Atrocitology - Matthew White

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and so on—went down to a shaded creek beneath the city walls to rest and cool off.

      Defenders on the wall started exchanging insults with the northern riffraff, and tempers frayed. The townsmen decided to go outside and teach the stray northerners a lesson. Unfortunately, during this sortie, they left the town gate wide open, filled with cheering civilians. Others in the crusader camp spotted the fight. They grabbed their clubs and rushed over to join the melee, finally chasing the townsmen back inside and following hard on their heels. As northerners got inside the gate, soldiers from the town rushed down from the city walls to drive them out. Distracted by the brawl, no one noticed that some of the more quick-witted crusaders had snuck in and propped ladders up against the suddenly unguarded walls.

      And that was the end of Beziers.

      As the crusaders eradicated this hotbed of heresy, the leader of the Catholic forces, Simon de Montfort, was asked how they could tell the heretics from the orthodox. His solution was simple: “Kill them all; God will know his own.”a Thousands of civilians took sanctuary in the town church, but the crusaders followed them inside and slaughtered them anyway. Although most of the townspeople were Catholic, all of the inhabitants of Beziers—20,000 people—were massacred regardless of religion.2

       Root and Branch

      Town after town fell to the crusaders. After the water supply to Carcassonne was cut, the inhabitants surrendered and were exiled with just the clothes they wore. The mountain fortress of Minerve near Beziers lost its water supply when crusader catapults destroyed the fortified tunnel to the town’s well. After Minerve surrendered, the Cathars were forcibly converted to Catholicism, except for 140 who refused and were burned.

      After the capture of Bram, every member of the Cathar garrison had his eyes gouged out and his nose and upper lip sliced off. Only one soldier was left with a single eye intact in order to guide the faceless men back to spread fear in Cathar territory.3

      Raymond of Toulouse had been keeping a low profile, riding along in support of the crusade, but after a year of watching his domain become ravaged, he switched sides. After Toulouse withstood a siege by Simon de Montfort, Raymond counterattacked, retaking much of the lost territory and bringing Montfort under siege. The next year, the Catholics had the upper hand and ended up outside Toulouse again. Because Raymond was the vassal and brother-in-law of King Peter II of Aragon in northern Spain, this king now joined the fight against the crusaders.

      Languedoc became a maelstrom of battle, and Toulouse changed hands several times before it was all done, but the war dragged on, year after year, without a final knockout blow. Because the pope required only forty days of crusading to earn God’s favor, the holy mobs that came south every summer for the campaign season would pack up and go home six weeks later, leaving Simon de Montfort alone in Languedoc to face the Cathar counterattack.4

      The war lasted longer than its major participants. King Peter II of Spain was killed in battle at Muret in 1213. In 1218, Simon de Montfort was killed outside Toulouse by a stone from a catapult manned by women of the town. Raymond fled to England for a time, then went to Rome to plead his case; he returned to fight and finally died in 1222.

      During the 1220s the war continued under a new generation of leaders, sons of Simon and Raymond, but one by one the last Cathar strongholds fell and stayed down. In 1226, King Louis VIII of France pledged himself to the crusade, and now the full French army overwhelmed the heretics in one tough year of campaigning. The king then negotiated acceptable terms with the principal nobles of the south, and the Treaty of Paris ended hostilities in 1229.5

      In 1229, Rome established the Inquisition in Toulouse to make sure none of the supposed converts were secretly practicing their old heretical ways. Sporadic rebellions and uprisings continued in the hinterlands for several decades. Apostates were hunted down. Relapsed or stubborn Cathars were burned—the last of them in 1321.6

HULAGU’S INVASION

      Death toll: 800,0001

      Rank: 55

      Type: conquest

      Broad dividing line: Mongols vs. Arabs

      Time frame: 1255–60

      Location: Middle East

      Who usually gets the most blame: Hulagu

      Another damn: Mongol invasion

      IT ANNOYED THE GREAT KHAN MONGKE, GRANDSON OF CHINGGIS KHAN, that the Muslim minority scattered around his empire considered the caliph in Baghdad—secular ruler of Iraq and spiritual leader of all Sunni Muslims—to be more important than the great khan himself. This could not be tolerated. The caliph had to go.

      Rumors of invasion preparations soon came to the ears of the Order of the Assassins, a mysterious Muslim cult in the mountain fortress of Alamut in Persia, who trained specialized killers to strike down enemies all over the world. Although the Assassins were no friends of the caliph, when it became obvious that the Mongols were getting ready to invade westward, the Assassins dispatched 400 of their best to cut down Mongke. The plan failed, and in 1253, Mongke ordered his brother Hulagu to retaliate.

      In 1256, after a few years of preparation and hard riding, the Mongols arrived, but a new grand master was in charge of the Assassins, and he quickly surrendered to avoid the worst. He accompanied the Mongols on a circuit of the Assassins’ castles, ordering them to surrender, which brought an end to the Order. The grand master was initially treated well for his cooperation, but eventually his Mongol attendants found an excuse to kick and beat him to death.

      The next year, Hulagu sent messengers to Baghdad insisting that the caliph tear down the city walls, fill the moat, and come groveling to Hulagu to offer his subservience. The caliph was in the middle of a power struggle among some of his officials and couldn’t find the time to respond, so Hulagu advanced.

      The Mongols arrived at Baghdad in January 1258, and within a week it was obvious that further resistance was pointless. The caliph and his generals surrendered, and Hulagu ordered the city destroyed. Although Hulagu himself followed the traditional tribal shamanism of the Mongols, his mother, favorite wife, and chief general were all Nestorian Christians from central Asia, so the Christian population of the city was going to be spared the worst. They were told to take refuge in their church, which was then declared off-limits during the subsequent sack.

      The rest of the city’s population was killed. Books from the great library were dumped in the Tigris River, which ran black with ink and red with blood. Because the Mongols believed it was bad luck to spill royal blood onto the earth, they rolled the caliph in a carpet and trampled him to death with horses. This extinguished the line of caliphs that stretched all the way back to Muhammad.

      Persian historians later claimed that 800,000 died in the sacking of Baghdad, but in diplomatic correspondence with King Louis IX of France, Hulagu himself reported that he had killed 200,000.

      The Mongols then swept through Syria, accepting the surrender of the Arab cities of Damascus and Aleppo and the crusader state of Antioch. The Mongol tide was about to wash over Egypt when word arrived that the Great Khan Mongke had died. Hulagu returned to Mongolia to settle the succession, leaving behind a subordinate to continue the conquest. Egyptian Mamelukes soundly beat these Mongols and killed their general at the Battle of Goliath Spring (Ayn Jalut) in Palestine, the farthest the Mongols would ever reach in this part of the world.2

HUNDRED YEARS WAR

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