Violence against Civilians in Conquest Wars

A third type of violence, and by far the best documented, concerns the military campaigns in sedentary regions and cities during conquests and raids. The victims of the violence itself, often literate and eyewitnesses to the events, left behind copious records and chronicles.

From Yang's recent study of Tang generals' attitude towards military violence, we can deduct that the behaviour of generals in allowing their troops to engage in widespread pillaging, raping and killing was surely not unusual in the case of military actions against Turks or other foreign peoples. It is quite clear that the restraint sometimes displayed in the repression of internal rebellions and against Chinese enemies was not observed with foreign enemies. The reason for this could be either a sense that foreigners were not entitled to particularly humane treatment or that the strategy followed by the Tang generals responded to a tit-for-tat that retaliated against northern nomads with the same methods used by the nomads themselves, which explained killing the males, enslaving women and children, and loot­ing property.

One notable case of violence against the local population was actually committed by the nomadic allies of China, the aforementioned Uighurs. During the turbulent times of the An Lushan Rebellion (755-63), when the then ruling Tang dynasty was on the verge of collapse, the Uighurs lent their military might to protect the Tang royal house against internal and foreign enemies. However, on two occasions they took advantage of ‘liberating' prosperous Chinese cities only to inflict massive violence on the local population. In 762 they pillaged Luoyang (the Eastern Capital) and treated the local population with exceeding brutality for several days, knowing that the Tang had no means to prevent it.^[46]

Episodes of opportunistic violence seem to point to a fundamental prag­matism in carrying out wars of conquest, or at any rate in territories outside the steppes. The general wisdom on this matter is overwhelmingly based on the well-documented Mongol conquest. The Mongol army, especially at the time of the early campaigns by Chinggis Khan, was a classic steppe cavalry army, extremely mobile and well disciplined, but with scant if any experience in siege warfare. Since the early days of the war in Central Asia against the Khwarazm-Shah it was therefore impellent that cities surrender rather than engage the Mongols in protracted and difficult sieges. Massacres of the population once the cities had been taken served therefore as a cautionary tale for other cities.

This account raises an important point, namely, whether the Mongols practised a selective violence against the civilian population. We have already seen that the practice of raiding and pillaging spared women and children, who were instead enslaved and treated as chattels. The Mongols added more categories of people who were more useful alive than dead. Chief among these was the class of artisans and people who, generally speaking, had practical knowledge in special crafts or were well versed in arts and sciences. Merchants and people adept with administrative matters from the ranks of the defeated can also be found in the employment of Mongols. The notion that the Mongols destroyed everything in their path has therefore been partly corrected in favour of a consideration ofboth the strategic use of massacres to weaken the resistance of cities and the selective use of violence to spare certain categories of useful people.

In some cases, however, the massacre of civilians seems to defy any particular logic other than sheer bloodlust. One of most famous cases is the sack of Baghdad in 1258. The complex political circumstances surrounding Hulegu’s campaign in the Middle East may have contributed to the extra­ordinary ferocity with which the fall of Baghdad was treated, given the resistance already met by the Mongols in Iran. Baghdad had repulsed the Mongols twice before Hulegu’s campaign, in 1230 and 1242, and, perhaps trusting in those precedents, the city preferred to resist rather than surrender. The siege lasted from 29 January to 7 February 1258, and was followed by forty days of unrestrained extreme violence, which is said to have entirely depopulated the city and amounted to a loss of hundreds of thousands of people, a figure made credible by the fact that its population had swollen because of country people who had moved there seeking refuge behind its walls.^[48] Hulegu’s army was by then already multi-ethnic, with soldiers from China, Central Asia and the Caucasus.^[49] When the order was given to stop the looting and killing, only a few people who had managed to hide survived.

The notion that the Mongols were animated by special ferocity surely favoured their progress in several campaigns, with enemies fleeing, leaving their cities unprotected, and cities surrendering without fighting. Other Inner Asian nomads, especially the dynasties that flourished on the northern frontier of China, and conquered parts of China, did not rise to the same reputation, probably because warfare between them and Song China had become by then not very different in tactics, the military situation was more balanced, and the degree of violence as a result of border wars and punitive campaigns was accepted by both sides.