- Joined
- Oct 19, 2019
This is just plain wrong. Campaigns of deliberate extermination were bread and butter in medieval Europe. Just off the top of my head there was the anglo-saxon extermination of the norse settlers, Richard the Lionheart's 'harrying of the north', Charlemagne's exterminations of the Saxons, the campaigns of extermination around English Gascoigne in the 100 years war, the French extermination of Occitans in the Albigensian crusade, the Flemish extermination of the French in the Bruges Matins, Vlad Tepes' extermination of Muslims in Bulgaria and Wallachia, the extermination of pagans in baltic crusades, the extermination of conversos as a demographic in Spain, the uncountable mass killings and entire major cities being deleted during the thirty years war, and hundreds of Jewish pogroms in major cities all over Europe, all throughout the period.Massive systematic genocide is very unusual, especially those cases where all the killing happened in a few years or even months in the case of Rwanda. If you look at the mediaeval pariod in Europe for example there was a lot of fighting but it was mostly pretty small scale and didn't involve flat out extermination except when the Mongols and Timurids got involved. The Crusaders killed a load of people when they sacked Jerusalem, but that was unusually bloody and most of the time captives just got enslaved or sold for ransom instead.
There are entire textbooks dedicated to European medieval genocide, and it was absolutely as massive and systemic as the people of the times could manage.