10 Of The Largest Massacres In History

Massacres are large-scale killings of people in a specific place over a short period. The line between a massacre, a battle, an act of ethnic cleansing, and a genocide is not always sharp, and scholars use the terms with overlapping but distinct meanings: a battle implies armed combatants on both sides; a genocide implies the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such (the legal definition in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention); a massacre, broadly, refers to the indiscriminate killing of a substantial number of people, often defenseless civilians, in a confined geographic and temporal frame.

Estimating the death toll of pre-modern massacres is also difficult. Contemporary sources often had political reasons to inflate or to suppress numbers, the absence of demographic records makes verification impossible, and modern historians frequently revise traditional figures. The figures cited below are best understood as the ranges that historians currently consider plausible, not as confirmed counts. The events are ordered by death toll in descending order, by the highest end of the cited range.

1. The Sichuan Massacres (1644-1646)

Sichuan is a large province in southwestern China, and its population is recorded to have collapsed during and immediately after the Ming-Qing transition of the mid-seventeenth century. The peasant rebel leader Zhang Xianzhong (1606-1647) marched his army into Sichuan in 1644 in the same year that the Ming dynasty fell in Beijing, captured Chengdu in September 1644, declared himself emperor of the short-lived Daxi (Great Western) regime, and ruled until late 1646; he was killed in battle against advancing Qing forces in January 1647. Zhang's reign in Sichuan was marked by extensive violence against opponents, and traditional Chinese historiography attributes the depopulation of the province (possibly up to one million dead, against a pre-1644 population of around three million) to him directly. Modern historians, including Wang Gang and others working on the period, argue that the depopulation was the cumulative product of Zhang's massacres, of the subsequent Qing reconquest of the province (which extended through the 1660s), of famine, of disease, and of refugee flight, rather than the work of one rebel leader. Qing court historians had clear political reasons to attribute the entire catastrophe to Zhang. The total death toll has never been firmly established.

2. The Yangzhou Massacre (1645)

The Yangzhou Massacre took place over approximately ten days in late May 1645, after Qing forces commanded by the Manchu prince Dodo (1614-1649), a son of Nurhaci and a brother of Qing emperor Hong Taiji, captured the prosperous Yangtze River commercial city of Yangzhou from the Ming loyalist defender Shi Kefa. Shi was executed by Dodo for refusing to surrender. The traditional figure for the death toll, drawn from the contemporary account "A Record of Ten Days in Yangzhou" by the survivor Wang Xiuchu, is approximately 800,000. Modern historians (Britannica, Lynn Struve, and others) consider this figure greatly exaggerated; some recent estimates fall closer to 80,000. The massacre is widely interpreted as a deliberate Qing policy of terror intended to discourage further Ming loyalist resistance south of the Yangtze, and Nanjing surrendered without serious resistance soon afterward.

3. The Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896)

The Hamidian Massacres took place across the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire between 1894 and 1896 (with some incidents extending into 1897) and are named for Sultan Abdülhamid II, during whose reign they were carried out. The killings targeted the Armenian Christian population of the Ottoman Empire, with smaller-scale violence against Assyrian Christian communities, particularly around Diyarbekir, where approximately 25,000 Assyrians were killed. Death toll estimates range from approximately 80,000 to 300,000 Armenians, with roughly 50,000 children orphaned. The massacres were carried out by a combination of regular Ottoman forces, Kurdish irregular Hamidiye cavalry units, and local Muslim mobs. The Hamidian Massacres are generally considered a direct precursor to the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923 carried out under the later Young Turk government.

4. The Asiatic Vespers (88 BC)

The Asiatic Vespers were the simultaneous killings of Roman and Italian residents across the Roman province of Asia in western Anatolia (modern western Turkey) on a single coordinated day in 88 BC, ordered by Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus at the outbreak of the First Mithridatic War with Rome. Mithridates's letter to the cities of the province instructed local authorities to put all Roman and Italian residents to death and to confiscate their property; cities including Ephesus, Pergamon, Adramyttium, and Tralles complied. The contemporary Roman sources (Appian, Plutarch, Valerius Maximus, Memnon) give figures of 80,000 to 150,000 dead, though modern classical historians regard these as likely exaggerated and politically charged Roman accounts. The event was one of the principal causes of the long series of wars between Rome and Pontus that ended with Pompey's defeat of Mithridates in 63 BC.

5. The Massacre Of The Latins (1182)

In April and May 1182, the Roman Catholic ("Latin") population of Constantinople was attacked by the city's Greek Orthodox majority during the disorder surrounding the rise to power of Andronikos I Komnenos. The Latin community, predominantly Venetian and Genoese merchants and their families, had become resented for the commercial privileges that successive Byzantine emperors had granted them and for their visible wealth. An estimated 60,000 Latins lived in the city before the massacre; tens of thousands were killed, approximately 4,000 were sold as slaves to Turkish buyers, and the rest fled. The event significantly worsened relations between the Eastern and Western Churches following the schism of 1054 and contributed to the long sequence of conflicts that culminated in the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204.

6. The Chios Massacre (1822)

The Chios Massacre took place in the spring of 1822, during the Greek War of Independence (1821-1832), after a small force from the neighboring island of Samos landed on Chios and encouraged the local population to join the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule. Ottoman forces responded by sending a large army to the island. Estimates of the death toll vary widely (approximately 25,000 to 52,000 killed); tens of thousands of additional residents were enslaved, and the island's pre-massacre population of approximately 120,000 was reduced to around 2,000 by the end of the operation. The event provoked widespread European public condemnation of the Ottoman Empire and inspired Eugène Delacroix's 1824 painting "The Massacre at Chios."

7. The Manila Chinese Massacre (1639)

Spanish-ruled Manila had a substantial Chinese (Sangley) merchant community that had long been viewed with suspicion by the Spanish colonial authorities and by the local Filipino population. In November 1639, a revolt broke out among Chinese laborers in the Calamba area south of Manila, which spread to the Chinese quarter (the Parián) and to nearby communities. The Spanish authorities and Filipino auxiliaries responded with a campaign of suppression; estimates of the resulting death toll range from 17,000 to 22,000 Chinese killed. This was one of several massacres of the Sangley population in Spanish Manila, with earlier and later episodes in 1603 (approximately 25,000 killed), 1662, 1686, and 1762.

8. The Praga Massacre (1794)

The Praga Massacre took place on November 4, 1794, during the Kościuszko Uprising against the Russian and Prussian partitions of Poland. Russian forces commanded by General Alexander Suvorov stormed Praga, the suburb of Warsaw on the right (east) bank of the Vistula River, and proceeded to kill an estimated 20,000 residents over the course of the day, including a substantial proportion of civilians. The objective was both military (to break the defense of Warsaw) and political (to terrorize the city into surrender); Warsaw capitulated the following day. The massacre is commemorated in Polish historical memory as one of the worst single-day atrocities of the partition era.

9. The Siege Of Nicosia (1570)

The Siege of Nicosia took place between July and September 1570 during the Ottoman-Venetian War of 1570-1573. After a siege of approximately seven weeks, Ottoman forces commanded by Lala Mustafa Pasha breached the city walls on September 9, and the assault that followed killed approximately 16,000 to 20,000 inhabitants. Survivors were enslaved or expelled, and the city was sacked. The fall of Nicosia preceded the longer Ottoman siege of Famagusta, which ended in August 1571 with a similar pattern of surrender, massacre, and enslavement, completing the Ottoman conquest of the island. Cyprus remained under Ottoman administration until 1878.

10. The Rhineland Massacres (1096)

The Rhineland Massacres took place in May and June 1096, during the People's Crusade that preceded the official First Crusade. Bands led by Count Emicho of Flonheim (also known as Emicho von Leiningen) attacked Jewish communities along the Rhine, principally at Speyer (where eleven Jews were killed on May 3), Worms (approximately 800 killed on May 18-25), Mainz (approximately 1,100 killed on May 27), and Cologne, with smaller attacks in Trier, Metz, and Regensburg. Estimates of the total death toll range from approximately 2,000 to 10,000 Jews. Most victims either refused forced baptism and were killed or chose death (often by suicide) over conversion. Known in Jewish tradition as Gezerot Tatnu (the Edicts of [the year] 4856), the Rhineland Massacres are widely regarded by historians as the first major coordinated wave of antisemitic violence in medieval Europe and as a precursor to later European antisemitic violence.