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Medieval war barbarity

Source: TW

You don’t know much about the 10th century or that general time period if you think the Vikings were somehow different.

William the Conqueror’s harrowing of the North for example.

Warfare in general was aimed at people and resources. Quick gains and quick destruction.

Crops pillaged. Houses and barns burned. Captives taken, bystanders scattered and killed. The stuff that went on regularly at the English Scottish border makes the vikings look like a bunch of secular humanists.

You can look at any place really. Carolingian wars commonly entailed slaughter of local populations as examples or just because, and of course pillaging and looting was the norm. Enslaving people. The Frankish wars among themselves had villages and towns burned .

Pepin the Short massacred and enslaved the population of Frisia. Carloman wiped out the Alamanni via treachery, killing all the leading families off in a slaughter of thousands. Charlemagne had every Saxon taller than his sword killed, according to some chronicles.

The campaigns against the Lombards and in Spain were also very violent affairs with all the same stuff I mentioned before. Looting, pillaging, burning, killing people and taking captives.

But the difference is these guys had mostly favorable biographers.

All this time the Franks were regularly hitting Slavic peoples with raids meant to plunder and take slaves. Many slaves ended up in Islamic Spain, some became slave soldiers and powerful political players(a famous Muslim general was a Slav sold there to Muslims)

I could come up with countless examples. Edward I campaigning in Scotland and Wales perpetrated many local massacres. Sometimes as fear and reprisal and sometimes beyond his control. The northern crusades saw entire populations like the old Prussians wiped out.

The Teutonic knights carried out regular raids for captives, plunder, and terror. They even attacked orthodox Christian Russians.

Crusader massacres all over the middle east too. Some particular cruel acts were done by crusaders, mostly French, in the leadup to the disaster at Nikopolis against the Ottomans. By cruel, I mean torturing prisoners and random Muslims to death. Killing everyone they found.