Most bloodthirsty history?

[Mooks]

Which empire, nation, city-state whatever in history was the most bloodthirsty and warlike? The most savage and frequent wars, best trained soldiers, and comebacks.

[Kagemusha]

Thats a very broad question,but if we talk about Bloodthirsty i would say Aztec Empire.Their Gods were truly hungry for blood.

[Gurkhal]

I agree that the Aztecs probably stand in a good position. But it also about how ones defines "bloodthirsty and warlike". The Mongols might also be a good candidate.

[Archayon]

The Mongols might also be a good candidate.

Didn't the Mongols spare anyone who surrendered without fighting?

Thats a very broad question,but if we talk about Bloodthirsty i would say Aztec Empire.Their Gods were truly hungry for blood.

Didn't the aztecs reject bow and arrow, because of the possibility of killing people in combat? (they wanted to take captives, for gaining honour, slavery and indeed ritually cutting their hearts out to keep the sun rising every day)


In my opinion it is difficult to "blame" a whole nation being bloodthirsty. Only persons or maybe some battles can be called bloodthirsty, at least somehow it's more fair than labelling a whole nation.


Some candidates:
- Stalin
- Napoleon
- emperor Ashoka (Maurya empire, North and Central India: one day he let so many be killed - like 100,000 - it shook himself, and he promptly converted to buddhism. At least, that's what the legend says)
(edit: mind he lived during the 4th century BC!)




Arch

[Innocentius]

Not very bloodthirsty really, but the British Empire and most other colonial nations have been pretty cruel and warlike through the ages.

[Archayon]

Leopold II Von Saxen-Coburg, king of Belgium, during the 19th century in Congo...


you should read "red rubber"


(i keep remembering those mountains of piled black hands that are cut off ... )





Arch

[Conqueror]

Timur & Friends.

[Mooks]

Byzatines were pretty bad. Granted, they had a stable goverment and generally peace within their borders. They had non-stop wars all thoughout their history.

[Randarkmaan]

The Assyrians were quite nasty... The interesting thing with them is that all the horrible things they did were mostly what they themselves told/wrote about, not what their enemies or other states wrote about them.

One account details the capture of a town, and describes it roughly like this: After defeating them we slaughtered the people like lambs, those we did not kill we captured and from amongst them we selected some whose cheeks we pierced, bound a rope through and made guard dogs for the others. One king boasts this: "Many of my enemies I burned, others I let live. On some of them I cut of hands or arms, on others noses or ears, and on many I poked their eyes out"
Their laws were also brutal, the most common death punishment was impalement (like Vlad Tepes did) others were skinned alive.
An example of a law: If a woman commits adultery and her husband discovers it he has the right to kill her and the one which she has commited adultery with or if he prefers he can cut off the nose of the woman and castrate the man and mutilate (right word?) his face. And so on and so on. When one comes to think of it most people throughout history are terribly cruel to eachother at times or in certain situations, but the Assyrians were proud of it.
It's also a bit interesting to note that the first state with a largely professional army was such a cruel one.

[Watchman]

The more warlike "barbarian" cultures of Antiquity certainly tried very hard as well. The Celts had a major fixation on severed heads, some Germanic tribes didn't allow young men to cut their hair before they'd killed a foeman in battle, and both regarded raiding and similar small-scale warring as a perfectly normal pasttime if not an outright necessity. Had some pretty interesting religious ideas concerning sacrifices as well, if contemporaries are to be believed.

And that's just the ones we know a bit of. Not a few others all around the world at roughly comparable stages of cultural and technical developement seem to have been just as pugnacious.

The various steppe nomads were also notoriously warlike - one reason they made so good soldiers was the way they got so much practical combat experience in their endless little skirmishes and raids against their neighbours, both settled and nomadic. Most are also infamous for regarding sedentary populaces as barely human and treating them accordingly; the amount of sheer devastation they could inflict was something else, although the Mongols at their more ruthless phases (some parts of Khwarimzam apparently never recovered demographically) and Timur & His Hitmen were probably the worst.

The Assyrians are another strong contender; not that warfare around those times tended to be very restricted anyway, but they made a point of being blood-curdling. Romans ought to rank fairly highly as well actually - once they got going they really took a liking to this whole conquering business, were notoriously rapacious victors and big believers in messy cautionary examples.

The Aztecs were an essentially military state with a somewhat peculiar religion that pretty much obliged them to constantly capture people for sacrifice - although besides the industrial-scale human sacrifice thingy they AFAIK weren't actually all that bloodthirsty. After all, they were after prisoners, subjects and tribute, not burning ruins stacked with corpses. Some of the other South American high cultures may have been a whole lot more ruthless warmongers in their heyday.

[Ibn Munqidh]

The European settlers on the east coast of the "new world". They did wipe out an entire nation didnt they?

[Watchman]

That'd really be just the ones in the North, and only after their little Civil War. The Iberians didn't really intend to wipe out the South and Central American natives - they needed them to work after all - but with all the new diseases running rampant, well...

[Innocentius]

Just realised no one (no, not me either) mentioned Nazi-Germany yet. Can't think of a more "bloodthirsty and warlike" nation.

[Watchman]

Well, they were kinda brief y'see.

[Julian the apostate]

are we talking Machievellian Brutality or like completely unessessary and brutal killings.
I would say King Ferdinand and Isabella, Hitler and Stalin (Katyn Forest)Tamurlame, I forgot who lead the crusade that took Jeruselem but i'll pin him 2. Albiet sometimes its not the leader but the troops like in most post-siege sackings from the begining of time right up to 1850-1900.

I just finished a book on THe MOngels, If you fought they would kill all of the elites typically and spare the peasants. It seemed a good system as opposed to the typical oppisite.

[Mooks]

are we talking Machievellian Brutality or like completely unessessary and brutal killings.
I would say King Ferdinand and Isabella, Hitler and Stalin (Katyn Forest)Tamurlame, I forgot who lead the crusade that took Jeruselem but i'll pin him 2. Albiet sometimes its not the leader but the troops like in most post-siege sackings from the begining of time right up to 1850-1900.

I just finished a book on THe MOngels, If you fought they would kill all of the elites typically and spare the peasants. It seemed a good system as opposed to the typical oppisite.

Who was the first lord of jerusleam....ummm *thinks deeply*

King baldwin comes to my mind. He wasnt really a king, heres a quote that Im doing from memory "Do not call me king where the king of kings was born. Nor shall I wear a crown where my savior wore one of thorns" Pious guy , and a lucky one at that (The fact that the crusades captured anything was pure luck).

One modern nation that I think excelled at war were the germans. They were said to be cool-headed and treated war as a business, not a passion. They almost defeated 3 nations in ww1 almost by themselves and defeated France in 1 week alone in ww2.

[Tribesman]

They almost defeated 3 nations in ww1 almost by themselves and defeated France in 1 week alone in ww2.

That appears to be a rather strange view of history there .

[ajaxfetish]

Wasn't Godfrey given the head position in Jerusalem before it passed to Baldwin? Anyway, it'd be hard to identify any one person as the man 'who lead the crusade that took Jerusalem' as leadership was so decentralized in the Christian army.

Ajax

[cegorach]

I would add Russia too. The state was PERMANENTLY at war - the reason was that it was always hungry for goods necessary to keep rewarding Tzar's servants.
One war fuelled another and the wars stopped the country was in crisis.

[Mooks]

That appears to be a rather strange view of history there .

Maybe so. But they pretty much kicked ass.

And im probaly wrong about the first king of jerusleam. Wait wait, Godfrey of Bullion. Thats his name.

[Randarkmaan]

Wasn't Godfrey given the head position in Jerusalem before it passed to Baldwin? Anyway, it'd be hard to identify any one person as the man 'who lead the crusade that took Jerusalem' as leadership was so decentralized in the Christian army.

Right, also the massarcre of Jerusalem wasn't exactly planned but they didn't try to prevent it either. In some ways it is "understandable" why the crusaders did what they did. They were in a sort of religious ecstasy, maybe they even believed that this was the end-times and that the capture of this city would lead to it or something, also it was widely believed that you gained remission for all your sins by participating and by killing the so-called infidel. And last the garrison at Jerusalem had defended it self pretty well, for a bout four months I think (it may have been less, but I think it's something like that) and had constantly battered the crusaders with catapults, ballistas arrows, rocks, naphta grenades and all that hell. Not to mention that before reaching the city they had been harassed by Turks and been dieing of thirst and hunger and probably at some points eaten eachother. So when they got inside the city many had probably lost a lot of their comrades maybe even their relatives and were very keen to discharge their anger at everyone in sight. Also some crusaders, mostly Southern Europeans, tried to take prisoners but this did mostly not work out very well.

[King Henry V]

Byzatines were pretty bad. Granted, they had a stable goverment and generally peace within their borders. They had non-stop wars all thoughout their history.

However, most of those were defensive; one of the Empire's greatest strengths, her place as the crossroads between East and West was also one of her greatest weaknesses in that she always had to wage war against some state on either of her borders.

[Justiciar]

A fair few post-Colonial African nations could be said to have bloodthirsty histories, however short, and not (in some cases, at least) necessarily their fault.

[Cangrande]

For sheer brutality it has to be the Germans of the early and mid-20th century.

The Crusaders might be worth a dis-honourable mention too.

The Assyrians? I think the reason they wrote these horror stories was to cow their enemies and put-off potential rebellion.

The north American colonists of the C19 who carried-out genocide on the indigenous population.

Finally, all the European colonial powers...except the Brits, who were nice and cuddly really

[King Henry V]

All nations have had a bloodthirsty history, heck, even Switzerland was one of the most feared powers in Europe during the XVth century until the battle of Marignano.

[Innocentius]

Finally, all the European colonial powers...except the Brits, who were nice and cuddly really

You got a point there...It's hard to imagine some sophisticated, tea-drinking, cricket-loving, bowler hat-wearing, pipe-smoking, moustached men going out to enslave half a continent.

[Fisherking]

I don't know, the encounter with history was a bit brief but the most disgusting culture I have read of…and that is only one account…is the Tunica Indians somewhere along the southern Mississippi River. It seems like they sacrificed captives like the Aztecs but also to move up in social standing they ritually sacrificed their own children. Or so the story went...

[Marquis of Roland]

Right, also the massarcre of Jerusalem wasn't exactly planned but they didn't try to prevent it either. In some ways it is "understandable" why the crusaders did what they did. They were in a sort of religious ecstasy, maybe they even believed that this was the end-times and that the capture of this city would lead to it or something, also it was widely believed that you gained remission for all your sins by participating and by killing the so-called infidel.

Wait, you're saying its "understandable" what the crusaders did because they were in a religious fervor? Does this make them good people that had an acceptable lapse into bad behavior because their religion said it was ok? If this was the case do we blame the Papacy for turning innocent people into killers?

And even if the Pope authorized killing infidels as a path to heaven, was it understandable for the crusaders to kill all the original Christians in Jerusalem too? They also massacred the population of Antioch when they took that. Since it was the Pope who insinuated the idea, we should probably nominate the papacy as a historically bloodthirsty faction. After all, it did authorize all of the crusades and the Spanish inquisition too (the ironic thing about the crusaders were that the more time they spent around the muslims, the more they saw them as actual people instead of "infidels").

I guess what I'm saying is even if you think you have a good reason to be bloodthirsty doesn't mean you're excused from being accused of committing atrocities or from being called a bloodthirsty faction.

[Randarkmaan]

I didn't say what the crusaders did was justified I said it is possible to understand why they did what they did. And I should probably have written "infidel" rather than so-called infidels maybe?

was it understandable for the crusaders to kill all the original Christians in Jerusalem too?

Yes, first of all they probably couldn't tell them apart, and second I think it's reasonable to assume that the Crusaders just unleashed their (religious, maybe) fury on anyone in sight when they got inside the city, however understandable it does not the lessen the tragedy of the event and I'm not at all saying it was justified. You should not always just feel sad for the ones murdered, but for the murderers as well.

[Sarmatian]

except the Brits, who were nice and cuddly really

I've always wanted to get one for a pet but mom and dad didn't allow me