetian mortar hit the Turkish powder magazine, detonating a massive explosion that destroyed most of the building, leaving only the outer colonnade still standing.