Melondy Phillips
Staff Writer
Wars are nothing new under the sun. They have been the beginning and the end of many civilizations throughout time. Anger, fighting, death, and pure survival instincts give way to the birth of a new society, whether it is good or bad. Still today, wars, and rumors of wars, are often talked about on the news and in social media. Multiple wars and battles, of all kinds, are ever present around the world at any given moment. Here are a few of the past wars record-ed through history.
• 184 AD – 280 AD – The Three Kingdoms: Rebels rose up against tyranny as three warlords fought for ultimate power in China. About 36-40 million deaths were attributed to the time known as the Yellow Turban Rebellion and Age of the Three Kingdoms.
• 235 – 284 – Military Anarchy or the Imperial Crisis: The Roman Empire nearly collapsed as they were bombarded with invasions, wars, plagues, power corruption, political instability, financial collapse, and losing support from their foreign territories (which were becoming more independent). Although not much information was recorded about the death toll of these events, the crisis did manifest major changes in most of the internal workings of the empire.
• 376 – The Huns: “In the late 4th century, the Huns began to invade the lands of the Germanic tribes and pushed many of them into the Roman Empire with greater fervor. In 376, the Huns forced many Therving Goths, led by Fritigern and Alavivus, to seek refuge in the Eastern Roman Empire. Soon after, starvation, high taxes, hatred from the Roman population, and governmental corruption turned the Goths against the empire. The Goths rebelled and began looting and pillaging throughout.” wikipedia.org
Number of deaths is unknown.
• 410 – Barbarians sacked Rome: A ripple effect, from the Huns invading the Germanic tribes years before, was one of the major causes of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. “Pelagius, a Roman monk from Britain, survived the siege and wrote an account of the experience in a letter to a young woman named Demetrias.
“This dismal calamity is but just over, and you yourself are a witness to how Rome that commanded the world was astonished at the alarm of the Gothic trumpet, when that barbarous and victorious nation stormed her walls, and made her way through the breach. Where were then the privileges of birth, and the distinctions of quality? Were not all ranks and degrees leveled at that time and promiscuously huddled together? Every house was then a scene of misery, and equally filled with grief and confusion. The slave and the man of quality were in the same circumstances, and everywhere the terror of death and slaughter was the same, unless we may say the fright made the greatest impression on those who had the greatest interest in living.” wikipedia.org
• 1206 – 1405 – The Mongol Invasions: Starting with Genghis Khan (meaning Universal Ruler) the onslaught rolled through Central Asia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Transylvania and the Caucasus, covering much of the Asia continent. The Mongol even began encroaching into parts of the Arctic. Some experts estimate that the death toll of around 40-50 million people, which was around 10 percent for the world’s population at the time.
• 1337 – 1453 – The Hundred Years War in France: Conflicts between France and England arose over two main issues: who was the legitimate successor to the French crown and the French feudal sovereignty over Aquitaine. By the end of the war, the population had been reduced to about one half of what it had been when the war started. Although the active warring between the two countries did finally come to a halt, a formal peace treaty was never adopted.
• 1644 – The collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty and the Thirty Years’ War in Europe: Once again, there was crop failure, floods and an epidemic. To top it off, there were also several long-term causes embedded in its structure, which had eroded the government to the point of collapse. The Chinese capital at Beijing was captured by the rebel leader Li Zicheng. Desperate, Ming dynasty officials called on the Manchus for aid. The Manchus took advantage of the opportunity to seize the capital and establish their own dynasty in China. An estimated 25 million people died during the Manchu conquest of the Ming Dynasty; a mid-20th century equivalent of 112 million deaths.
• 1850 – 1864 – The Taiping Rebellion: A radical political and religious upheaval irrevocably altered the Qing dynasty in China. This transition cost the lives of 18-to-20 million people.
• 1861 – 1865 – Civil War: April 6–7, 1862, was considered the bloodiest battle on the American continent up to that time. On the single day of September 17, 1862, more than 23,000 men on both the Union and Confederate sides were killed, wounded or missing in action. An estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers, plus an unknown number of civilians, perished during the Civil War. History.com states, “But in 2011, demographic historian Dr. J. David Hacker published A Census-Based Count of Civil War Dead, in the scholarly quarterly, Civil War History, reporting that his in-depth study of recently digitized census data concluded that a more accurate estimate of Civil War deaths is about 750,000, with a range from 650,000 to as many as 850,000 dead.”
• 1914 – 1918 – World War I: Approximately nine-to-15 million deaths are attributed to World War I.
• 1937 – 1945 – The Second Sino-Japanese War: a cost of nearly 20 million lives, mostly Chinese civilians
• 1939 – 1945 – The Second World War: best estimates put the death toll number at 50-to-85 million people
• 1944 – The height of the Holocaust: The dramatic change in German politics that would eventually lead to attempted genocide beginning January 30, 1933, with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor. By 1941, German leaders decided to carry out the systematic mass murder of Jews. Estimates of six million Jews, plus nearly that many non-Jews, killed during the Holocaust.
• 1945 – 1991 – The Cold War: (1958 – 62 – The Cuban Missile Crisis) Many years of great tension as the thought of a Nuclear War was always impending. A person’s health and way they live can be greatly impacted when enmeshed with an ever-lingering threat.
As of the day of this writing, the Geneva Academy is monitoring more than 110 armed conflicts worldwide, several considered “major wars” due to the death toll.
