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Selected Death Tolls for Wars, Massacres and AtrocitiesBefore the 20th Century

Alphabetical Index

Site Index

This is an incomplete listing of some very bad thingsthat happened before the 20th Century. I've scoured the history books andcollected most of the major atrocities that anyone has bothered to enumerate.

However, just because an event is missing from these pages doesn't mean thatit wasn't very bloody. There are undoubtedly many other events that were neverrecorded and have now faded into the oblivion of forgotten history. This makesit difficult to prove whether brutality is waxing or waning in the long term. Maybe the 20th Century reallywas more barbaric than previous centuries(as some people say), but you'll need more complete statistics to prove it. [n.1]

(Possibly) TheTwenty (or so) Worst ThingsPeople Have Done to Each Other:

RankDeath TollCauseCenturies
163 millionSecond World War20C
240 millionMao Zedong (mostly famine)20C
40 millionGenghis Khan13C
427 millionBritish India (mostly famine)19C
525 millionFall of the Ming Dynasty17C
620 millionTaiping Rebellion19C
20 millionJoseph Stalin20C
819 millionMideast Slave Trade7C-19C
917 millionTimur Lenk14C-15C
1016 millionAtlantic Slave Trade15C-19C
1115 millionFirst World War20C
15 millionConquest of the Americas15C-19C
1313 millionMuslim Conquest of India11C-18C
1410 millionAn Lushan Revolt8C
 10 millionXin Dynasty1C
169 millionRussian Civil War20C
178 millionFall of Rome5C
8 millionCongo Free State19C-20C
197½ millionThirty Years War17C
7½ millionFall of the Yuan Dynasty14C

What other people say:

World HistoricalPopulation

For perspective

Population of the World In Millions

BCE 400153
CE 1252170300
200257190
400190
600208200
800220
1000253265310
1200400360
1400442360
1500461425500
1600578545600
1650470545
1700680610
1750694771720791
1800954900980
18501091124112001260
19001571163416251650
19502513252025002520
199053215270
200062366060

(See alsoandand )

Western Wars, Tyrants, Rebellions and Massacres(800-1700 CE)

Before the rise of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and the rest of the gang, theseatrocities were the bywords of barbarism. Now that populations have gottenbigger and body counts have grown proportionally, they don't seem that bad;however, this says more about us than it does about them.

  1. Charlemagne (768-814 CE)
  2. Wars of theCarolingian Succession
  3. Crusades (1095-1291)3 000 000 [make link]
  4. Albigensian Crusade (1208-49)1 000 000[make link]
  5. Padua, Tyranny ofEzzelino da Romano (fl.1237-1259)
  6. Sicilian Vespers (1282)
  7. Hundred Years War (1337-1453)3 000 000 [make link]
  8. Spain
  9. West Europe (1348)
  10. France, Jacquerie Revolt (1358)
  11. England, Wat Tyler's Rebellion (1381)
  12. General Religious Mayhem:
  13. Witch Hunts (1400-1800) [make link]
  14. England, War of theRoses (1455-85) [make link]
  15. Vlad Dracula, Wallachia (r.1456-1462) [make link]
  16. Turkish War (1456+)
  17. SpanishInquisition (1478-1834) [make link]
  18. Lisbon (1506)
  19. Tudor England [make link]
  20. Peasants' War, Hungary (1514) [make link]
  21. Germany, Knights' War, von Sickingen (1519-1523)
  22. Peasants' War, Germany (1524-25) [make link]
  23. Ivan the Terrible, Russia, (r.1533-84) [make link]
  24. Persecution of theWaldenses (1540s) [make link]
  25. Dutch Revolt (1566-1609) [make link]
  26. France, Religious Wars, Catholic vs.Huguenot(1562-1598)3 000 000 [make link]
  27. St.Bartholomew's Massacre, France (1572) [make link]
  28. Russo-Tatar War (1571) [make link]
  29. Spanish Armada (1588) [make link]
  30. Russia, Time of Troubles (1598-1613)5 000 000 [make link]
  31. Transylvania, Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1604-1611)
  32. TheThirty Years War (1618-48)7 500 000 [make link]
  33. British Isles, 1641-52 [make link]
  34. France, TheFronde (1648-53)
  35. Poland (1648-54)
  36. England (17th C)
  37. Russia, (1667-71)
  38. Franco-Dutch War (1672-78)
  39. New England, KingPhilip's War (1675-76)
  40. Habsburg-Ottoman War (1682-99)
  41. Russia, Peter the Great (Pyotr Alekseyevich,r.1682-1721) [make link]
  42. War of the League ofAugsburg (1688-97)
  43. (For the 18th Century, seewars18c.htm
  44. (For the 19th Century, seewars19c.htm)
  45. (For the 20th Century, seewarstat1.htm, etseq.)

Medieval wars as a whole:

Pitirim Sorokin estimated that Europeans lost some 435,000 men on thebattlefield between 900 and 1450 CE:

Total War Dead Throughout History

I haven't the foggiest, but here's an interesting essay on the subject:The Great "WarFigures" Hoax: an investigation in polemomythology

The Conquest of the Americas

[make link]

The number of Indians who died at the hands of the European invaders ishighly debatable, and it basically centers on two questions:

  1. How many people lived in America before the population plummeted?
  2. How many of the deaths during the plummeting can be blamed on humancruelty?

Pre-Columbian Population:

Pick a number, any number.

Sometimes it seems that this is the way historians decide how many Indianslived in the Americas before the European Contact. AsThe New York PublicLibrary American History Desk Reference puts it, "Estimates of theNative American population of the Americas, all completely unscientific, rangefrom 15 to 60 million." And even this cynical assessment is wrong. Theestimates range from 8 to 145 million.

If you want to study the question of pre-Columbian population and itssubsequent decline in detail, two good books to start with are David Henige,Numbers From Nowhere (1998) and Russell Thornton,American IndianHolocaust and Survival (1987).

Population of the Western Hemisphere in 1492 according to variousexperts:

The problem, of course, is that by the time that the Europeans got around tocounting the Indians, there werea lot fewer to count

I've graphed the estimates chronlogically to show that the passage of timeand the gathering of more information is still not leading toward a consensus. Over the past 75 years, estimates have bounced around wildly and ended up rightback where they started -- around 40 million.

I've also graphed the population of Europe in 1500 because this is magicnumber to which many of the estimates aspire. Native American history istraditionally treated as marginal -- a handful of primitive kingdoms that wereeasily overwhelmed by the most dynamic civilization on Earth -- but if it couldsomehow be proven that the Americas had even more people than Europe, thenhistory would be turned upside down. The European conquest could be treated asthe tail wagging the dog, like the Barbarian invasions of Rome, a small fringeof savages decending on the civilized world, wiping out or enslaving the bulk ofhumanity.

The advocates of large numbers, however, are often their own worst enemies. On page 33 ofAmerican Holocaust, David Stannard declares, "[P]robablyabout 25,000,000 people, or about seven times the number living in all ofEngland, were residing in and around the great Valley of Mexico at the time ofColumbus's arrival in the New World".

Now, I've been to England, and I can vouch that the English have left theirmark on the land. You can't throw a brick in England without hitting some relicof the earlier inhabitants -- castles, cathedrals, Roman walls and roads,Stonehenge, etc. -- not to mention books, tools, coins, weapons and all thelittle pieces of the past that turn up anytime someone plows a field or cleanstheir attic.

Now go back and read what Stannard has written. I'm sure that the pointthat he'strying to make is that since there were seven times as manyMexicans as English, truly the Mexicans were seven times more civilized than theEnglish, so if anyone deserved to be called "savages", it's theEnglish. Unfortunately, the point that nags at me is "If there were seventimes as many people in Mexico, shouldn't there be seven times as many relics inMexico?" Yes, I've read the archaeological reports that discuss irrigationsystems, and I've seen the big, colorful picture books showing jungle-encrustedruins of ancient pyramids, but the fact is that seven times the population ofEngland should have left behinda lot more stuff than that.

I find the estimates for Virginia even more awkward because I live here. Stannard estimates the population of Powhatan's Confederation at 100,000, yetthere's not a single site in the Virginia Tidewater that remotely hints at thecomplex infrastructure necessary to support even half this number. There's notone ruin of any permanent building. Artifacts of any kind are rare -- barelyeven a single burial mound worth pilfering. And it's not like there's someforgotten ghost town deep in the desert or jungle waiting to be discovered. Thisis Virginia. It's been settled, plowed and excavated for 400 years.

I also find it difficult to believe that the Europeans obliterated alltraces of the earlier inhabitants. After all, I've been to Germany too. I'veseen that bombed-out cities still have a substantial presence of the past, and Idoubt that the conquistadores could be more destructive than a flock of B-17s. [n.3]

In any case, the median of all the estimates charted above is 40 million. It's the type of number that half the experts would consider impossibly big, andthe other half would consider impossibly low, so it's probably exactly right.

And then, within a century of the European Contact, the hemisphericpopulation plunged to a fairly well-proven residue of less than 10 million. Howmany of these deaths count as indictable atrocities?

The Death Toll:

InAmerican Holocaust, Stannard estimates the total cost of thenear-extermination of the American Indians as 100,000,000.

The problem here (aside from the question of whether there were even thismany people in hemisphere at all) is that Stannard doesn't differentiate betweendeath by massacre and death by disease. He blames the Europeans for bringingnew diseases which spread like wildfire -- often faster than than the Europeansthemselves -- and depopulated the continent. Since no one disputes the factthat most of the native deaths were caused by alien diseases to which they hadnever developed immunity, the simple question of categorization is vital.

Traditionally we add death by disease and famine into the total cost of warsand massacres (Anne Frank, after all, died of typhus, not Zyklon-B, but she'sstill a victim of the Holocaust) so I don't see any problem with doing the samewith the American genocides, provided that the deaths occurred after theirsociety had already been disrupted by direct European hostility. If a tribe wasenslaved or driven off its lands, the associated increase in deaths by diseasewould definitely count toward the atrocity (The chain of events which reducedthe Indian population of California from 85,000 in 1852 to 18,000 in 1890certainly counts regardless of the exact agent of death, because by this time,the Indians were being hunted down from one end of California to another.);however, if a tribe was merely sneezed on by the wrong person at first contact,it should not count.

Consider the Powhatans of Virginia. As I mentioned earlier, Stannard citesestimates that the population was 100,000 before contact. In the sameparagraph, he states that European depredations and disease had reduced thispopulation to a mere 14,000 by the time the English settled Jamestown in 1607. Now, come on; should we really blame the English for 86,000 deaths that occuredbefore they even arrived? Sure, he hints at pre-Jamestown "depredations",but he doesn't actually list any. As far as I can tell, the handful of Europeanventures into the Chesapeake region before 1607 were too small to do muchdepredating, and in what conflicts there were, the Europeans often got the worstof it. [see and and]

Think of it this way: if the Europeans had arrived with the most benignintentions and behaved like perfect guests, or for that matter, if Aztec sailorshad been the ones to discover Europe instead of vice versa, then the Indianswouldstill have been exposed to unfamiliar diseases and thepopulation wouldstill have been scythed by massive epidemics, butwe'd just lump it into the same category as the Black Death, i.e. bad luck.(Curiously, the Black Death was brought to Europe by the Mongols. Should weblame them for it? And while we're tossing blame around willy-nilly, aren't theNative Americans responsible for introducing tobacco to the world -- and for the90 million deaths which followed?)

Other Guesses:

I can't confidently estimate the number of unnatural deaths (i.e. indictablekillings, as a result of violence and oppression, both direct [war, murder,execution] and indirect [famine, avoidable disease]) among Amerindians acrossthe centuries, but as a guess, I'd say 20 million, for no reasons other thanit's half of the original 40M, and it seems to be near the median of the 4previous estimates. (Rummel, Barrett, Althea, Stannard)

Not the most solid grounds, I'll grant you.

Specific Events:

ChinesePopulation Crashes

Despite a few temporary interruptions, China has existed as a political entity longer than any other nation on Earth, and the civil servants of the Chinese Empire have been keeping detailed records for centuries.  Surprisingly, many fragments, copies and summaries survive — among them are sporadic census records going back several dynasties, showing the impact of war, plague, flood and famine. The following documented population collapses have been accepted as authentic by some scholars, but doubted by others.

  1. Xin Dynasty/Red Eyebrows Revolt (interrupting the Han Dynasty: 9-24 C.E.) [make link]
  2. Three Kingdoms (189-280 C.E.) [make link]
  3. An Lushan Revolt (756-763 CE) [make link]
  4. China, fall of the Yuan Dynasty (ca. 1368) [make link]
  5. China, fall of the Ming Dynasty (1618-44) [make link]

MiscellaneousOriental Atrocities

Here are just a few of the estimates that are kicking around:

  1. China,Shang Dynasty (ca. 1750-1050 BCE) [make link]
  2. Assyrians
  3. Qin Shihuangdi(First Emperor of China: 221 to 210 BCE) [make link]
  4. India,Ashoka's Conquest of Kalinga (261 BCE)
  5. China,Yellow Turban Revolt (184 CE) [make link]
  6. China (4th-6thC CE)
  7. China, something? (600s CE):
  8. Korea, Chinese Invasion (612 CE) [make link]
  9. Arab Outbreak, et seq. (7th Century CE andbeyond) [make link]
  10. Morocco (1035 CE):
  11. Fang La Rebellion (China: 1120-22) [make link]
  12. Genghis Khan (ruled 1206-27) [make link]
  13. India, Muhammad Shah, Sultan of Kulbargavs. Bukka I, Raya of Vijayanagar (1366) [make link]
  14. Timur Lenk (1369-1405) [make link]
  15. Ottoman Empire (16th Century) [make link]
  16. Campaign around Belgrade (1456): Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet byEnguerrand de Monstrelet, p.240: 200,000 Turks slain in campaign.
  17. Misc. events in theMuslim Conquest of India [make link]
  18. Mughal India (1568)
  19. Burma-Siam (1500s) [make link]
  20. Korea, Japanese Invasion (1592-98) [make link]
  21. Ottoman Empire (17th Century) [make link]
  22. Japan,Shimabara Rebellion (1638) [make link]
  23. Mughal Empire, Alamgir Aurangzeb (1681-1707) [make link]

[FAQ: "How reliable are these numbers?"]

Footnotes:

[n.1]"...more barbaric than previous centuries."

One contender for worst century has to be the Seventeenth (the 1600s). The30 Years War was the bloodiest single conflict in Europe until World War One. Russia began the century in bloody chaos. The Manchu conquest of China wascertainly responsible for one the top population collapses in East Asia, whilethe Mughal invasion of South India caused the highest alledged body count inSouth Asian history. Meanwhile, the collapse of the Native American populationbottomed out, and the Slave Trade was accelerating. All this was clobbering aworld with a population only a fifth that of the world in the middle of theTwentieth Century.

The primary cause of this was a quantum leap in military technology. Thedevelopment of efficient muskets and artillery was allowing entire civilizationsto be brought under the command of a single dynasty, creating so-calledGunpowder Empires. Althoughin later centuries, these new Empires would be a stabilizing influence, theybegan by destroying ancient power balances and unleashing chaos.

[The Dictionary of Military History, (1994, André Corvisier,editor) cites a French scholar who estimated that 2% of the non-militaryEuropean population died of war during the 17th Century. My estimate (on another page) is that 4-5% of all deaths inthe 20th Century were caused by war and oppression. I haven't yet figured outwhether these two statistics are comparable ("non-military European ... war"vs. "all ... war and oppression".)]

See alsoTotal War Dead Throughout History.

[back]

[n.2]FAQ: "How reliable are ancient andmedieval atrocity statistics?"

The short answer is, "We don't know."

The longer answer is that these are the numbers we've been given, so wepretty much have to take them or leave them at face value. We can't easilycheck behind them.

The principle argument against the accuracy of ancient atrocity statisticsis that they come from innumerate societies without the modern skill in countinglarge numbers of people and keeping accurate records. Conquerors liked to bragabout their exploits, and the vast hordes of the enemy army grew with eachretelling. Civilization before the Enlightenment was rather flexible when itcame to historic accuracy, and medieval historians never let the truth get inthe way of a good story

Specific numbers from ancient history are often discredited by pointing outthat it would have been physically impossible to crowd that many people ontothat battlefield, or to fit them inside the walls of this city, or to carry thatmany arrows, or to slit that many throats in that length of time.

(Also, we should never underestimate humangullibility. Even in our own era of thorough cradle-to-grave, 24-hour-a-daydocumentation of everything that ever happens anywhere -- and despiteoverwhelming evidence to thecontrary --Bill Clinton is widely accused of dozens of secret murders.)

In fact, there are many historians who doubt ancient atrocity statistics asa matter of course, simply because the supporting evidence (if there ever wasany) is now lost in the mists of time. Of course, in 300 years, historians willprobably be treating the Holocaust the same way.

The principle argument in favor of these statistics is that they wereconsidered credible at the time, and if eyewitnesses believed that it waslogistically possible to field an army that huge, well, they would know betterthan we would, right? Our ancestors knew how to count sheep and cattle, so whywould they suddenly turn stupid when it came to counting people. We oftenaccept the word of ancient historians when they list a chronology of events, sowhy are we more skeptical when they list numbers?

Nor is technology the deciding factor. Even today, most killings areaccomplished with traditional low-tech methods (starvation, disease, machetes),so we shouldn't automatically consider high body counts to be beyond the reachof our ancestors. In our lifetimes, we've seen massive genocides commited inCambodia and Rwanda without any particularly advanced technology.

We should keep in mind that many of the numbers from well-documented modernhorrors are too big to be believed, but true nonetheless. The danger indoubting too easily is that we'll approach the subject with a double standard,believing the stories we want to believe, and denying the ones we don't.

[n.3]Native American Population

I get a lot of comments on this, most of them trying to explain away thelack of artifacts.

In any case, it appears that they've conceded my main point -- that thereare fewer archaeological relics than an equivalent number of Europeans, Asiansor Africans would leave behind -- and are reduced to making excuses.

Let me try again: Everywhere we look in the Old World, from Zimbabwe toAngkor Wat to Shang China to Troy to Vedic India to Stonehenge, we see thatpopulations of a certain density produce detritus such as the foundations ofbuildings, discarded bones of domestic animals, rusty tools, rusty nails,pottery shards, glass shards, lost coins, abandoned mineshafts, crumbling stonewalls, broken bridges, broken piers, broken statues, inscriptions, tombs,shipwrecks and graffiti. We also see that town sites are inhabited forcenturies at a time, generating layer after layer of this detritus.

You might want to point out that the Indians didn't evenhave thetechnologies listed above, but that's my point. They lacked the technology thatother societies needed to maintain high population densities. In fact,the overall scarcity of artifacts across so much of pre-Columbian America is astrong indication that either ...

  1. The native population density was far less than ancient farmingcommunities in comparable climatic zones of the Old World, or
  2. There's a vast cover-up of supporting evidence by chauvanisticEuro-Americans, or
  3. The natives were exceptionally frugal and tidy, or
  4. They used delicate and fragile materials that vanished without a trace.

You may take your pick, but I like Option One because it doesn't requirethat we invent hypothetical and mysterious technologies, psychologies orconspiracies out of thin air.

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Last updated Oct. 2010

Copyright © 1999-2010Matthew White

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