Most undeserved Dark Legends in History

Mongolian "Millions" are anything but proved and most of the XX century killings (many tens of millions) were not religion based but are not considered OK.

So you think they killed less than a million? Far less, even? I don't know enough to make my own estimate, but that seems like pretty radical revisionism given the estimates I have seen.
 
I think they're the only civilization in history that significantly decreased global population by killing as many people as they did. If anything, I think they've been whitewashed way too much of late. Killing millions is a-okay so long as you don't discriminate by religion, apparently.
The "white washing" largely is a result of better historical techniques as opposed to forgiving killings in the name of tolerance.

We now know that in Genghis's reign, there was an active campaign of increasing numbers; much of the numerical account we do have comes from the Persian historian Juvayni who was literally a member of the Mongol court and regularly reported more people dying than actually lived in the various cities.

We also have to factor in the historical ambiguity of what counts as a "mongol death".
Most of the deaths in the Jurchen campaign for instance coincided with an awful famine that preceded the conflict, how we seperate a natural death from death by Mongol (exacerbation being almost impossible to quantify in modern times) is something with no clear answer. Traditional historical accounts have lumped all of them together, which makes the numbers insanely higher than can be reasonably be put forward.

Then of course there is the famous and horrifically misquoted study of the Mongols and Climate change.
What is most commonly reported is this idea that "Genghis Khan killed so many that he cooled the planet!", a claim which makes for a good headline but is incredibly misrepresentitive on a few accounts.

First, the study doesnt actually deal with Genghis Khan specifically, but global events across multiple centuries (notably, he himself being dead for most of the study) and yet reporting continues an unfortunate trend of conflating him with his descendants.
It also includes as part of its numbers natural deaths, such as the earlier years of the black plague and being continous with a pre-existing chinese warring period (+ that earlier mentioned Famine) and the crusades.

The actual conclusion of the study, that the higher number of deaths in those centuries surrounding the Mongol empire helped cool the planet is not nearly as interesting a study.
 
Honestly, that sounds like a better legacy than being known for impaling your own subjects...

Impaling was quite a common thing at these times and the worst part of the legend seemingly coming from the Ottomans who had been widely practicing it but got upset seeing that Vlad applied this method to them.
 
The fact that they prosecuted "heretics" who were mostly converted Muslims and Jews is probably a part of why they're seen so dimly. Doesn't really matter how "fair" they are if their main purpose was to persecute religious minorities.
That doesn't really fit though because that same kind of idea, persecuting religious minorities, was just as true in other countries courts as well, normally with FAR more brutality.

The Inquisition seems largely to have been demonised by its political enemies, particularly in other countries, and even moreso in countries that went Protestant as a way of pretending that their own witch hunts and murder sprees, which both occurred later than the worst of the Inquisition, and were largely more brutal, were better than those barbarous Catholics.
 
So you think they killed less than a million? Far less, even? I don't know enough to make my own estimate, but that seems like pretty radical revisionism given the estimates I have seen.

The point is that nobody can tell for sure because most of the "traditional numbers" are taken from the old sources that do not stand to any criticism and actually are in a contradiction with the known realities like active participation of the Chinese (Han and Kidan) officials and military (up to 7 tumens) on the Mongolian side during conquest of the Northern China, exaggerated reports about complete destruction of the cities of the CA many of which remained in "circulation" after the Mongolian conquest and none of which having a population close to the legendary numbers (usually they'd be around a million for a big city like Bukhara). Ditto for the Mongolian conquest of Russia: practically all "completely destroyed" cities had been proven functioning soon after the conquest with the population, local princes visiting the Horde to confirm their right to rule, etc. BTW, there is a big difference between "million" and enough of "millions" to make a significant dent in the world's population of even the XIII century.


To a great degree the "information" is generated by a tradition of exaggerating the numbers of killed as a way to price a conqueror. Nothing new or original there. IIRC, Caesar also bragged about the enormous numbers of the killed barbarians and so did pretty much each and every conqueror before and after all the way to the modern times (bragging about killing the civilians eventually got out of fashion but the enemies remained a fair game).
 
Was Herodes really a vile tyrant ?

If you mean Herod the Great, he killed a load of people, including his second wife and three of his own sons, so I'd say he was pretty tyrannical, yes.

So if some idiot like Dawkins comes along thinking he's dismantled the entire medieval worldview because "how could there have been days before the Sun was made???", you should know better.

My favourite was when he said "God couldn't have made the sun stand still in the sky, because that would mean stopping the earth from spinning, and everybody would just fly off their feet when that happened." Apparently Dawkins' God has a very specific level of omnipotence...

To be fair, that probably comes out of the areas where Union occupation during the war was rather brutal, such as when union soldiers executed this farmer's son because they (inccorectly) identified him as a confederate.

The farmer went on to be a sniper with over 200 confirmed kills in the Mississippi river valley

Sounds a bit like the plot of a Mel Gibson movie.

(As is well-known, there are two sure-fire ways to die in a movie. One is to be related to Mel Gibson; the other is to kill someone related to Mel Gibson.)

That doesn't really fit though because that same kind of idea, persecuting religious minorities, was just as true in other countries courts as well, normally with FAR more brutality.

The Inquisition seems largely to have been demonised by its political enemies, particularly in other countries, and even moreso in countries that went Protestant as a way of pretending that their own witch hunts and murder sprees, which both occurred later than the worst of the Inquisition, and were largely more brutal, were better than those barbarous Catholics.

Plus, a large part of the reason for religious persecution was that religious dissent was considered a threat to social stability, and modern states are perfectly willing to crack down on beliefs which they think threaten society (hence laws against hate speech, restrictions on members of extremist groups getting certain jobs, etc.).
 
Maybe. But if he'd personally had them killed it would have been done in a way that improves his position. Richard was too shrewd to just bump them off.

Has anyone considered his Queen, Anne Neville, as a possible culprit?

After all, should anything happen to Richard a few years down the line, the by then near-adult Princes would be a big threat to their young son. And as the Kingmaker's daughter she had been through a frightful series of ups and downs, so might have acted first and stopped to ponder afterwards. And it would explain Richard's silence on the matter as, had the story come out, he would have had no way to clear himself.
 
Has anyone considered his Queen, Anne Neville, as a possible culprit?

After all, should anything happen to Richard a few years down the line, the by then near-adult Princes would be a big threat to their young son. And as the Kingmaker's daughter she had been through a frightful series of ups and downs, so might have acted first and stopped to ponder afterwards. And it would explain Richard's silence on the matter as, had the story come out, he would have had no way to clear himself.

I must admit that we know so little about Anne Neville that it is easy to project it onto her. However, my question is why could Anne not have given the order? Elizabeth Wydeville (with Warwick and Clarence), Margaret Beaufort (with Warbeck and Warwick) and Marguerite d'Anjou (with Richard, duke of York) did the same (whether directly or indirectly) to threats to their husband/son. None was a saint, yet Anne Neville, the Kingmaker's Daughter, sidesteps any role in it (outside of Philippa Gregory's imagination) when of EVERYBODY she would've seen how quickly a crown could be lost and you get traded to the winning side as a prisoner (much like the other 3 women).

She would've seen the prospect of a reignited round of the Cousins' War and probably acted pre-emptively. I don't think she was any more a saint than Marguerite d'Anjou or less a sinner than Margaret Beaufort. We simply DON'T know much about Anne, but to survive what she did and make it to be crowned queen she would've needed nerves of steel and ice in her veins IMO. She's not a Lady Macbeth ordering a murder in the name of ambition (she's already queen) she'd rather be ensuring her son's safety like any mother would've.
 
The British army of the 19th century was led by incompetents promoted based on chin size (the smaller the better) rather than actual talent.

Related: the generals of WW1 were all a bunch of incompetents obsessed with fighting the Napoleonic Wars.

The latter wasn't totally untrue. There were several thousand deaths after the Armistice had been signed, but before it came into effect. Several officers sought a last bit of glory storming positions from which the Germans had already agreed to withdraw. Some of these may have been due to delays in the news getting around, but by no means all.

What *is* mythical is the surprisingly widespread notion that this was a specifically British phenomenon. In fact, Americans and French were equally prone to it. The latter, indeed, avoided awkward questions by backdating all their 11/11 casualties to the previous day.
 
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What did chin size have to do with the quality of the soldiers? I know the duke of Cambridge wasn't interested in brains, but this is the first I hear about chins. Sorry for the dumb question
 
The latter wasn't totally untrue. There were several thousand deaths after the Armistice had been signed, but before it came into effect. Several officers sought a last bit of glory storming positions from which the Germans had already agreed to withdraw. Some of these may have been due to delays in the news getting around, but by no means all.

What *is* mythical is the surprisingly widespread notion that this was a specifically British phenomenon. In fact, Americans and French were equally prone to it. The latter, indeed, avoided awkward questions by backdating all their 11/11 casualties to the previous day.

The death tolls racked up by generals such as Luigi Cadorna (Italy), Conrad von Hötzendorf (Austro-Hungary}, Erich von Falkenhayn (Germany) and Enver Pasha (Ottoman Empire), to name but a few, certainly illustrate that the phenomenom was universal.
 
It's not a mystery that what most people believe about a certain topic isn't necessarily true and about Dark Legends there're a lot of commonplaces that are regarded as "pure gold".
I'd like to have a list of them to help me and anyone else who is interested in Actual and/or Alternate History. I hope you'll help me with your ideas 'cause I know I'm not perfect and I may be victim of some of this Legends too.
I'll start with the most famous ones:
- Christianity caused the end of Rome.
- The Vikings were uncivilized savages.
- The Mongols were uncivilized savages.
- The Renaissance started only after (and because) Costantinople was conquered in 1453.
- The Inquisition burned millions (According to someone even trillions!) of innocent witches/heretics.
- Nobody before Columbus knew there was anything on the other side of the Atlantic.
- Spanish Dark Legend (The one that gave me inspiration.):
- - Military:
- - - Spanish army was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.
- - - Spanish navy was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.
- - Economy:
- - - There were no banks in Spain before 1700.


Columbus' critics opposed his plan because they believed that the world was flat.

In fact, they not only knew it was round, but had a far more realistic estimate of its size (Columbus assumed it was about half its actual diameter), so realised that going to the Indies by sailing west would be an impossibly long voyage. But since Columbus fortuitously discovered something he wasn't looking for, they have lived in ignominy as a bunch of ignoramuses who believed in a flat earth.
 
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