Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

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A lot more people, as a percentage, died during medieval wars than do today in modern wars. Read about the crusades sometime. They would lay siege to cities and massacre the entire population. Not a single survivor.

They didn’t need advanced weaponry to kill tens of thousands of people. A few thousand soldiers would go through a city, house-by-house, and put every single man, woman, and child to the sword. They then looted what they wanted and burned the house to the ground.

Thousands more died during the siege, long before any soldiers reached them, due to disease and starvation from overcrowding and dwindling food supplies. It was absolutely horrific and it happened mainly because swords, spears, and bows were useless against city walls so long sieges were the rule.

The massacres that followed could be chalked up to deep resentment on the part of the attacking soldiers for the defenders holding out so long. I think another part of it is simply that the commanders of the day had less power over their soldiers, so looting and pillaging was part of the bargain to encourage them to fight.

Looting was in large part the payment for soldiering. Whomever raised the army might pay a bit regularly for maintenance, but all the real money was in the spoils, and everyone involved knew it. Many is the army that failed to destroy a defeated foe because the victorious soldiers mostly wanted to loot the enemy camp.

I'd be curious about data supporting this claim. Browsing through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anthropogenic_disaster... seems to suggest otherwise, but its also not relative to population.

Erm, no, I don't think so. Can you give a source for that claim?

Medieval wars were in general shorter, more regional, used much smaller forces and affected the civilian population less than in later ages. Of course it is very difficult to give any numbers, but various infection diseases, childbirth and infant death were major causes of death. (E.g. women life expectancy overtook that of men only in the 19th century.) Also at least in the 13th and 14th century in Europe main reasons for a significant temporary population decline - during a time of general population growth - were black death and hunger, the latter being partially caused by limitations to agriculture technology and available land.

Medival wars in Europe were smaller and shorter because of weakness and fragmentation of European states at that time. The Mongol conquest cost the lives of 50 million people and left huge swathes of Europe and Asia uninhabited.

The Mongol siege and destruction of Baghdad. An estimation of 200k to 2M civilians killed in one week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)

a bit over the top, but the crusades could be quite bloody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_Ayyadieh

as a general rule though this was also because it was Christians killing non-Christians etc.

>affected the civilian population less than in later ages

lol. lmao, even.

Just an army moving through a region - just walking, scouting and "foraging" (this doesn't mean bushes, this means looting from rural villages) - guarantees a famine for those involved. Only the invention of the railway prevented (no, lessened) this.

If you want to see some really brutal wars, you need to go back from the Middle Ages into Antiquity.

The ancient empires were able to gather armies much larger than any medieval king could, and, at the same time, people had few qualms about genocide. There weren't even religious reasons not to commit one, much less any chivalry codes etc.

The Romans in particular had the principle of "aries murum attigit", which meant that a city had time to surrender until the first battering ram touched its walls. After that, the captives would be put to the sword.

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