The Pacification of War
Battle Massacres may have gone out of fashion
"Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”
1 Samuel 15:3
When one reads both ancient and modern history he’s struck by an interesting difference in the behavior of soldiers between the two periods, the killing of those who were defeated or surrendered was a lot more common in the past (or on special occasions, sacrificed to the gods1).
From the history of the Neo-Assyrians which is one damn massacre after another in which Ashurbanipal brags about creating “A pillar of the dead” and “A pillar of the living”(?whatever that means), to the Peloponnesian war which opened with two massacres, one of the Thebans by the Plataeans, then another by the Thebans and Spartans of the Plataeans2, Furthermore, consider that Carthage was destroyed by the Roman3, Susa by the Arabs and Baghdad by the Mongols, Yet When one reaches the modern period we do not find massacres of similar magnitude or frequency in the American Revolutionary or Civil War4.
At least that is my impression, which is not worth as much as actual data on this subject except as an intution to be tested. So what is the data? the “Historical Conflict Event Dataset”5 Practically does the whole work for us, it contains over 8000s battles since 1500 B.C. and classifies whatever a massacre occurred in/after battle, all that is left is to download the data and plot the trend over time.
Historically more than 1 out of 10 battles contained a massacre or was followed by a massacre. A strong deviation from the historical trend occurred in early modern times, after 1600 massacres quickly became less than half as frequent as they used to be. Overall 10.5% of battles before 1600 contained a massacre but only 3.6% of them did after 1600.
This transition toward lower rates of violence in battle looks remarkably similar to the pattern of decline in historical rates of homicide found by Manuel Eisner6 in which a strong post-1600s decline is also observed and it’s also similar to the decline in rates of regicide in which we see a strong downward trend somewhat earlier.
It’s also similar to a trend starting a little earlier, the decline in the proportions of nobles who died in battle, discovered by Neil Cummins7 by utilizing the fact that when a battle happens a large number of nobles die on the same day and looking at deaths among nobility who coincide to the same day. (The red line in the graph below is a comparison with a genealogical study by Hollingsworth, looking at the proportion of violent deaths in English Ducal families, both proportions refer to male deaths from violence.)
It’s also possible that there is a direct connection with the decline in noble deaths in battle being partly due to a decline in battle massacres and the same might be true of the decline in regicide (which includes battle deaths) given that a non-trivial number of rulers died in battle.
Also possible that battles have gotten less bloody once the noble warrior castes were less involved in them, given the violent proclivities of some noble groups in the Middle Ages.
It also fits the trend line in the percentage of bashed-up skulls in a sample of 4738 crania in the archeological records of Europe8.
It’s worth thinking for a moment about what form of violence is recorded by datasets of cranial trauma. In my opinion, it’s unlikely to be majority homicide because the sex ratio of medieval victims of homicide was around 25 males/females and this ratio has trended downward in the modern era to 5.8 males/females9 yet the ratio we see here is closer to a bit more than 3 males/females and does not trend downward (much) over time.
This indicates to me that the type of violence recorded by cranial trauma includes not just homicides (and attempted homicides) but other forms of less targeted violence such as the indiscriminate civilian casualties of war and raids, as this would tilt the sex ratio to become more even and uniform over time. (Actual battlefields are excluded from such datasets, in any regard only a few of them were found in the archeological record10)
So the result in the decline in massacres is in line with various datasets, all of which point to a similar trend of reduction in violence in the transition from the medieval to the modern period, sweet.
This does not mean that all types of violence have been reduced, in terms of war deaths the 20th century was quite possibly more deadly than previous ones and this is somewhat of a paradox if the nature of men has become more peaceable after the Middle Ages why has war remained so lethal up to the industrial age? one likely cause is the greater ability of modern states to recruit a larger share of their population into warfare, this would mean that even if individual battles are less deadly, casualties could still be much higher, another element is the mass killing committed by states against civilians in the name of an ideology which is of a somewhat a different nature to the senseless killing committed by rouges in anger. After all, improvements in the ability of men to exert self-control, the explanation that Eisner believes drives the decline in violence, would not stop ideologically motivated killing by persons believing they are doing the right thing.
To sum the whole thing up in no more words, a picture11:
Edit:
Since this post was published, one of the explanations brought forward to explain the decline in rates of massacres is that due to the increase in the documentary records smaller and less bloody battles have been recorded post-1600, somewhat against that explanation, the datasets include a 1-5 scale of the size of many battles and when separating the rate of massacre based on the size of battles it appears that in both pre and post-1600, it is smaller battles that have higher rates of massacres, therefore it’s unlikely that greater recording of smaller engagements influences the overall pattern.
Post note:
The sun is not going to run itself.
Even though they promised not to.
By which I mean Cato the Elder.
Although some occurred, mostly on a small scale and some mentioned as such are arguably not so.
“The History of Violence in Europe - Evidence from Cranial and Postcranial Bone Trauma” - By Joerg Baten and Richard H. Steckel
Table 5, footnote 6.
Preservation problems, lack of knowledge of where to look, anyway you can see some medieval battlefields here.
Battle massacres also include some battles outside Europe, although the overwhelming majority of battles in the sample involve Western powers.
This was so good, all of your articles are so good. Hate to be a sycophant, but it is true.
"one likely cause is the greater ability of modern states to recruit a larger share of their population into warfare"
This seems to be a myth. See: War Before Civilisation by Lawrence H. Keeley.
"This does not mean that all types of violence have been reduced, in terms of war deaths the 20th century was quite possibly more deadly than previous ones"
Arguably not true going by the rate of homicide or battlefield massacres. Estimations of modern vs ancient battle casualties usually include deaths from secondary causes (such as disease, accients etc.) in the modern casualty rates but don't do so for estimations of ancient ones, skewing the data (see the book I cited above).