“I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances
to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of
enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
The mission of this page is to list, summarize, and link accounts of major massacres around the world since the year One A.D. I begin in the Christian Era (or Common Era if you prefer) because events prior to that time are often poorly documented, obscured in legend, and subject to vastly different standards of morality from those we profess today. As the once widely-read historian Will Durant has observed, “It was a great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or eat their fellow men, and merely made them slaves.” Atrocities that occurred when men scarcely knew any better have little to say to us.
My own idiosyncratic definition of a massacre is this: A single occasion of deliberate slaughter of a large number of unarmed persons. Excluded are genocides by nation-states (e.g. of Jews, Armenians, American Indians) and battleground annihilations of armed foes (e.g. The Alamo, Little Big Horn).
This page is not original research. All the sources I cite are secondary, with their own points of view, to which some readers may object. In many cases, the title of the massacre is linked to other descriptions on the Web. My goal is to suggest that, despite the pretensions of many religions and optimistic philosophies, homo sapiens is often just another species of animals, brutes, and savages. Civilization and liberal education may be necessary antidotes, but they are not sufficient. Virtually no race or religion is absent from this list, either as victim or perpetrator. And my list is by no means complete. Massacres listed are merely those that seem to be the most notorious and best documented. Suggestions or comments are welcome at billmccarter@earthlink.net .
1 A.D. The Massacre of the Innocents
According to the Gospel of Matthew, “Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.” This almost certainly never happened (it is mentioned in no other source), but generations of Christians have believed that it did. For that reason alone, it is a worthy introduction to our list.
629 Mohammed Massacres the Qurayza Jews
Of Mohammed, historian Robert Payne has written “No other religious leader of comparable stature has ever urged such unpitying wars against his enemies.” Here is an account by his more sympathetic 1961 biographer, Maxime Robinson, of the fate of a sect of Jews who surrendered to Mohammed at Medina. “The Jews were led out and tied together in groups, and beheaded, one by one, on the edge of the trenches and thrown in. According to some there were six or seven hundred of them; while others say eight or nine hundred… It must be remembered that the customs of the time were extremely primitive. Even so, the care taken by the texts to exculpate Muhammad shows that it must have aroused some feeling. Details emerge even from these very texts which make it difficult to accept the Prophet’s innocence.”
1099 The Crusaders’ Massacre at Jerusalem
The Christian Crusaders were far more bloodthirsty than Mohammed. The goal of the First Crusade was to retrieve the holy land from the rule of the infidel Moslems (now Muslims), and it was temporarily accomplished. But in conquering Jerusalem for the cross, the Crusaders ran berserk over every word Christ spoke in the Sermon on the Mount. According to (pro-Arab) historian Anthony Nutting in The Arabs (1965): “Then began one of the bloodiest and cruelest massacres in history. No reliable figures are available of the total number of Moslems who perished, but according to Ibn al-Athir, some seventy thousand were slaughtered in the al-Aqsa mosque alone, all of them non-combatants and some of them Imams and professors of theology, who had taken refuge in what, under Islamic laws of war, was held to be a sanctuary. Christian analists have confirmed this report. … Small wonder that to the Moslem world, the Crusaders were ‘animals, possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else.'”
1204 The Crusaders’ Massacre at Christian Constantinople
The diversion of the Fourth Crusade from its goal of rescuing the holy land to plundering the richest city in Christendom is one of the great scandals of western history. This account is from Ernle Bradford’s The Great Betrayal (1967): “It was the beginning of a shameful episode, a day that should be deep-edged in black in the church calendars of the western world. It was one of the greatest betrayals in history – a betrayal of their crusading oaths, of the Christian faith and of the Byzantines who had laid down their arms and peacefully submitted the city… Imbued with a hatred of the Byzantines who had driven them from their shops and houses, and confident that they had the protection of their fellow countrymen and co-religionists, these Pisans and Genoese now took an ample revenge. As the monk Gunther tells us, they were the first to take arms against the Byzantines and they alone were responsible for killing nearly 2,000 Greeks.”
1258 Mongol Massacre at Baghdad
Mongol prince Hulegu led the horde’s assault, aided by the local Christians. This account is from The Devil’s Horsemen by James Chambers (1979): “First Hulegu sent a messenger calling on the soldiers in the garrison to lay down their arms … and, believing they would be allowed to retire into Syria, they marched out unarmed, only to be divided into companies and slaughtered … The Christians who assembled in the Nestorian church and some of the foreign visitors were spared, but the Moslem population was subjected to a hideous massacre, in which the Christian soldiers of Georgia took part with particular relish, and when all were dead and the plunder had been removed, the mosques and palaces were set on fire… [N]ot for the first time, the Mongol armies were forced to abandon their camps by the stench of the corpses.” Although Chambers thinks such numbers are exaggerated, Anthony Nutting asserts in The Arabs: “Over a million people, including women, children, and babies in arms – three quarters of the population – were massacred by the blood-crazed Mongols.”
1282 The Sicilian Vespers Massacre
This account is from the Encyclopedia Britannica: “Its name derives from a riot that took place in a church outside Palermo at the hour of vespers on Easter Monday, March 30. Peter III of Aragon, Charles’s rival for the Neapolitan throne, conspired to raise a rebellion against him in Sicily. The rising broke out prematurely when Sicilians, incensed by Charles’s oppressive regime, killed some insulting French soldiers at vespers in the church of Santo Spirito. The people of Palermo followed suit and massacred 2,000 French inhabitants of the city the night of March 30-31.”
1415 Henry V Massacres his Prisoners at Agincourt
Mortal statistics are provided by Christopher Hibbert in Agincourt (1964): “Unknown numbers of throats were cut. Some said that there were more men killed in this way than were killed in the fighting. Certainly only the most valuable and distinguished prisoners – the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon amongst them – were spared. The rest, as they stood, bareheaded but still in armor, in groups or alone, were cut or clubbed to death within a few minutes.” From John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976): “Henry, a Christian king, was also an experienced soldier and versed in the elaborate code governing relations between a prisoner and his captor. Its most important provision was that which guaranteed the prisoner his life – the only return, after all, for which he would enter into anything so costly and humiliating as a ransom bargain. And while his treachery broke that immunity, the mere suspicion, even if well-founded, that he was about to commit treason could not justify his killing. At a more fundamental level, moreover, the prisoner’s life was guaranteed by the Christian commandment against murder, however much more loosely that commandment was interpreted in the fifteenth century. If Henry could give the order and, as he did, subsequently escape the reproval of his peers, of the Church and the chroniclers, we must presume it was because the battlefield itself was still regarded as a sort of moral no-man’s land and the hour of battle as a sort of legal dies non.”
1453 The Turkish Massacre at Constantinople
Turkish sultan Mahomet II finally took this great city for Islam on October 29, 1453. In Jihad in the West (1998), Paul Fregosi gives this account: “Several thousand of the survivors had taken refuge in the cathedral: nobles, servants, ordinary citizens, their wives and children, priests and nuns. They locked the huge doors, prayed, and waited. Mahomet had given the troops free quarter. They raped, of course, the nuns being the first victims, and slaughtered. At least four thousand were killed before Mahomet stopped the massacre at noon… Mahomet ordered the Grand Duke Notaras, who had survived, to be brought before him, asked him for the names and addresses of all the leading nobles, officials, and citizens, which Notaras gave him. He had them all arrested and decapitated. He sadistically bought from their owners high ranking prisoners who had been enslaved, for the pleasure of having them beheaded in front of him. He then lined up their heads, counted them, meditated, and at one moment recited a verse by the Persian poet Firdusi.”
1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
Personal responsibility for this, the most notorious event in the sixteenth century Wars of Religion, is unclear. According to Alistair Horne in La Belle France (2005): “The view long held was that Charles IX, acting on the advice of his mother, Catherine, to resolve France’s dilemma by a mass purge of Protestants, gave the terrible order: ‘Kill them all, so that not one will be left to reproach me for it.’ … Some 15,000 were slaughtered that night, most of them in Paris; which, according to witnesses ‘looked like a conquered city.’ Surviving Huguenots began to leave France in legions. Over the next century, culminating with Louis XIV, the loss of their talents was to result in something akin to what Hitler achieved for Germany in his twentieth century persecution of the Jews.”
The numbers in this massacre were not great; thirty-eight MacDonalds were slaughtered by their Campbell hosts. “There had been more terrible slaughters in the Highlands, clan upon clan. Even the bitter grievance it left – betrayal of hospitality, murder under trust – was not unknown, brother killed brother and cousin struck down cousin. The Massacre of Glencoe, however, was a political act, planned by a King’s Minister. A King’s officer carried it out and the King himself signed and countersigned the final order.” John Prebble, Glencoe (1966).
1770 The Boston Massacre
This petty killing of five civilians by panicked British regulars scarcely deserves mention here. But everyone, or at least every American, knows the name. That it was no real massacre, but is nonetheless far better known than most of the events on this page that were, is a testament to the propaganda value of elementary school text books.
In September of 1792 Danton whipped up a paranoid frenzy among the revolutionary authorities in Paris to exterminate “traitors within”, focusing on prisoners already locked up in the capital. “What then followed has no equal in atrocities committed during the French Revloution by any party. … Approximately one half of all the prisoners in Paris died in the September massacres. In some places like the Abbaye and the Carmelites, 80 per cent or more of the inmates perished. … But the Commune never pursued the killers, and a number of its members actually praised the deeds as a useful purge of a fifth column.” Simon Schama, Citizens (1989).
1793 The Massacre of Prisoners at the Vendee
1805 Dessalines Massacres the Haitian Whites
Ex-slave Dessalines was crowned Emperor of Haiti in October of 1804. He feared a counter-revolution by the white landowners, and by March of 1805 rumors were rife that the French were about to attack on their behalf. Marxist historian C.L.R. James gives this account in his classic The Black Jacobins (1938): “It was then that the complete massacre took place. The population, stirred to fear with the nearness of the counter-revolution, killed all with every possible brutality. After the first slaughter Dessalines issued a proclamation promising pardon for all who were in hiding. They came out, and were immediately killed.” But James has no sympathy for the whites. “For these old slave-owners, who burnt a little powder in the arse of a Negro, who buried him alive for insects to eat, who were well treated by Toussaint, and who, as soon as they got the chance, began their old cruelties again; for these there is no need to waste one tear or one drop of ink.”
1816 The Massacre at the Negro Fort
One of several stains on the escutcheon of the president who graces our twenty dollar bill, this quasi-military encounter relating to territorial disputes with Florida Indians may not strictly qualify for inclusion here. Readers may judge, first from this account by Marquis James in his biography Andrew Jackson: The Border Captain. “With three thousand small arms and a thousand barrels of powder, [the fort] was now in the hands of fugitive slaves under the determined leadership of one of their number named Garcon… Jackson told [General] Gaines to awe the Indians with a show of force and gave him permission to destroy the Negro Fort ‘regardless of the ground it stands on.’ … Meanwhile, Gaines had blown up the Negro Fort, killing two hundred and seventy of its occupants, and a measure of peace settled on the southern border.” A few more details may be found in A History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War by John Bach McMaster (1895): “Seven hundred barrels of gunpowder tore the earth, the fort, and all the wretched creatures in it to fragments. Two hundred and seventy men, women, and children died on the spot. Of sixty-four taken out alive, the greater number died soon after.”
1857 The Mountain Meadows Massacre
Again from the Encyclopedia Britannica: “Angered by the U.S. government’s decision to send troops into the Utah territory, Mormons there were further incensed in 1857 when a band of emigrants set up camp 40 miles (64 km) from Cedar City. On September 7 or 8, the travelers were attacked by a party of Paiute Indians and some Mormon settlers led by John Doyle Lee. The attackers, promising safe conduct, persuaded the emigrants to lay down their arms. Then, as the band of 137 proceeded southward toward Cedar City, they were ambushed, and all except the young children were massacred.” A cheesy recent movie, September Dawn, purported to move the date to September 11.
1860 Massacre of Christians at Damascus
Details of this atrocity are hard to come by. Accounts I have found eschew statistics in preference for tributes to the chivalrous conduct of former anti-French rebel Abd al-Qadir. Here is Anthony Nutting’s account, from The Arabs (using an older spelling of the hero’s name). “In 1860, four years after Abd el-Kader settled in Damascus, a terrible massacre of Christians – Arabs as well as foreign citizens – was instigated by the Turkish governor. Abd el-Kader did not hesitate for a second… [H]e went to the Christian quarter where the worst carnage was taking place. Here he and his henchmen literally grabbed Christians from the hands of the murderous mob and shepherded them to the safety of his home. When the tally of those saved reached about four thousand, the infuriated crowd marched to his house and threatened to seize it if the Christians inside were not handed over. Fearlessly, Abd el-Kader confronted them. Wild with rage, he reminded them of how he had fought for fifteen years to uphold Moslem rights and Arab independence and, calling in aid the sacred words of the Koran, cursed the howling mob as cowards and murderers… The crowd dispersed, and when tempers had cooled, Abd el-Kader had offered fifty piasters for every Christian brought to him alive… By this combination of bravery and bribery, he saved about twelve thousand people from being butchered.”
What follows is the Introduction to The Saltville Massacre by Thomas D. Mays (1998). “On October 2, 1864, near the southwest Virginia town of Saltville, Confederate forces commanded by General John S. Williams repulsed an invading Union army under General Stephen Gano Burbridge. This battle would have been remembered as a small affair, confined to the footnotes of history books, if it were not for what happened the next morning. What started as a small but intense mountain battle degenerated into a no-quarter racial massacre. Both Union and Confederate eyewitness accounts and regimental records demonstrate that the murders at Saltville were one of the worst atrocities of the Civil War… The men killed at Saltville were prisoners, mostly wounded, and were murdered in the days following the fight.”
1885 The Mahdi’s Massacre at Khartoum
In The Scramble for Africa (1991), Thomas Pakenham gives this account of what the Mahdi found after his forces had overrun the city and its heroic Victorian defender, General George Gordon: “At least 4,000 people out of the 30,000 civilians and 6,000 soldiers of the doomed garrison had been massacred the previous morning. The bodies of men hacked to death and then ritually decapitated lay in every part of the city. Efforts continued, by dint of the courbash (the buffalo-hie whip), and still more drastic methods, to persuade the survivors to point out where they had hidden their gold and silver. The Mahdi ordered his men to stop further killing and not to damage the buildings, which would be needed for God’s work.”
1919 The Amritsar Massacre
“As the sun started to set on Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh, British Brigadier Reginald Dyer ordered fifty of his toughest Gurkha and Baluchi troops to opoen fire without warning on an unarmed gathering of Punjabi peasants celebraing their spring harvest. Four hundred were murdered, another 1,200 wounded. As their ammunition ran low, the troops withdrew without caring for any of the wounded or calling for any medical assistance.” Stanley Wolpert, Gandhi’s Passion (2001).
1937 The Rape of Nanking
1941 The Katyn Massacre
1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki
When someone claims it was necessary to incinerate a couple of hundred thousand Japanese civilians so that American GIs wouldn’t have to be slaughtered while invading the home islands, remember it’s not that simple. Japan was no threat to world or regional peace in August of 1945. The only reason an invasion seemed “necessary” was that Japan would not agree to our demand for unconditional surrender. Quite likely a surrender on reasonable terms could have been negotiated without the bomb or an invasion. Instead, we dropped two horrific A-bombs without warning, and then we accepted a surrender on terms after all (Japan kept the Emperor). Some skeptics still wonder whether our real motive was to scare the pants off the then bombless Soviet Union.
1946 The Bombing of the King David Hotel
Except for the mythical first item, Jews have not appeared here as perpetrators, since for many centuries after 1 A.D. they were in no position to massacre anyone. (Before 1 A.D., according to the Old Testament, Joshua, at least, had the gift.) But with the arrival of Zionism and the post-World War II clamor for a Jewish state, things began to change. Surely the most notorious massacre committed by Jews is this one, briefly described by Martin Gilbert in Israel: A History (1998): “On July 22 the Irgun blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jersualem. Ninety-one people were killed, including British administrators working in the hotel. Many of those administrators were Arabs and Jews. There was a schock of horror among Jews and Arabs alike in Palestine, and among critics of Jewish terrorism throughout the Diaspora, and in the non-Jewish world.”
1948 Indian Partition
1968 The My Lai Massacre
1988 Pan Am Flight 103
1989 The Massacre at Tienanmin Square
1993 Massacre of Branch Davidians at Waco
1995 The Oklahoma City Bombing
1995 The Srebernica Massacre
2001 The September 11 Massacre
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