 |
| Massacre of the Innocence, Pieter Breugel the Elder, 1565 |
Here is a list of religion-inspired massacres, i.e. a single event of mass killing inspired by religion or specifically of followers of a different religion, often merely a different sect of the same religion as the killers.
This is a work in progress, and probably always will be, as there will probably never cease to be excuses for religious massacres.
| Date | Location | People Killed | Name | Details |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 782 CE | Verden, Lower Saxony, Germany | 4,500 | Massacre of Verden | Saxon prisoners killed on orders of Charlemagne during his war to forcibly Christianise the Saxons |
| 30 December 1066 | Grenada, Al-Andelus | 4,000 | Grenada Massacre | Responding to a rumour that Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela intended to assassinate the king and usurp the throne, a Muslim mob killed him and the Jewish population of the city. |
| 1099 | Jerusalem, Palestine | 10,000 | Siege of Jerusalem | During the First Crusade, a Christian force had laid siege to the Muslim/Jewish city of Jerusalem. When it fell, almost all the inhabitants was slaughtered. Reports spoke of streets being ankle-deep in blood. |
| 16 March 1190 | York, England | 150-500 | 1190 York Massacre | During a period of Christian fervour stoked by the Crusades, and egged on by local gentry who were heavily in debt to Jewish money-lenders, the entire Jewish population of York, which had taken refuge in York Castle, were killed. Similar massacres had earlier occurred in Lincoln, Norwich and Stamford and were to be repeated elsewhere in England in succeeding years. |
| 1209 | Béziers, Langedoc, France | 15,000+ | Massacre at Béziers | First major military action in the 'Albigensian Crusade' against the Cathars in Béziers, in which the Cistercian abbot commander, having been told that there were many Catholic Christians in the town, ordered his soldiers to "Kill them all. God will recognise his own". See also "Feel That Christian Love!" |
| 1298 | Germany | Many thousands | Rintfleisch Massacres | A local Christian demagogue, the self-styled "Lord Rindtfleisch" claimed he had been given a mandate from Heaven to exterminate the Jews. Starting at Röttingen on 20 April 1298 where his mob burned the Jewish population, he then destroyed the Jewish populations of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Würzburg, Bamberg, Dinkelsbühl, Nördlingen, Forchheim and Nuremberg. He then moved into Bavaria and Austria where a further 5,000 Jews were massacred. |
| 21 March 1349 | Erfurt, Germany | 100-3,000 | Erfurt massacre | Encouraged by local Catholic clergy, a mob massacred the Jewish community of Erfurt, believing them to be responsible for spreading thee Black Death. This was one of many such massacres of European Jews by Christians during the Black Death. |
| 29-31 May 1453 | Byzantium (Constantinople), Byzantine Empire | 4,000-50,000 | Fall of Constantinople | Following a siege from early April, 1453, Byzantium eventually fell to the Muslim forced led by Sultan Mehmed II. The victorious soldiers were given the traditional three days of freedom to loot and pillage. Estimates of the number killed vary from the entire population (of some 50,000) to just 4,000, mostly Eastern Orthodox Christians. |
| 1555-1558 | England | 300+ | Marian Persecutions | In an attempt to reverse the Protestant Reformation in England, encouraged by the Pope and her Catholic husband, King Philip II of Spain, Queen Mary ("Bloody Mary") instigated a campaign of executing leading Protestants, mostly senior clerics, by burning at the stake. |
| 1570 | Cyprus | 30,000-50,000 | Cyprus Massacre | Ottoman (Turkish Muslim) forces conquered Cyprus and killed the Christian inhabitants. |
| 23 August 1572 | Paris, France | 5,000-70,000 | Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre | Catholic mobs massacred French Huguenots (Calvinist Protestants) who had gathered in predominantly Catholic Paris to celebrate the marriage of the King's sister Margaret to the Protestant, King Henry III of Navarre. |
| 1612 | Yorkshire, England | 10 | The Pendle Witches | Following an outbreak of witch hysteria, nine women and two men from Pendle and the surrounding area were tried for witchcraft at York Asizes. One woman was acquitted; the rest were executed by hanging. Another woman died in prison before coming to trial. These form a small sample of some 500 English 'witches' to be executed. |
| September 1649 | Drogheda, Ireland | 3,552 including 700-800 civilians | Drogheda Massacre | An English force of Cromwell's Puritan "New Model Army" massacred the Irish Catholic Royalist garrison of Drogheda after a brief siege, following the Parliamentarian victory in the English Civil War. See also "A History of Ireland - 3. Rebellion, Cromwell and Jacobites" |
| 1649 | Wexford, Ireland | 2,000+ including 200 women and children | Wexford Massacre | Fresh from their victory at Drogheda, Cromwell's Puritan "New Model Army" sacked the town of Wexford and ran amok, killing at least 2000 people, including 200 women and children 'executed' in the market square. See also "A History of Ireland - 3. Rebellion, Cromwell and Jacobites" |
| February 1692 to May 1693 | Salem, Massachusetts, Colonial America | 20. 19 hanged and 1 'prest' | Salem Witch Trials | During another bout of Christian witch hysteria 20 people, mostly women, were executed, fifty more 'confessed', one hundred and fifty were imprisoned and a further 200 faced accusations of witchcraft before the Governor, William Phips intervened and stopped the trials. |
| 1755-57 | Northwest China | 500,000-800,000 | Dzungar Massacre | The Manchu emperor, Chien-lung, sixth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, poet and art collector, massacred eighty percent of the Tebetan Buddhist Dzungar people in a series of campaigns of conquest. |
| April 1821 | Peloponnese, Greece | 35,000 | Tripolitsa Massacre | Greek Orthodox Christian forces captured the town of Tripolitsa after a siege and killed the entire Muslim and Jewish population, in the Greek War of Independence. |
| 19 August 1821 | Peloponnese, Greece | 3,000 | Navario Massacre | Greek Orthodox Christian forces repeated their success at Tripolitsa and killed the entire Muslim population of Navarino and the surrounding area. |
| 1822 | Chios, Greece | about 20,000 | Chios Massacre | Tens of thousands of Greek Orthodox Christians on the island of Chios were killed by occupying Ottoman Muslim troups. |
| 30 October 1838 | Caldwell County, Missouri, USA | 19 | Haun's Mill Massacre | 240 members of the Livingstone County Militia attacked and killed a Mormon settlement in Caldwell County, Missouri, killing 18 Mormons and one non-Mormon. Although their names were known, no one was ever charged with the murders. |
| 1850-1864 | China | 20,000,000 | Taiping Rebellion | A disaffect and mentally ill Hakka Chinese named Hong Xiuquan (born Hong Renkun) became convinced that he was the younger brother of Jesus whom he had read about in some pamphlets given him by European Christian missionaries. He decided that he had been sent to rid China of demons (i.e, Confucianists & Buddhists). The resulting Christian, violently anti-Confucian, anti-Buddhist, and above all, anti-Government, cult was eventually put down in a protracted civil war in which some 20,000,000 Chinese were killed. See also The Heavenly Peace Of Jesus. |
| 11 September 1857 | Mountain Meadows, Utah, USA | 120-140 | Mountain Meadows Massacre | A Mormon force, the Utah Territorial Millitia, disguised as Indians, together with Paiute tribesmen, attacked and plundered the Baker–Fancher emigrant wagon train, killing all the emigrants. |
| 30 April 1876 | Batak, Ottoman Empire | 3,000-5,000 | Batak Massacre | Muslim Ottoman irregulars killed Bulgarian Christian civilians who had taken refuge in a church. |
| 1894-96 | Anatolia, Ottoman Empire | 100,000-300,000 | Hamidian Massacres | On the orders of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Muslim forces killed Armenian Christians across the Empire. Includes the 1895 Massacres of Diyarbakir, in which Syrian and other Christian denominations were also killed indiscriminately. |
| 10 March 1906 | Bud Dajo, Jolo Island, Philippines | 800-1,000 | Moro Crater Massacre | An American Army unit under the command of Major General Leonard Wood and a US Naval unit together with a detachment of native police, attacked and killed 600 unarmed Muslims including many women and children in a village inside the crater of an extinct volcano. |
| April-May 1909 | Adana Province, Anatolia, Ottoman Empire | 15,000-30,000 | Adana Massacre | Religious-ethnic tensions between Muslims and Armenian Christians in Adana province, led to a series of anti-Armenian pogroms throughout the area. |
| 21 November 1920 | Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland | 23 | Croke Park Massacre | A detachment of the British special force, the "Black and Tans", opened fire on the predominantly Catholic crowd at a Gaelic Football match between Dublin and Tipperary, during the Irish insurrection against British rule. |
| August 1933 | Iraq | 3,000 | Simele Massacre | Armed Iraqi and Kurdish Muslim forces killed 3,000 'Nestorian' Christians in an attempt to ethnically cleanse Northern Iraq. Methods of killing included running over children with armoured cars and bayoneting pregnant women. |
| 29 September 1941 | Kiev, Ukraine | 30,000 | Babi Yar Massacre | Nazi Einsatzgruppen killed the Jewish population of Kiev. |
| 22-24 October 1941 | Odessa, Soviet Union | 25,000–34,000 | Odessa Massacre | German & Romanian forced killed the Jewish population of Odessa and surrounding towns. |
| 25 & 29 November 1941 | Kaunas, Lithuania | 4,934 | Ninth Fort massacres of November 1941 | First systematic killing of German Jews by the Nazi state. |
| 1941-1945 | German-occupied Europe | 6,000,000 | The Holocaust | Led by the psychopathic and delusional Catholic fanatic, Adolf Hitler, and encouraged by the German Catholic Church, the German state embarked on an industrial-scale genocide against European Jews who had been officially classified as non-human. Until the early 1960s, the Catholic Church's official position was that the Germans were doing God's work as a punishment for the Jews having killed Jesus. None of the predominantly Catholic Nazi leaders were ever excommunicated for their genocides. Note: The Nazi German state also systematically killed a further 11,000,000 Romani, homosexuals, disabled, communists, Poles, Russians and Polish prisoners of war as well as some 1,200 Jehovah's Witnesses. |
| October-November 1946 | Naokhali, Bengal, British India | 5,000 | Noakhali Genocide | A series of massacres, rapes, abductions and forced conversions of Hindus and looting and arson of Hindu properties, perpetrated by the Muslim community in the districts of Noakhali and Tipperah. |
| 1947 | British Indian | 250,000-1,000,000 | Partition of India | "Ethnic cleansing" of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu populations leading up to partition of India into India and Pakistan at Independence. In some areas Christians were also persecuted. |
| 1975-79 | Kampuchea | 25,000 | Khmer Rouge Massacres | The Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot, attempting to introduce a primitive form of agrarian Communism, killed 25,000 Buddhists in an attempt to eradicate Buddhism. In all, the regime killed 1-3,000,000 Cambodians and ethnic Chinese, including doctors and intellectuals, targeting anyone with an education. |
| 16-18 September 1982 | Beirut, Lebanon | 762-3,500 | Sabra and Shatila Massacres | During the Lebanese Civil War, a unit of the Israeli Defence Force acting on the orders of Ariel Sharon, Israel's Defense Minister, sealed off two Palatinian refugee camps and illuminated them at night with aerial flares so that a Christian Phalangist militia could butcher the unarmed Shiite Muslim inhabitants including the women and children. Ariel Sharon later became leader of the Likud Party and Prime Minister of Israel whilst the leader of the Christian Phalangist murderers, Elie Hobeika, became a minister in the post civil-war Lebanese government |
| 1975-1990 | Lebanon | 120,000-150,000 | Lebanese Civil War | Multiple massacres of various religious groups by others, taking advantage of the collapse of central authority and degeneration into warring factions and religion-based warlordism. |
| 1994 | Rwanda | 500,000-1,000,000 mostly Tutsi | The Rwanda Genocide | Aided by Catholic and Protestant Christian priests, following the death of the President in a suspicious plane crash, the Hutu population unleashed a pre-planned campaign of murder intended to exterminate the Tutsi. A popular technique was for priests to invite Tutsi to take shelter in churches and then hand them over to armed Hutu execution squads or, at least in one case, to order bulldozers to demolish the church and crush those inside. |
| July 1995 | Srebrenica, Bosnia | 8,000+ | Srebrenica Massacre | Bosnian Moslem men and boys from the town of Srebrenica and surrounding villages were butchered by a Serbian Orthodox Christian force supported by Greek volunteers, led by Ratko Mladić during the Bosnia civil war which followed the break-up of Yugoslavia. Many of the Greek volunteers who participated in the massacre are now in the Greek neo-Nazi 'Golden Dawn' party. |
| 11 September 2001 | New York and Washington DC, USA | 2977 | 9/11 | Muslim fundamentalists hijacked four planes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center, New York and the Pentagon, Washington DC. In the fourth plane, passengers over-powered the hijackers but the plane crashed, killing all on board. The 19 hijackers also died. |
Obviously, there are many yet to be added, and it doesn't include all those little religious massacres like mass witch burnings and the odd clutch of heretics. I'll add to it over the coming days.
Suggestions in the comment section, please.
| Twitter Tweet | StumbleUpon | Reddit |
0 comments:
Post a Comment