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Atrocitology. Matthew White
Читать онлайн.Название Atrocitology
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isbn 9780857861252
Автор произведения Matthew White
Издательство Ingram
| FIRST PUNIC WAR |
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Death toll: 400,0001
Rank: 81
Type: hegemonial war
Broad dividing line: Rome vs. Carthage
Time frame: 264–241 BCE
Location: western Mediterranean
Who usually gets the most blame: Carthage (a classic example of the winners writing the history books)
Another damn: Roman conquest
A BOATLOAD OF UNEMPLOYED MERCENARIES CALLED THE MAMERTINES seized Messina in Sicily, murdering the town’s leaders and taking their women for themselves. That was bad enough, but then the Mamertines began raiding some of their neighbors for loot and extorting from the rest. Sicily was mostly under the local control of tribes and city-states, but Carthage and Syracuse had staked out large spheres of influence, and Roman-ruled Italy was within shouting distance across the straight from Messina. All three major powers in the region wanted to drive the Mamertines out and restore the peaceful status quo, but politics complicated the situation. When Syracuse moved to attack the freebooters, Carthage naturally took the other side. Then the Mamertines worried that the price for Carthaginian help was too high, so they asked Rome to help them get rid of the Carthaginians. This quickly escalated into a general war for control of Sicily.2
The Roman army—veterans toughened by the conquest of Italy—won almost every land battle in Sicily, but the Carthaginian navy was far superior in numbers, seamanship, and boatbuilding to anything the Romans could launch. As a result, they could land fresh mercenary armies anywhere on the island and intercept Roman reinforcements being shipped over from the mainland. It created a stalemate.a
The Romans soon came up with new naval tactics that played to their strengths. They turned sea battles into land battles by inventing the corvus (crow), a pivoted and hinged gangplank located at the front of the boat. Rather than rely on the difficult tactic of ramming enemy ships, the Romans used grappling hooks to drag their ship alongside a target ship. Then the corvus dropped, its spike crashing down and hooking through the deck of the enemy ship. Then heavily armed Roman soldiers rushed across the plank to slaughter the crew.
In 255 BCE, after securing Sicily and clearing the Carthaginians off the sea, the Romans landed an army in North Africa, but they were stopped by the powerful walls around the city of Carthage. Then a freshly hired army of Greek mercenaries and war elephants landed and beat the Romans. The Romans evacuated the survivors from Africa, but a sudden storm hit, sinking 248 ships of the Roman fleet off Cape Pachynus, sending 100,000 rowers, marines, and soldiers to the bottom.3 It was the worst maritime disaster in human history.b
The war then returned to Sicily. Now the Romans had the advantage on both land and sea, but two more unexpected storms destroyed two more Roman fleets in quick succession, giving the Carthaginians an opportunity to hold the Romans to a stalemate. Finally, in 241 BCE, by the Aegates Islands off western Sicily, the Romans destroyed the Carthaginian fleet, which was bringing supplies to the army. With their last army trapped and starving, Carthage agreed to peace on Roman terms, which included reparations, ransom, and Sicily.
| QIN SHI HUANG DI |
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Death toll: a million1
Rank: 46
Type: despot
Broad dividing line: First Emperor vs. tradition
Time frame: 221–210 BCE
Location: China
Who usually gets the most blame: Qin Shi Huang Di (born Zheng)
The First Emperor
Once Zheng became lord of all China, he invented a brand new title by which he is known to history: First (Shi) August (Huang) Emperor (Di) of China (Qin).
At his side, Prime Minister Li Si set new standards for all of the conniving, ruthless chief counselors in history. Li Si had very definite ideas on how to remodel China into a peaceful and orderly empire for all eternity. He had the ear of the First Emperor and plenty of suggestions. For the most part, these reforms spread Qin’s well-established totalitarian system into the newly conquered lands.
To keep power out of the hands of ambitious nobles, Shi Huang Di broke up the old aristocracy and abolished feudalism. After collecting weapons from the defeated nobles, he divided his domain into thirty-six commanderies run by officials he appointed. For each commandery, the First Emperor had three autonomous officials running part of the government: a governor running the civil branch, an independent military commander, and an inspector to spy on the other two. For lower jobs, he created a professional civil service that was filled by applicants who had passed impartial tests of their education.
To spread unity across the previously warring states, the First Emperor reduced all regional variations to one official version of everything. He standardized Chinese writing to the system in use today. He reissued money and decreed one system of weights and measurement. He required all wagons to have the same axle length so they would fit on the new roads he built all over China, roads that made it easier for him to rush his armies to any hot spot.
Whenever Shi Huang Di tried to make changes, academics fussed and insisted that there was no precedent—the law forbade it. Well, the obvious solution was to remove all those pesky precedents and start from scratch. He ordered every book in China brought to him, and he had all of them, except for a few technical manuals, burned. When scholars howled at this, he buried 460 of them alive so he wouldn’t have to listen to their howling anymore. Many years later, after Shi Huang Di was safely gone, scholars gathered and tried to write down whatever they could remember of the lost literature.2
Sealing Himself In
The First Emperor needed to protect the northern frontier against raids by the nomadic horsemen known as the Xiongnu (who were once believed to have been forerunners of the Huns, but now are not). He connected several local walls that blocked strategic passes into one big wall dividing the known world into Us and Them. To build this wall, he sent a general to the frontier with 300,000 soldiers and a million conscripted laborers, most of whom were said to have died in the construction. A steady flow of workmen traveled north to replace the dead. Legend says that every stone in the wall cost a human life.
The purpose of the Great Wall wasn’t to keep the Xiongnu from crossing. It was easy enough for them to prop a ladder up against any long unmanned stretch. But they couldn’t get horses up the ladder and over the wall, so they would have to invade China on foot, without the military advantage that made them so formidable.
Although Shi Huang Di was the first to build a Great Wall of China, he didn’t build the Great Wall of China. The wall has been expanded,