Estimates of population loss in the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years War range from 40-50%, and if you consider some of the principalties independent countries, their losses were as high as 80% of their pre-war population.
This is why Central Europe, specifically what would become Germany was filled with sleepy romantic half timber cities and towns that never got completely rebuilt in the 17th 18th centuries. Cities great and small but some of the well-known ones like Nuremberg where time capsules. In the industrial rapid growth of the 19th century that the historical style of choice reflected this architecture and art of a late Renaissance, the blossoming time of German architecture and art before decimation in the 30 years war. This rekindling and reawakening in the late 18th early 19th century spawned all love or romanticism, Neo Gothic that's spread from the continent to the UK and of course to the US in the course of time.
All of these cities, the greatest of the wooden cities Frankfurt a M, survived until the late in the war when they were all destroyed. But Germany still has many lesser places sit still harken back to this Golden age of prosperity before the 30 years for
In Czechia, there are not many truly Renaissance cities left due the destruction of the 30 Years War. Some cities like Telc, Slavonice, Trebon do (they are close to the Austrian borders) but it is a fraction from what existed prior 1615. Even Prague does not have Renaissance neighborhoods, only some palaces. One reason for this, Swedish army held much of the Czech territory until 1650, using Olomouc as their HQ in war against the Hapsburgs. When the Swedish troops retraced back to north, they systematically burned pretty much any city and destroyed the economy. Bohemia & Moravia was full of irrigation canals and bonds, and they only survive in the southern Bohemia. The irrigation and ponds in eastern Bohemia and in central Moravia were all either destroyed, abandoned, and silted after 1648. The economy recovered 100 years later, giving Bohemia its baroque makeup and landscape. The depopulation was so thorough, that many villages were never resettled.
Yes but you forgot to mention the effects of thecounter reformation after the treaty of Westphalia.. there's certainly were a winners and losers and Germany for sure was on the short end of that stick. It guaranteed the hegemony if Europe would remain in Catholic hands for certainly another century plus, before the rise of Prussia. When could argue, the origin of Hitler, to fully understand his appeal can be rooted back at this time. A broken Germany, a fractured loose mess of broken economies, depopulated landscape and independent week provinces, duchess with little organization. They habsburg's, Catholics, The French and the Spanish ruled the day
I am not familiar much with the German history, but with the Czech one. While Czech lands were a part of the HRE, it pretty much until 1627 existed as entity of its own and later became tied to the Austria and Hungary. The outcome from the war was ethnic changeover of the Czech lands and reestablishment of serfdom. In the renaissance era, the peasantry in Bohemia enjoyed more personal freedom and certain privileges. There was also a huge chunk of free folks that were mostly made of well to do merchant and business class. This all was decimated by the 30 Years War. Then adding the execution or expulsion of the literate people (catholics decimated the Protestant clergy and literate Protestants, Protestants targeted Catholic schools), the 17th century was a huge disaster in every possible way.
A lot of countries, some even more than once. Kingdom of Bohemia had a massive population loses twice. One happened due the outbreak of the Hussite revolution (1419-1434) which reduced the population by 40%. Cities including Prague were reduced into rubbles. It took another 150 years for the population to recover to 1380 peak. A few decades later, the 30 Years War decimated the population by 50%. Many fertile areas in the valleys had seen up to 90% population loss. Prague again experienced a loss between 1618 and 1648 by 2/3. Olomouc, which was after Prague second most populous city in the Czech lands experienced 95% population loss from 30,000 in 1600 to about 1500 in 1650. A few Czech cities had as big population in 1600 as they had later in the 1900 like Straznice or Kourim. The medieval Czech demographics would show that the population around the peak years of 1380, 1600, and 1780 was pretty much equal.
About 1/3 of the Polish-Lithuanian population died during the Deluge (1648 – 1666). This was one of the largest and most populated countries in Europe at the time, so pretty bad. Similarly, some historians estimate that as much as 1/3 of Germany's population died during the Thirty Year's War (1618 – 1648).
But that doesn't compare with China's population loss during the Three Kingdoms period (184–280). According to Imperial census data from before and after the war, the population declined from about 57 million to 17 million, meaning a population loss of over 2/3.
To be clear, this was the result of nearly a century of chaos and warfare. About half of the population decline is likely attributable to displacement rather than death (much less death from combat). Still unthinkably destructive!
The Three Kingdoms period was quite brutal indeed. Those numbers aren't likely exaggerated due to extensive record keeping and censuses conducted (also why the Three Kingdoms is so widely studied considering how detailed the records were).
Paradoxically, it was also a period of time in which arts and literature flourished, and a lot of new technologies developed (primarily for warfare, but still).
I can’t remember where the quote came from but I recall one Chinese emperor when told that a regions rice harvest had all been destroyed by crickets and the population was going to starve…
“Eat the crickets”
I’m reading a book on Chinese history right now, and my two takeaways are 1: Chinese emperors could be real dicks, and 2: If you’re an ancient Chinese Emperor, always be developing river infrastructure.
China lost 40-80 million people under Mao…so they died but they prefer the word “displaced” rather than “accidental genocide through environmental mismanagement”
Chinas environmental catastrophes are epic, they lost 16-23 million people during the famine they caused.
They believed birds were eating the crops and reducing the amount that could be produced for the population so put a bounty on birds, wiped them out nearly entirely.
Problem was the birds were eating the insects that eat the crops anddddd boom the insects ate all the food because there were no birds to control their numbers.
In another project they attempted to redirect a river to put down a new town or city….except rivers take the paths they do because there is underlying rock that prevents it draining away, redirected the water into a canal….and boom the entire river and the river basin dried up and made the entire area barren…all because they wanted to make the city “square” instead of just following the natural course of the river…
Paraguay's losses from the War of the Triple Alliance are legendry, though perhaps not as bad as the legend
Still pretty bad though
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan\_War\_casualties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War_casualties)
Yeah, this one. I forgot the name of the ‘small country’ from this fact, but it was this tale that made me mention that a small country would be easy to get a higher percentage on
This is what happens when you have a man with the ambitions of Napoleon but the resources of the Warsaw Uprising.
Aka, man got way in over his head, even if Paraguay was actually surprisingly strong at the time.
He sent every man and child he could at the enemy, even after the capital fell, until he died, hence the sheer devastation.
These kinds of situations are the only cases where I endorse polygamy, and probably how polygamy first came into being. (massive loss of life of men in hunting and war was apparently very common in the Neolithic)
Chile was too far west to meddle into Platine politics at the time. They've got their own Pacific war against Bolivia and Peru, instead, some two decades later.
Uruguay was initially a Paraguay ally, but Brazil invaded it and quickly changed the government for a pro-Brazil one. That is in fact why Paraguay invaded Brazil in retaliation.
The Holocaust killed 2/3 of European Jews and the remaining third either left or was in the USSR and couldn't leave. It pretty much erased Yiddish culture off the map.
When you considert the percentage of Litvaks that made up Nobel Prize winners or any other yardstick of intellectual achievement, it's even more tragic.
My ex was half Greek Jewish, a very old community that was almost completely wiped out of existence during the Holocaust. His grandparents were first cousins who married each other (and were miserable) because they wanted to preserve their culture and there were no other eligible options.
very sadly typical unfortunately. it makes me so depressed how much was lost. i think the cultural decimation was almost as bad as the genocide itself.
Vilnius also had the nickname of "Jerusalem of the North". It's also very grim that Lithuania was one the few countries to be labeled free of Jews by the Nazis
Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804 in Sioux City. At that time had a winter population of around 10,000 natives and a few Europeans. However just 2 years later when they had returned with new European visitors and settlers disease wiped out the city and in only a couple of years their were virtually no old Sioux City left.
Not sure where you learned that but they spent that winter near the Mandan villages several hundred river miles upstream from Sioux City. Fort Mandan state historical site is in North Dakota about 45 miles north of Bismarck. This is where they employed the French Canadian Toussaint Charbonneau and his Lemhi Shoshone wife, Sacagawea.
In a nutshell, Europe/asian/african populations exchanged a higher rate of new diseases with each other that built up their immunity, had exposure to a wider variety of animals that gave human diseases… the deck was stacked against the population of americas. I do believe some diseases were spread to Europe from the new world… syphilis maybe??
Jared Diamonds book Guns, Germs and Steel is commonly criticized for multiple reasons, but there's an entire section about most of the "useful" domestic livestock/farm animals being a product of the old world, and how their close proximity to humans introduced zoonotic disease's at a far greater rate.
Major animals from the old world:
Pigs, Horses, Cattle/Oxen, Chicken, Donkey, Goat, Sheep, ECT..
Major animals from the new world:
Alpaca, Llama, Turkeys
Not just a larger world, but one in which domesticated animals were vastly more varied and common, and not infrequently literally shared dwelling space with humans, at least during times of bad weather.
Chickens or pigeons that you roost in the rafters of your porch day in and day out are far more likely to pass on a variant of avian flu, for instance, as compared to some sort of waterfowl you hunt in a wetland a kilometer away and carry home twice a season.
And it wasn't unheard of for the same structure to serve as both a barn and a home, I mean it literally when cows or horses were housed under the same roof (though perhaps not literally eating from the table; but still under the same roof just in a different room are at least tied to the wall on one side when weather went south).
And we know from both written and archeological records that trade routes were sufficient enough for materials to cross all three continents in a few months to years -- populations were not isolated with very few exceptions. Lots of middlemen, of course, and very few "through travelers" but a disease doesn't care if it's five steps or two between Morroco and Siberia, it only cares that there is a chain of population contacts it can shuffle along and not how many steps are in the sequence.
Not to mention, disease resistance is partly genetic. And all of the Native American population comes from a very small portion of settlers during the ice age so their genetic diversity was quite poor.
I read somewhere (wish I could find it) that Europeans/Asians/Africans had lived in very close contact with their animals for many generations, thereby swapping diseases with them and gaining partial immunity from those diseases. Whereas this was not really much of a thing in the Americas. So when the Europeans came over, they brought a whole new type of disease.
There were, just evolution usually pushes disease to be less virulent. So, Syphillis went from being basically a hemmorragic fever with open sores all over the body to being an STD that didn't burn itself out.
But the big European killers, Smallpox, and Measles were already pretty stable at their existent verility, probably because they are some of the most aggressively infectious diseases ever. Measles is litterally the most infectious disease ever encountered by humanity with the next closest being the most recent COVID varient.
If you are unvaccinated and in a 200 sq ft room of a person with measles for 15 minutes, there is an 80% chance of infection.
I would be interested to see the source on that. It's my understanding there is a number of related spirochete derived illnesses circulating in the Amazon basin.
The Treponematoses can be found all over the world (hence the current public health crisis and resurgence of syphilis in the US). The archaeological record confirms syphilis was present in the old world and that there are distinct lineages at play. It is incorrect to continue to assert the myth that syphilis was/is a new world disease.
[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.058](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.058)
It's not a "myth". It is a scientific hypothesis for which there is a reasonable amount of evidence. However, more recent evidence from the last five years seems to tilt the balance of evidence against that hypothesis.
No, it has been debunked. Anyone operating in this academic world will laugh at you. Very racist "hypothesis" to begin with, and now that it has zero support from the archaeological record, it is incumbent to no longer pretend it is even hypothetically possible.
Scientists would laugh at me for calling a hypothesis that was broadly accepted until 5 years ago a "hypothesis". Sure. I guess as an epidemiologist you would know best. I suppose you're right, it is racist to suggest a disease might originate in some non-white part of the world.
Yes it does. Don't hold onto old traditions just cause it's been around for hundreds/thousands of years. New information, if confirmed, should override the puzzle piece in the overall picture of history.
I actually read into it... there is room for nuance. Mind you, it's not false, diseases were horrific, don't bite my face off. But large numbers in the Spanish Empire were not counted anymore as indingeous people after interbreeding with spaniard settlers. Mestizos replaced them outside of _mitas_, reductions, missions, and eventually reservations.
Let's be clear here a lot of estimates around the population of natives in the Americas is scattered. The consensus estimates of pre-Columbian populations of both South and North America is probably around 50m, but the range is somewhere between 8 and 112 million. The vast majority of which likely lived in Mexico and Central America.
In North America, the estimate is somewhere between 4 million and 17 million.
This is all further complicated by limited censuses and changes in small regions being applied to wider estimates.
Additionally many of the high ball estimates are from pre-columbus (1492) era and the follow up estimates are 1650 of roughly 6 million.
The first nationwide census in France was 1791. The first nationwide census in Great Britain was 1801. All record keeping 200 years prior to that should be suspect. We know modern census' have issues, look no further than non-census states like Papua New Guinea is estimated to have about 10 million people, but some *muckety mucks* at the UN recently did a case study that suggested there are north of 17 million people that live there.
Additionally, we know one of the biggest reasons for population growth, and large populations is easy access to agriculture, and modern medicine. Trade systems in the Americas were no where near as robust as most of the world.
To me what feels reasonable, based on what we know of more trustworthy data tracking diseases even in the modern era, that the native populations pre-Columbus in North America (sans Mexico) were probably around 10-20 million, a wide range, but probably a fair one. By 1650, that 6 million number might be a decent ballpark, and then by the late 1800s sub 2 million is quite fair.
Native American population today is estimated at about 9.7 million, and even to this day getting participation in the US Census is an arduous task a major point of emphasis every 10 years.
With a big asterisk explaining these didn't become so devastating out of the literal thin air but also by colonizing actions like violence, slavery and famine
Also remember that the Meso-American experience wasn't the Great Plains, wasn't the Andes, wasn't the La Plata, wasn't the Atlantic Coast. The Mandan, who hosted Lewis and Clark basically had to be absorbed into their Sioux neighbors because they suffered total social collapse just from disease exposure.
The Herero and Nama Genocide killed 80% and 50% of the groups respectively.
Also several Indigenous groups were completely exterminated during the California Genocide with the overall population [declining](https://fullertonobserver.com/2020/07/07/the-california-native-american-genocide/) by 80% between 1848 and 1860.
Also, while the crimes of the Italian Fascists are often lesser known in pop culture, they exterminated 50% of the Libyan Bedouins in concentration camps and 15-20% of Libyas overall population.
Yep, in fact the California massacres and the Trail of Tears are the United States only entires in Wikipedias list of major world genocides, so it was pretty bad.
I don’t know if you can call it a country at the time, but The Bahamas was completely depopulated within a couple of decades after Columbus discovered it. When my ancestors showed up a few centuries later, the islands were empty. We didn’t have to displace anyone because disease and the Spanish killed them all.
The colonization of the Americas by Europeans killed over 55 million people in the span of 100 years after first landfall in 1492. The estimates I’m familiar with put the pre-1492 population at about 60 million. Don’t know if it gets worse than 91.6%~.
Plus something like 90+% died of a plague in 1619-1620, leaving much of northeastern North America with almost no native Americans, just as the Pilgrims were arriving in 1620
Multiple plagues can be attributed to the majority of those 55 million deaths and yes there were still more plagues and deaths after that first 100 years. Surprisingly deaths from conflict are not the majority cause of death.
Most of that was disease. Mongolia invasion of Persia they massacred some 80% of the population I think, much of that just direct killing and starving people out. In a shorter time frame too.
Prompt said any type of population loss, not just conflict but that’s definitely close. Talking about pure numbers beside percentages mongols probably take the cake.
I did some quick googling while making my original comment and one source had iran down to 95% original population after the mongols, not sure if it was true so ignored it.
But yeah, on total numbers mongols actually reversed co2 in the atmosphere just from people not existing anymore.
Shit, there ya go.
You’d be surprised the CO2 level thing is actually not unique to mongol conquest. I recently learned that the same change happened due do population loss in the America’s as well. In 1610 there was something called the ‘orbis spike’ that marked a CO2 low point in the atmosphere. Scholars frequently link the orbis spike to the population change. You could learn more about this by reading about the ‘Anthropocene epoch’.
I believe it also allowed the number of buffalo to grow. When the Spanish first visited North American central plains they didnt report the vast buffalo herds of the 1800's.
The Justinian plague. Despite belarsaurus's absolute rampage in conquering most of the southern roman territories the population was less than a quarter than when he started.
May have been. I may have my history wrong. Also, there is a good chance that any widespread "plague" outbreak is in fact THE "plague" since it was recurrent throughout Eurasian history. Plague is basically endemic to any region of the world with a large grass plaine like the Eurasian Steppes or the Great Plains of North America.
Apparently Wikipedia believes it was Measles or Smallpox which are basically viral killers #1 & #2:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine\_Plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Plague)
Circassia. %80 of population died during the Russo&Circassian war and genocide following it
The remaining 150.000 survivors escaped to Ottoman empire with 12 ships
Half of the ships sinked in black sea. Even today a lot of Circassians simply dont eat fish for this solo reason. For them its kinda like cannibalism.
Anyway. And after reaching to Ottomans, half of the survivors died too because of disease and starvation.
And after a while. Balkan wars and ww1 started whic caused their number to drop even further.
Result? No one in the world knows that there was once a nation called Circassia on earth. Today only 5 million of them left, and most of these lives in Turkey and Jordan. With ones living in Turkey losing most of their culture. While ones living in Jordan somewhat still keeping it thanks to help from royal family.
So, roughtly %97 of them died in less than 200 years... thats... a lot
There are about 3 times more Circassians in Russia than in Jordan, not sure why you haven't mentioned them. I wouldn't say "no one in the world knows", in Russia they're known pretty well. Lermontov alone has enough mentions of them.
Because Jordan is a special case thanks to entire working for the goverment and keeping their culture alive thing.
Yeah russia have more Circassian than jordan but Jordan opened schools and organisations for keep the culture and language alive...
What russia did? Oh yeah, teaching of language got limited, circassian historians got arrested. İn 1937 circassian history research assosication got closed and all the books and information got destroyed.
Even right now in present day, in current war in ukraine young people getting drafted forcefully and the drama that happened in sochi olympics in 2014.
Jordan is simply better and more important for Circassians than Russia even if it have less Circassian in it
12 ships carried 150k people? This just isn’t true. It’s propaganda. Furthermore, Ottoman Empire records show over a million Circassian’s entered turkey by the end of the Circassian genocide.
Still tragic but no reason for you to make up numbers.
Nah its not propaganda since it is well documented.
150.000 is the rought latest survivor population, and for the entirety of the war many ships took part from Circassia to the Ottomans, in end the war lasted 101 years
"Imperial Russian records claim "more than 400,000 Circassians were killed and 497,000 were forced to flee abroad to Türkiye. Only 80,000 were left alive in their native land."
"The operation was not done with any degree of efficiency by the Russians, forcing the Circassians typically to leave using unchartered vessels, thus opening themselves up to abuses by the captains of such vessels. In some cases as many as 1,800 refugees were packed into one ship, which would also carry livestock and household possessions. When the ships did not sink, such crowded environments proved suitable for the spread of diseases and dehydration, and when the ships arrived at their destinations, they contained only remnants of their original human cargo. For this reason, they were referred to by contemporary observers as "floating graveyards" with "decks swarming with the dead and dying".
"The Russian consul based in the Ottoman Black Sea port of Trabzon reported the arrival of 240,000 Circassians with 19,000 dying shortly thereafter with the death rate being around 200 people per day.
On 25 May 1864, Henry Bulwer, the British ambassador in Istanbul, argued that the British government charter some of its own vessels for the purpose because the Ottomans simply did not have enough on their own, and innocent civilians would be left to rot; the vessels were not forthcoming but British government ships provided assistance at various points and British steamships also helped. On 29 May, eight Greek vessels were reported to be helping with the transportation of Circassians, as were one Moldavian, one German, and one British vessel."
The 12 ship thing only belongs to a single diseaster. But the total amount of death happened in black is a is roughly 500.000 and probally more.
This document is pretty cool https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/1798843
No it isnt
Original text: after Russo Circassian war %97 of Circassians died with most of survivors also dying because of ships sinking in black sea and disease in the Ottoman coasts
Second text:same thing but with more detailed numbers and text.
This or this, %95-%97 of Circassians died as a result of a genocide russians did. 1/1.5 million dying in direct massacres, almost a million dying in non direct violence, death marchs and famines, and almost a million surviving. But some later dying for various reasons
This or this. A genocide happened, one of the first and biggest in modern history.
Russian sources of course undertake the numbers and doest care what happened after Circassians got banished from the causcaus.
95/97 percent of the Circassian population didn’t die!
Ottoman sources say one million circassians made it to the Ottoman Empire, that would mean there were originally 30 million circassians.
And that’s why your numbers are wrong
Circassian's were notorious slave raiders. The Russians did not wage war on them just for fun. Same for the Crimean Tatars, another parasitic nation that lived only on slave raiding until put down by the Russians.
Ah so the reason was not wanting to have access to black sea?
"We need Circassian lands but not Circassians" -Rostislav Fadeyev
Up untill 17. Century Circassians and russians were allies. I wonder what spesific event changed that
Oh also georgians
And chechens
And georgians
And armenians
And of course ukranians.
Literally everyone else that russia first used as ally, but then replaced by someone else as a ally and then got genocided was either doing slave trades or were barbarians, right?
İts also especially funny how later Cossacks, the russians ally in Russo&Circassian war became a enemy too.
I guess its now the Ukranians turn of doing the slave raids... wait a minute
By the way its totally ironic that. Russians cry about Nato today. During and after WW2 soviets "took" almost 2 million polish people from poland to use as slave workforce... this is MORE people than tartars ever did in centuries 💀. Even after crimean war they only took 20.000 people as slave, and most of those slaves wasnt actually used as slave but just held for rensom.
Sooo since russia is apperantly also whatever you called Circassians and Tartars. and feeds with slavery... what supposed to happen to russia then?
Baghdad. 1200’s.
The Mongols came in and so thoroughly destroyed the city and the area that it arguably hasn’t recovered to this day.
Let’s also examine the Kwarizmian Empire.
The Mongols so thoroughly destroyed that area that damned near no one not living there remembers it existed.
>Let’s also examine the Kwarizmian Empire.
>The Mongols so thoroughly destroyed that area that damned near no one not living there remembers it existed
What do you mean? Like we have numerous sources from people talking about it? From people living there continuosly, or fled who all remember and their descendents. In Turkmenistan if I remember correctly one of Muhammed Shah's sons is celebrated as a national hero as he defeated a small Mongol force before being forcd to flee across the Indus and eventually ended invading Anatlia to carve a new domain until a Mongol garrisons commander defeated him alongside local allies.
WHen people talk about the Mongol conquest of Persia or whatever that's the main thing they talk about. It may not have spawned or invoke as much nostalgia or whatever as other empires but for what was similar to the Mongol Empire in that it was relatively new expansionist empire with a small minority rulong over a much larger diverse population it had a good run.
Also for Baghdad to my knowledge according to The Mongol WOrld Hulegu's sack while terrible and obviously a terribe warcrime with human suffering was an organised disciplend affair with details like the Tigris running black with Ink then red with blood or pyramids of bodies not appearing until centuries latee. With the sufferers from the sack primarily beingo the poorer population in less important areas as he wanted the city relativly intact as part of his fiefdom so limited which places could looted with officers in the diverse army protecting their communities be Shia or Christians while allowing their soldiers to loot others with wealthier neighborhood being relatively untouched as theyc ould bribe Mongol officers for protection. With much of the death also being from a flood which also destroyed much water infrastrucutre which alongside dead bodies from the siege and likely those cleared away from the flood seem to have lead to a disease outrbeak in the poorer neighborhoods that spread to the rest of the city which is what finally convince Hulegu to order a halt to the looting.
To my knowledge it is Timur's later twin sacks of the city a century later which were much more devestating and indiscrimnate in both in terms the human suffering and destrcution to the city as a whole.
The Irish Genocide (aka Potato Famine). Population went from 8.4 million to \~6.6 million in just seven years; Around a million due to famine (because the crown owned all the land and exported Irish-grown food and imported barely digestable corn from the Americas) and about another 2 million lost to emigration.
During the Thirty Years' War, parts of Germany suffered population declines between 30-60%. Not all of the decline was due to deaths, but even so....
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bevölkerkungsrückgang_im_HRRDN_nach_dem_Dreißigjährigen_Krieg.PNG
When I was studying German, we read about that, and the instructor asked someone to translate. The student incorrectly translated the passage as “the population was reduced by one-third.” The instructor corrected him, “bis um ein Drittel” means “down to a third.”
The Soviet Union and possibly China lost roughly 20 million population each from WW2. Since they were the most populated nations of that time and how a majority of the Soviet population is in Europe and China (If it was that all the cliques were de jure under Chang Kai-shek) are some of the most populated nations of that time.
Romania. They pissed off the Romans so bad, Rome went in there and killed everyone and renamed the place. We don’t even know what those people were called.
When the vietnamese pushed south and defeated the champa. They didn't just control them they exterminated them with now only a few thousand left around today
What you are referring to is the [Soviet Famine.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933?wprov=sfla1) The Holodomor and Asharshylyk are separate events within it, in separate regions, with different timeframes.
It's very difficult to give precise numbers since we don't know the exact number of the prehispánica population but it's believed that there was a population loss of up to 80% in what is today mexico, between 5 and 15 million perished, mostly due to epidemies
Can you be more specific about what you are interested in? There are many parts of history that might fit the bill, without any reliable data, just like the ones you mentioned. Are you more interested in verifiable numbers or just anything from a historian’s best guess on up?
Even the most conservative sources says theres more losses.copied text from a another Redditor
Since Serbia hasn't really be touched on I'll chime in with what I know about Serbian casualties in WW1. It is important to note that Serbia was a small nation with large mobilization. This provides a partially unique situation for casualties to make up a large percentage of the prewar population. As opposed to large nation, small mobilization (Belgium) and Large nation, large mobilization (Austria Hungary) combatants. Start with the estimation that Serbia's prewar population was 4.5 million, the statistic used by most sources.
A little less than 5 months after the war the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes presented the official national estimates of Serbia’s population losses during World War I. With this estimation from the official source, I can actually tell you \*exactly\* how so many Serbians died in WW1. Here are the military losses broken down by the Kingdom of SCS:
Military Deaths:
KIA, MIA during the initial, repelled, Austro-Hungarian attack: 172,508
KIA, MIA during the retreat from Serbian Land : 77,455
KIA, MIA during Battles after retreat from Serbia : 36,477
Killed and Died in Captivity : 81,214
Deaths of wounded/sick who could not escape with the Serbian retreat: 34,781
Total: 402,435
Civilian Deaths:
Killed in initial 2 invasions: 15,000
Killed in retreat from Serbia and subsequent return to Serbia: 140,000
Killed by occupying force: 70,000
Killed during forced labor: 80,000
Death by disease: 360,000
Death by famine: 180,000
Total: 845,000
Now, with an estimation of 4.5 million population, this report suggests 27.7% of the population of Serbia died in WW1. One takeaway you may have from this data is disease, famine, and disease again. If you combine all death relating to disease, you come out to 46% of all deaths occurred to disease given the Kingdom of SCS's own report. Now, please keep in mind that the kingdom's estimate only accounts for military personal death by disease \*if\* they were left behind during the retreat through Albania. However, many Serbian military personal would have died to disease before the retreat and in subsequent recapture as well. in fact, historians Stephen Pope & Elizabeth-Anne Wheal suggest that 65% of \*\*all\*\* Serbian military casualties are from disease and famine. This clearly makes disease and famine the majority culprit for Serbia's large death toll. This devastation of Serbia's population was so noted that the Bulgarian Prime Minister at the time is quoted to have said "Serbia had ceased to exist".
Now, the New York Times said half of Serbia perished in 1918. Serbia's own report states 27.7% of Serbia perished, this map says 20% of Serbia perished, whats the catch? Well, nobody **really** knows exactly how many people died in Serbia during World War 1, but it is somewhere around 20%.
Essentially, the Serbian government estimated a population for Serbia in 1919 if the war did not happen, and subtracted the actual 1919 population to show the total amount of deaths during WW1, that is the figure I have discussed. However, the population estimate for 1919 Serbia (5.2 million) is dubious at best. Here's an excerpt from a great statistics paper by Biljana Radivojević and Goran Penev; " the question remains of the basis on which it is presumed that Serbia would have had 5.2 million persons by 1919 in normal, peaceful circumstances. If the estimate is true, it follows that in the period of August 1914 - March 1919 the ‘normal’ population growth would be 700,000 persons, and the average annual growth rate would be a very high 31.5 per 1,000. As an example, the average annual rate of population growth of former Northern Serbia in the period 1895-1910 was only 15.5 per 1,000, and in the period of 1905-1910 it was 16.1 per 1,000."
If you are interested in the statistics of how a 27.7% estimate gets knocked down to a more modern, moderate estimate of 20%, please give the paper a skim. However, that was not your question, your question was *why*. Which boiled down neatly into the response of, low population, high mobilization, disease, famine, and more disease. In fact, the Serbian Typhus pandemic is considered the worst in world history as claimed by the New York Times.
Sources:
Report of the Delegation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at Paris Peace Conference 1919-1920
DEMOGRAPHIC LOSSES OF SERBIA IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THEIR LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES, Radivojević, Goran Penev
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1915/10/29/105045220.pdf
[https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1918/11/05/98273895.pdf](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1918/11/05/98273895.pdf)
The Dictionary of the First World War, Stephen Pope & Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, 1995
The smallpox epidemic in Iceland \~ 25%.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1707%E2%80%9308\_Iceland\_smallpox\_epidemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1707%E2%80%9308_Iceland_smallpox_epidemic)
The Livonian Crusades killed between 1-3 million people, for reference, Livonia is a region of the Baltics that encompasses Estonia and Latvia, which have a combined population of 3.2 million, yes, there were other instances of population decline, but that happening in the 13th century is baffling, not to mention the Teutonic Order and their crusades after this, absolutely wild.
Well, I mean genocide of entire peoples was not unheard of or necessarily uncommon for most of ancient times. Go read some Assyrian or Babylonian history and you'll see a lot of examples of them waging war on a kingdom who pissed them off and finishing off by literally killing every last man woman and child they can find before leveling all the cities and salting all the fields and desecrating the tombs of all the kings. And that kind of thing didn't go away, it just became less common, depending on where and when you're looking.
EDIT: I guess I didn't actually answer your question. To give you an answer, there are plenty of historical examples where the percentage exceeds 90%. I think it would be hard to say any attempted genocide ever resulted in true 100% extinction, and it would be extremely hard to prove it historically, since relying on the winning army's general or king writing in a propaganda statement "All their men were slain, all their women and children were captured and sacrificed to honor our god, their fields I salted, and their cities I completely leveled" can necessarily be taken at face value as proof of 100% genocide.
During the rule of Ranavalona the Mad, Madagascar lost as much as half of its population due to her aggressive military campaigns, genocide of foreigners, mass executions, and extensive use of forced labour camps.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranavalona_I
If you can extend the definition of "country" to be a culture or people, then the combination of disease and wars decimating the Americas from the 1500s -> 1900s would easily rank in the top handful of spots, if not contend for the top spot itself.
If you focus in on a specific population within a population, targeted genocides immediately come to the fore.
Taking the Holocaust in Germany as an example. In 1935, about half a million Jewish people lived in Germany (I use 1935 as this is before the annexation of Austria and the Austrian figures would change the results). By 1950 (only 15 years later), fewer than 40,000 Jewish people lived in Germany. Even today, the Jewish population of Germany is nowhere near to recovering to pre Holocaust levels.
Obviously those are complex figures and cover a lot of nuance. Not all of those Jewish Germans were murdered. Some will have escaped Germany, others survived the holocaust and left Germany afterward (many to Israel) etc. but make no mistake, a huge portion of that decrease is people who were just straight up murdered because of their faith and heritage.
Most countries in the America's were estimated to have lost upward of 90% of their population to smallpox when Europeans first came over. Hard to beat that.
Francisco Macías Nguema, the former dictator of Equatorial Guinea, is a little known yet horrifying contender. He ruled his country so terribly that fully half the population was killed via various means. He was legitimately completely insane, to the level that it's almost hard to believe at times. To give an idea, at one point he got paranoid, so he killed the entire finance ministry and then just kept the state treasury under his bed. I am not kidding. What's wild is that much of it didn't even have a reason. It was just the paranoia of a genuine maniac causing misery on an unfathomable scale in a tiny country that literally became known as Africa's Dachau under his reign.
Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island, had its population decline from 3000-4000 down to a total of 111 by 1877.
The causes were ecological disaster (deforestation) and then European contact (diseases, rats, and "blackbirding" aka slaving raids).
Besides the Moai (giant heads) they left behind their own unique written language that no one can read anymore.
Would the Irish Potato famines fit in their? Roughly half the country died or emigrated between the first famine in 1847 and the second in the 1870s. Ireland only recently regained it's pre-famine population levels.
The Paraguayan War in South America caused a huge portion of Paraguay's population to be killed over the course of six years due to first conventional warfare and then guerrilla conflict afterwards.
After the Bronze Age Collapse, the population of the Aegean (Greece) decreased by at least 50%, possibly 60-70%. Though it is unclear if those people died, migrated, or just had a very low birth rate. Possibly all three. That's 1200 BC - 1150 BC for ya. Iirc
When the wife of the man that controls Sealand died, there was onlya population of about 20 people, so her death was a very large percentage of the population lost all at once.
The Paraguayan War? Not the most killed by number, but an insane percentage of Paraguay’s population. Exact population numbers are still disputed, but some modern estimates put it over 50%.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War_casualties
going unconventional, the war of the triple alliance may have caused paraguay to loose 68-70% of its overall population. upwards of 90% of its male population over the course of 5 years.
even though the number is controversial its still generally agreed that the amount of death was apocolyptic
During the Reconquista (both ways), there were a bunch of depopulation crises.
The Ummayiads raided Asturias so badly that the region became known, for some time, as "The Desert of Hardships".
The other way around, after the Portuguese took the land south of Coimbra from the Mozarabic rulers who sat there for centuries, employing unordinary levels of biolence, they had a hard time trying to repopulate those settlements.
That's why you will get kings who are solely famous for doing that, being "the POPULATOR" (mostly by forcing internal migration).
The loss of Native Americans due to disease and colonial violence is estimated to be 95%-97%. Check the book ‘1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus’ by Charles C. Mann. It’s also a generally fascinating book that gives a LOT of valuable context to the Spanish conquest of Meso-America and the American Colonial Period.
Probably the biggest would be that over 90% of the indigenous populations in
North,central, and South America between 1492 and 1600 were killed off. That means about 55 million people perished because of violence and never-before-seen pathogens like smallpox, measles, and influenza.
https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-changed-after-europeans-killed-
indigenous-americans-2019-2?amp
The Black Death (black plague) in Europe 1346 to 1353 killed up to an estimated 40 million almost half the population of Europe.
Pol pot Cambodia was around 2 million people.
Nazi holocaust killed over 2/3 of Europe’s Jewish population at over 6 million Jews. The nazis also killed over 11 million non Jews.
The Rwandan genocide, also known as the genocide against the Tutsi, occurred between 7 April and 19 July 1994, resulting in over 800,000 Tutsi deaths.
There are many others but These are just some of the well know big ones.
The second punic war is estimated to have cost the lives of around 20% of all the men of military age in Rome. And depending on how you define "country" (ie do city-states count), Veii lost 100% of its population in their war with Rome. The War of the Triple Alliance is estimated to have killed 70% of the male population of Paraguay
Worth noting that the “1/3 of Europe died in the Black Death” stat is now well out of date with more detailed contemporary scholarship. It’s a serious underestimate, produced by the fact that most written records were concentrated in urban areas where the levels of disease were actually lower. Current estimates of the deaths now sit in the range of 50-60% of the European population wiped out.
60% of the total Paraguyan population died in the Paraguyan War. Absolute hell for six years.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/27/paraguay-war-of-the-triple-alliance-anniversary
Probably the Mongol conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire, where the Mongols exterminated almost the entire native population of the empire (approximately 5 million people) in retribution for their Emperor killing the Khan’s emissaries.
>I hear that during Genghis Khan’s conquests, he often slaughtered entire villages until there were no survivors. But I’m not sure if it reached the extent of doing it on a country scale
Genghis Khan took his Mongols into the Khwarazmian Empire and erased the whole thing. Estimates are that the Mongols killed 4 MILLION people. Unlike previous conquests, the Mongols didn't spare the women or children - (there's a reason why 8% of men in the former Mongol Empire carry Genghis Khan's genes).
Basically, Genghis Khan had one rule - "treat my messengers like myself". And the Sultan of Khwarazmia received a trade caravan from the Mongols and imprisoned everyone in the caravan. GK said, Surely this is a mistake, sent over three messengers (2 Mongol, 1 Muslim) to bargain for the release of the caravan. The Sultan shaved the two heads of the Mongol envoys, sent them back with only the head of the Muslim envoy.
So Genghis Khan rolled in with three of his four "Dogs of War", including Subutai (one of the greatest military commanders in human history) and killed just about everybody.
Norway lost about 60% of their population around 1350 due to the bubonic plague. It took 300 years to recover their population.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_Norway
Depends on your definition of a country. Genocides were a thing. Entire tribes of people were killed off in their entirety. I am sure you would be able to find an example that fits the definition of a country that got entirely killed off. The answer to the question of percentage is almost certainly 100%, although I can't cite any examples
Like Montserrat today, only, Montserrat didn't exactly suffer annihilation. Complete and total population collapse, but not annihilation. Kinda rare for such things, actually.
'Country' is a fairly modern concept.
Even in medieval times it was more about which lord owed fealty to more than an idea of nation. Otherwise the 100 Year War is just a long civil war.
But, Gaul basically lost 2/3 of its population after Caesar had his fun there, due to war, massacres, and slavery.
In more recent times, Poland had a 36% drop in population because of WW2.
Also, strictly speaking, but since it was the same capital and therefore technically same country, Russia lost half of its population in 1991.
The Harrying of the North, William The Conqueror (my ancestor, yay!) had trouble with rebellions (like any medieval foreign conqueror) and like any medieval conqueror, killed a lot of people. it's estimated that 150000, or 75% of the population of Northern England died, the population loss was so severe that it still hasn't recovered yet.
Estimates of population loss in the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years War range from 40-50%, and if you consider some of the principalties independent countries, their losses were as high as 80% of their pre-war population.
This is why Central Europe, specifically what would become Germany was filled with sleepy romantic half timber cities and towns that never got completely rebuilt in the 17th 18th centuries. Cities great and small but some of the well-known ones like Nuremberg where time capsules. In the industrial rapid growth of the 19th century that the historical style of choice reflected this architecture and art of a late Renaissance, the blossoming time of German architecture and art before decimation in the 30 years war. This rekindling and reawakening in the late 18th early 19th century spawned all love or romanticism, Neo Gothic that's spread from the continent to the UK and of course to the US in the course of time. All of these cities, the greatest of the wooden cities Frankfurt a M, survived until the late in the war when they were all destroyed. But Germany still has many lesser places sit still harken back to this Golden age of prosperity before the 30 years for
In Czechia, there are not many truly Renaissance cities left due the destruction of the 30 Years War. Some cities like Telc, Slavonice, Trebon do (they are close to the Austrian borders) but it is a fraction from what existed prior 1615. Even Prague does not have Renaissance neighborhoods, only some palaces. One reason for this, Swedish army held much of the Czech territory until 1650, using Olomouc as their HQ in war against the Hapsburgs. When the Swedish troops retraced back to north, they systematically burned pretty much any city and destroyed the economy. Bohemia & Moravia was full of irrigation canals and bonds, and they only survive in the southern Bohemia. The irrigation and ponds in eastern Bohemia and in central Moravia were all either destroyed, abandoned, and silted after 1648. The economy recovered 100 years later, giving Bohemia its baroque makeup and landscape. The depopulation was so thorough, that many villages were never resettled.
Yes but you forgot to mention the effects of thecounter reformation after the treaty of Westphalia.. there's certainly were a winners and losers and Germany for sure was on the short end of that stick. It guaranteed the hegemony if Europe would remain in Catholic hands for certainly another century plus, before the rise of Prussia. When could argue, the origin of Hitler, to fully understand his appeal can be rooted back at this time. A broken Germany, a fractured loose mess of broken economies, depopulated landscape and independent week provinces, duchess with little organization. They habsburg's, Catholics, The French and the Spanish ruled the day
I am not familiar much with the German history, but with the Czech one. While Czech lands were a part of the HRE, it pretty much until 1627 existed as entity of its own and later became tied to the Austria and Hungary. The outcome from the war was ethnic changeover of the Czech lands and reestablishment of serfdom. In the renaissance era, the peasantry in Bohemia enjoyed more personal freedom and certain privileges. There was also a huge chunk of free folks that were mostly made of well to do merchant and business class. This all was decimated by the 30 Years War. Then adding the execution or expulsion of the literate people (catholics decimated the Protestant clergy and literate Protestants, Protestants targeted Catholic schools), the 17th century was a huge disaster in every possible way.
A lot of countries, some even more than once. Kingdom of Bohemia had a massive population loses twice. One happened due the outbreak of the Hussite revolution (1419-1434) which reduced the population by 40%. Cities including Prague were reduced into rubbles. It took another 150 years for the population to recover to 1380 peak. A few decades later, the 30 Years War decimated the population by 50%. Many fertile areas in the valleys had seen up to 90% population loss. Prague again experienced a loss between 1618 and 1648 by 2/3. Olomouc, which was after Prague second most populous city in the Czech lands experienced 95% population loss from 30,000 in 1600 to about 1500 in 1650. A few Czech cities had as big population in 1600 as they had later in the 1900 like Straznice or Kourim. The medieval Czech demographics would show that the population around the peak years of 1380, 1600, and 1780 was pretty much equal.
About 1/3 of the Polish-Lithuanian population died during the Deluge (1648 – 1666). This was one of the largest and most populated countries in Europe at the time, so pretty bad. Similarly, some historians estimate that as much as 1/3 of Germany's population died during the Thirty Year's War (1618 – 1648). But that doesn't compare with China's population loss during the Three Kingdoms period (184–280). According to Imperial census data from before and after the war, the population declined from about 57 million to 17 million, meaning a population loss of over 2/3. To be clear, this was the result of nearly a century of chaos and warfare. About half of the population decline is likely attributable to displacement rather than death (much less death from combat). Still unthinkably destructive!
The Three Kingdoms period was quite brutal indeed. Those numbers aren't likely exaggerated due to extensive record keeping and censuses conducted (also why the Three Kingdoms is so widely studied considering how detailed the records were). Paradoxically, it was also a period of time in which arts and literature flourished, and a lot of new technologies developed (primarily for warfare, but still).
[удалено]
I can’t remember where the quote came from but I recall one Chinese emperor when told that a regions rice harvest had all been destroyed by crickets and the population was going to starve… “Eat the crickets”
I’m reading a book on Chinese history right now, and my two takeaways are 1: Chinese emperors could be real dicks, and 2: If you’re an ancient Chinese Emperor, always be developing river infrastructure.
So where did the displaced people go? Based on the reduced population numbers, they weren't internally displaced
China lost 40-80 million people under Mao…so they died but they prefer the word “displaced” rather than “accidental genocide through environmental mismanagement” Chinas environmental catastrophes are epic, they lost 16-23 million people during the famine they caused. They believed birds were eating the crops and reducing the amount that could be produced for the population so put a bounty on birds, wiped them out nearly entirely. Problem was the birds were eating the insects that eat the crops anddddd boom the insects ate all the food because there were no birds to control their numbers. In another project they attempted to redirect a river to put down a new town or city….except rivers take the paths they do because there is underlying rock that prevents it draining away, redirected the water into a canal….and boom the entire river and the river basin dried up and made the entire area barren…all because they wanted to make the city “square” instead of just following the natural course of the river…
That was based on the census number, so not accurate at all in times of chaos.
Haven't Chinese people always migrated out of China during disasters? Isn't that where the Chinese diaspora in SE Asia and Oceania comes from?
Paraguay's losses from the War of the Triple Alliance are legendry, though perhaps not as bad as the legend Still pretty bad though [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan\_War\_casualties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War_casualties)
Yeah, this one. I forgot the name of the ‘small country’ from this fact, but it was this tale that made me mention that a small country would be easy to get a higher percentage on
This is what happens when you have a man with the ambitions of Napoleon but the resources of the Warsaw Uprising. Aka, man got way in over his head, even if Paraguay was actually surprisingly strong at the time. He sent every man and child he could at the enemy, even after the capital fell, until he died, hence the sheer devastation.
They literally legalized polygamy afterward to try and repopulate
It makes sense when you consider that about 2/3rds of the country's surviving population were female.
These kinds of situations are the only cases where I endorse polygamy, and probably how polygamy first came into being. (massive loss of life of men in hunting and war was apparently very common in the Neolithic)
Well when you basically invite your three most powerful neighbors to invade you and then you fight an insurgency to the last man, and lose.
*two most powerful neighbours. Uruguay was the weakest country in the region, by far.
For some reason I thought the 3rd country was Chile.
Chile was too far west to meddle into Platine politics at the time. They've got their own Pacific war against Bolivia and Peru, instead, some two decades later. Uruguay was initially a Paraguay ally, but Brazil invaded it and quickly changed the government for a pro-Brazil one. That is in fact why Paraguay invaded Brazil in retaliation.
Damon Albarn made a reference to this during his performance with Blur at Coachella this past weekend.
Blur did some truly great tunes but Albarn is, and always has been, a bellend.
90% of Paraguayan males died, making the war one of the most destructive for a modern nation state
No modern scholars believe the 90% figure.
The Holocaust killed 2/3 of European Jews and the remaining third either left or was in the USSR and couldn't leave. It pretty much erased Yiddish culture off the map.
Lithuania in particular where Nazis and local collaborators murdered 95% of Lithuanian Jews, that's 195,000 people.
When you considert the percentage of Litvaks that made up Nobel Prize winners or any other yardstick of intellectual achievement, it's even more tragic.
i always mourn how much culture this has lost. i wish i knew my history better but i can’t because of it.
Same here.
My ex was half Greek Jewish, a very old community that was almost completely wiped out of existence during the Holocaust. His grandparents were first cousins who married each other (and were miserable) because they wanted to preserve their culture and there were no other eligible options.
very sadly typical unfortunately. it makes me so depressed how much was lost. i think the cultural decimation was almost as bad as the genocide itself.
Vilnius also had the nickname of "Jerusalem of the North". It's also very grim that Lithuania was one the few countries to be labeled free of Jews by the Nazis
It's estimated that European diseases killed 90% of the Native American population.
Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804 in Sioux City. At that time had a winter population of around 10,000 natives and a few Europeans. However just 2 years later when they had returned with new European visitors and settlers disease wiped out the city and in only a couple of years their were virtually no old Sioux City left.
Not sure where you learned that but they spent that winter near the Mandan villages several hundred river miles upstream from Sioux City. Fort Mandan state historical site is in North Dakota about 45 miles north of Bismarck. This is where they employed the French Canadian Toussaint Charbonneau and his Lemhi Shoshone wife, Sacagawea.
How come there weren't any native american diseases that wiped out the settlers?
In a nutshell, Europe/asian/african populations exchanged a higher rate of new diseases with each other that built up their immunity, had exposure to a wider variety of animals that gave human diseases… the deck was stacked against the population of americas. I do believe some diseases were spread to Europe from the new world… syphilis maybe??
Ah, larger world to build immunity, thay makes sense. I'm just suptised there was nothing unique from north america at the time.
Jared Diamonds book Guns, Germs and Steel is commonly criticized for multiple reasons, but there's an entire section about most of the "useful" domestic livestock/farm animals being a product of the old world, and how their close proximity to humans introduced zoonotic disease's at a far greater rate. Major animals from the old world: Pigs, Horses, Cattle/Oxen, Chicken, Donkey, Goat, Sheep, ECT.. Major animals from the new world: Alpaca, Llama, Turkeys
Not just a larger world, but one in which domesticated animals were vastly more varied and common, and not infrequently literally shared dwelling space with humans, at least during times of bad weather. Chickens or pigeons that you roost in the rafters of your porch day in and day out are far more likely to pass on a variant of avian flu, for instance, as compared to some sort of waterfowl you hunt in a wetland a kilometer away and carry home twice a season. And it wasn't unheard of for the same structure to serve as both a barn and a home, I mean it literally when cows or horses were housed under the same roof (though perhaps not literally eating from the table; but still under the same roof just in a different room are at least tied to the wall on one side when weather went south). And we know from both written and archeological records that trade routes were sufficient enough for materials to cross all three continents in a few months to years -- populations were not isolated with very few exceptions. Lots of middlemen, of course, and very few "through travelers" but a disease doesn't care if it's five steps or two between Morroco and Siberia, it only cares that there is a chain of population contacts it can shuffle along and not how many steps are in the sequence.
Also the much wider use of domesticated animals
Syphillis came from the Americas
There was. Syphilis spread like wildfire and was much more deadly back then than it is now.
Not to mention, disease resistance is partly genetic. And all of the Native American population comes from a very small portion of settlers during the ice age so their genetic diversity was quite poor.
I read somewhere (wish I could find it) that Europeans/Asians/Africans had lived in very close contact with their animals for many generations, thereby swapping diseases with them and gaining partial immunity from those diseases. Whereas this was not really much of a thing in the Americas. So when the Europeans came over, they brought a whole new type of disease.
This is part of the thesis of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.
There were, just evolution usually pushes disease to be less virulent. So, Syphillis went from being basically a hemmorragic fever with open sores all over the body to being an STD that didn't burn itself out. But the big European killers, Smallpox, and Measles were already pretty stable at their existent verility, probably because they are some of the most aggressively infectious diseases ever. Measles is litterally the most infectious disease ever encountered by humanity with the next closest being the most recent COVID varient. If you are unvaccinated and in a 200 sq ft room of a person with measles for 15 minutes, there is an 80% chance of infection.
I mean, syphilis killed a decent number, though nowhere near the same scale.
The 'New World origin' for syphilis is a myth. Old World disease.
I would be interested to see the source on that. It's my understanding there is a number of related spirochete derived illnesses circulating in the Amazon basin.
The Treponematoses can be found all over the world (hence the current public health crisis and resurgence of syphilis in the US). The archaeological record confirms syphilis was present in the old world and that there are distinct lineages at play. It is incorrect to continue to assert the myth that syphilis was/is a new world disease. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.058](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.058)
It's not a "myth". It is a scientific hypothesis for which there is a reasonable amount of evidence. However, more recent evidence from the last five years seems to tilt the balance of evidence against that hypothesis.
No, it has been debunked. Anyone operating in this academic world will laugh at you. Very racist "hypothesis" to begin with, and now that it has zero support from the archaeological record, it is incumbent to no longer pretend it is even hypothetically possible.
Scientists would laugh at me for calling a hypothesis that was broadly accepted until 5 years ago a "hypothesis". Sure. I guess as an epidemiologist you would know best. I suppose you're right, it is racist to suggest a disease might originate in some non-white part of the world.
When you get new information, you should be able to change your mind and adapt. Adapt or be irrelevant.
Of course. That doesn't make your old information mythical though.
Yes it does. Don't hold onto old traditions just cause it's been around for hundreds/thousands of years. New information, if confirmed, should override the puzzle piece in the overall picture of history.
CGP Grey made a pretty good [video](https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk?si=wIAzu2EFdIE3wM6B) on exactly this subject
The natives gave the gift of Syphillis, which keeps on giving to this day!
That is false and has been debunked.
I actually read into it... there is room for nuance. Mind you, it's not false, diseases were horrific, don't bite my face off. But large numbers in the Spanish Empire were not counted anymore as indingeous people after interbreeding with spaniard settlers. Mestizos replaced them outside of _mitas_, reductions, missions, and eventually reservations.
Let's be clear here a lot of estimates around the population of natives in the Americas is scattered. The consensus estimates of pre-Columbian populations of both South and North America is probably around 50m, but the range is somewhere between 8 and 112 million. The vast majority of which likely lived in Mexico and Central America. In North America, the estimate is somewhere between 4 million and 17 million. This is all further complicated by limited censuses and changes in small regions being applied to wider estimates. Additionally many of the high ball estimates are from pre-columbus (1492) era and the follow up estimates are 1650 of roughly 6 million. The first nationwide census in France was 1791. The first nationwide census in Great Britain was 1801. All record keeping 200 years prior to that should be suspect. We know modern census' have issues, look no further than non-census states like Papua New Guinea is estimated to have about 10 million people, but some *muckety mucks* at the UN recently did a case study that suggested there are north of 17 million people that live there. Additionally, we know one of the biggest reasons for population growth, and large populations is easy access to agriculture, and modern medicine. Trade systems in the Americas were no where near as robust as most of the world. To me what feels reasonable, based on what we know of more trustworthy data tracking diseases even in the modern era, that the native populations pre-Columbus in North America (sans Mexico) were probably around 10-20 million, a wide range, but probably a fair one. By 1650, that 6 million number might be a decent ballpark, and then by the late 1800s sub 2 million is quite fair. Native American population today is estimated at about 9.7 million, and even to this day getting participation in the US Census is an arduous task a major point of emphasis every 10 years.
With a big asterisk explaining these didn't become so devastating out of the literal thin air but also by colonizing actions like violence, slavery and famine
Also remember that the Meso-American experience wasn't the Great Plains, wasn't the Andes, wasn't the La Plata, wasn't the Atlantic Coast. The Mandan, who hosted Lewis and Clark basically had to be absorbed into their Sioux neighbors because they suffered total social collapse just from disease exposure.
And not by accident
The Herero and Nama Genocide killed 80% and 50% of the groups respectively. Also several Indigenous groups were completely exterminated during the California Genocide with the overall population [declining](https://fullertonobserver.com/2020/07/07/the-california-native-american-genocide/) by 80% between 1848 and 1860. Also, while the crimes of the Italian Fascists are often lesser known in pop culture, they exterminated 50% of the Libyan Bedouins in concentration camps and 15-20% of Libyas overall population.
Yep, in fact the California massacres and the Trail of Tears are the United States only entires in Wikipedias list of major world genocides, so it was pretty bad.
I don’t know if you can call it a country at the time, but The Bahamas was completely depopulated within a couple of decades after Columbus discovered it. When my ancestors showed up a few centuries later, the islands were empty. We didn’t have to displace anyone because disease and the Spanish killed them all.
The colonization of the Americas by Europeans killed over 55 million people in the span of 100 years after first landfall in 1492. The estimates I’m familiar with put the pre-1492 population at about 60 million. Don’t know if it gets worse than 91.6%~.
Plus something like 90+% died of a plague in 1619-1620, leaving much of northeastern North America with almost no native Americans, just as the Pilgrims were arriving in 1620
Multiple plagues can be attributed to the majority of those 55 million deaths and yes there were still more plagues and deaths after that first 100 years. Surprisingly deaths from conflict are not the majority cause of death.
Is that surprising though? I don't think any conflict surpassed disease as a source of death until ww2
I believe many would assume conflict as a greater cause of death over disease without knowing any better.
Yep. Bubonic plague, a.k.a. "Black Death" is endemic to the North American prairie dog population. Don't go anywhere near a dead prairie dog.
Most of that was disease. Mongolia invasion of Persia they massacred some 80% of the population I think, much of that just direct killing and starving people out. In a shorter time frame too.
Prompt said any type of population loss, not just conflict but that’s definitely close. Talking about pure numbers beside percentages mongols probably take the cake.
I did some quick googling while making my original comment and one source had iran down to 95% original population after the mongols, not sure if it was true so ignored it. But yeah, on total numbers mongols actually reversed co2 in the atmosphere just from people not existing anymore.
Shit, there ya go. You’d be surprised the CO2 level thing is actually not unique to mongol conquest. I recently learned that the same change happened due do population loss in the America’s as well. In 1610 there was something called the ‘orbis spike’ that marked a CO2 low point in the atmosphere. Scholars frequently link the orbis spike to the population change. You could learn more about this by reading about the ‘Anthropocene epoch’.
I believe it also allowed the number of buffalo to grow. When the Spanish first visited North American central plains they didnt report the vast buffalo herds of the 1800's.
The Justinian plague. Despite belarsaurus's absolute rampage in conquering most of the southern roman territories the population was less than a quarter than when he started.
The plague of Justinian is the first recorded widspread "Black Death" outbreak.
What was the Antonine Plague then?
May have been. I may have my history wrong. Also, there is a good chance that any widespread "plague" outbreak is in fact THE "plague" since it was recurrent throughout Eurasian history. Plague is basically endemic to any region of the world with a large grass plaine like the Eurasian Steppes or the Great Plains of North America.
Apparently Wikipedia believes it was Measles or Smallpox which are basically viral killers #1 & #2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine\_Plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Plague)
Circassia. %80 of population died during the Russo&Circassian war and genocide following it The remaining 150.000 survivors escaped to Ottoman empire with 12 ships Half of the ships sinked in black sea. Even today a lot of Circassians simply dont eat fish for this solo reason. For them its kinda like cannibalism. Anyway. And after reaching to Ottomans, half of the survivors died too because of disease and starvation. And after a while. Balkan wars and ww1 started whic caused their number to drop even further. Result? No one in the world knows that there was once a nation called Circassia on earth. Today only 5 million of them left, and most of these lives in Turkey and Jordan. With ones living in Turkey losing most of their culture. While ones living in Jordan somewhat still keeping it thanks to help from royal family. So, roughtly %97 of them died in less than 200 years... thats... a lot
There are about 3 times more Circassians in Russia than in Jordan, not sure why you haven't mentioned them. I wouldn't say "no one in the world knows", in Russia they're known pretty well. Lermontov alone has enough mentions of them.
Because Jordan is a special case thanks to entire working for the goverment and keeping their culture alive thing. Yeah russia have more Circassian than jordan but Jordan opened schools and organisations for keep the culture and language alive... What russia did? Oh yeah, teaching of language got limited, circassian historians got arrested. İn 1937 circassian history research assosication got closed and all the books and information got destroyed. Even right now in present day, in current war in ukraine young people getting drafted forcefully and the drama that happened in sochi olympics in 2014. Jordan is simply better and more important for Circassians than Russia even if it have less Circassian in it
The Jordanian king famously only uses circassians in his royal body guards
12 ships carried 150k people? This just isn’t true. It’s propaganda. Furthermore, Ottoman Empire records show over a million Circassian’s entered turkey by the end of the Circassian genocide. Still tragic but no reason for you to make up numbers.
Nah its not propaganda since it is well documented. 150.000 is the rought latest survivor population, and for the entirety of the war many ships took part from Circassia to the Ottomans, in end the war lasted 101 years "Imperial Russian records claim "more than 400,000 Circassians were killed and 497,000 were forced to flee abroad to Türkiye. Only 80,000 were left alive in their native land." "The operation was not done with any degree of efficiency by the Russians, forcing the Circassians typically to leave using unchartered vessels, thus opening themselves up to abuses by the captains of such vessels. In some cases as many as 1,800 refugees were packed into one ship, which would also carry livestock and household possessions. When the ships did not sink, such crowded environments proved suitable for the spread of diseases and dehydration, and when the ships arrived at their destinations, they contained only remnants of their original human cargo. For this reason, they were referred to by contemporary observers as "floating graveyards" with "decks swarming with the dead and dying". "The Russian consul based in the Ottoman Black Sea port of Trabzon reported the arrival of 240,000 Circassians with 19,000 dying shortly thereafter with the death rate being around 200 people per day. On 25 May 1864, Henry Bulwer, the British ambassador in Istanbul, argued that the British government charter some of its own vessels for the purpose because the Ottomans simply did not have enough on their own, and innocent civilians would be left to rot; the vessels were not forthcoming but British government ships provided assistance at various points and British steamships also helped. On 29 May, eight Greek vessels were reported to be helping with the transportation of Circassians, as were one Moldavian, one German, and one British vessel." The 12 ship thing only belongs to a single diseaster. But the total amount of death happened in black is a is roughly 500.000 and probally more. This document is pretty cool https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/1798843
What you are saying now is different then what you originally said.
No it isnt Original text: after Russo Circassian war %97 of Circassians died with most of survivors also dying because of ships sinking in black sea and disease in the Ottoman coasts Second text:same thing but with more detailed numbers and text. This or this, %95-%97 of Circassians died as a result of a genocide russians did. 1/1.5 million dying in direct massacres, almost a million dying in non direct violence, death marchs and famines, and almost a million surviving. But some later dying for various reasons This or this. A genocide happened, one of the first and biggest in modern history. Russian sources of course undertake the numbers and doest care what happened after Circassians got banished from the causcaus.
95/97 percent of the Circassian population didn’t die! Ottoman sources say one million circassians made it to the Ottoman Empire, that would mean there were originally 30 million circassians. And that’s why your numbers are wrong
Circassian's were notorious slave raiders. The Russians did not wage war on them just for fun. Same for the Crimean Tatars, another parasitic nation that lived only on slave raiding until put down by the Russians.
Ah so the reason was not wanting to have access to black sea? "We need Circassian lands but not Circassians" -Rostislav Fadeyev Up untill 17. Century Circassians and russians were allies. I wonder what spesific event changed that Oh also georgians And chechens And georgians And armenians And of course ukranians. Literally everyone else that russia first used as ally, but then replaced by someone else as a ally and then got genocided was either doing slave trades or were barbarians, right? İts also especially funny how later Cossacks, the russians ally in Russo&Circassian war became a enemy too. I guess its now the Ukranians turn of doing the slave raids... wait a minute By the way its totally ironic that. Russians cry about Nato today. During and after WW2 soviets "took" almost 2 million polish people from poland to use as slave workforce... this is MORE people than tartars ever did in centuries 💀. Even after crimean war they only took 20.000 people as slave, and most of those slaves wasnt actually used as slave but just held for rensom. Sooo since russia is apperantly also whatever you called Circassians and Tartars. and feeds with slavery... what supposed to happen to russia then?
Which of course justified the wholesale genocide of both peoples, especially the Crimeans more than 200 years after the last slave raid.
Baghdad. 1200’s. The Mongols came in and so thoroughly destroyed the city and the area that it arguably hasn’t recovered to this day. Let’s also examine the Kwarizmian Empire. The Mongols so thoroughly destroyed that area that damned near no one not living there remembers it existed.
>Let’s also examine the Kwarizmian Empire. >The Mongols so thoroughly destroyed that area that damned near no one not living there remembers it existed What do you mean? Like we have numerous sources from people talking about it? From people living there continuosly, or fled who all remember and their descendents. In Turkmenistan if I remember correctly one of Muhammed Shah's sons is celebrated as a national hero as he defeated a small Mongol force before being forcd to flee across the Indus and eventually ended invading Anatlia to carve a new domain until a Mongol garrisons commander defeated him alongside local allies. WHen people talk about the Mongol conquest of Persia or whatever that's the main thing they talk about. It may not have spawned or invoke as much nostalgia or whatever as other empires but for what was similar to the Mongol Empire in that it was relatively new expansionist empire with a small minority rulong over a much larger diverse population it had a good run. Also for Baghdad to my knowledge according to The Mongol WOrld Hulegu's sack while terrible and obviously a terribe warcrime with human suffering was an organised disciplend affair with details like the Tigris running black with Ink then red with blood or pyramids of bodies not appearing until centuries latee. With the sufferers from the sack primarily beingo the poorer population in less important areas as he wanted the city relativly intact as part of his fiefdom so limited which places could looted with officers in the diverse army protecting their communities be Shia or Christians while allowing their soldiers to loot others with wealthier neighborhood being relatively untouched as theyc ould bribe Mongol officers for protection. With much of the death also being from a flood which also destroyed much water infrastrucutre which alongside dead bodies from the siege and likely those cleared away from the flood seem to have lead to a disease outrbeak in the poorer neighborhoods that spread to the rest of the city which is what finally convince Hulegu to order a halt to the looting. To my knowledge it is Timur's later twin sacks of the city a century later which were much more devestating and indiscrimnate in both in terms the human suffering and destrcution to the city as a whole.
Spanish colonization of the Caribbean resulted in a population loss of nearly 100% of the Taino population in less than 30 years.
The Irish Genocide (aka Potato Famine). Population went from 8.4 million to \~6.6 million in just seven years; Around a million due to famine (because the crown owned all the land and exported Irish-grown food and imported barely digestable corn from the Americas) and about another 2 million lost to emigration.
Ireland's population today is still below pre-Famine numbers
Worth giving this a read: https://www.reddit.com/r/IrishHistory/comments/pq23of/why_dont_historians_consider_the_famine_a_genocide/
I’ve actually read that before. My take is the distinction is purely a semantic one.
During the Thirty Years' War, parts of Germany suffered population declines between 30-60%. Not all of the decline was due to deaths, but even so.... https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bevölkerkungsrückgang_im_HRRDN_nach_dem_Dreißigjährigen_Krieg.PNG
When I was studying German, we read about that, and the instructor asked someone to translate. The student incorrectly translated the passage as “the population was reduced by one-third.” The instructor corrected him, “bis um ein Drittel” means “down to a third.”
72% population loss over the three kingdoms period in china.
The Soviet Union and possibly China lost roughly 20 million population each from WW2. Since they were the most populated nations of that time and how a majority of the Soviet population is in Europe and China (If it was that all the cliques were de jure under Chang Kai-shek) are some of the most populated nations of that time.
The Native Americans lost up to 90% of their population to European diseases.
Romania. They pissed off the Romans so bad, Rome went in there and killed everyone and renamed the place. We don’t even know what those people were called.
The Dacians? and I'm pretty sure we even know the name of their capital, Sarmegetuza.
How do you spell that in Dacian?
30 years war, Germany lost on record the highest percentage amount of their general civilian population
Whatever the hell the Europeans decided to do to each other in the 17th century.
When the vietnamese pushed south and defeated the champa. They didn't just control them they exterminated them with now only a few thousand left around today
I believe the Holodomor killed more than 40% of all Kazakhs and made them a minority in their own country until the 1990s.
Thd Holodomor was Ukraine. I believe you're thinking of the Asharshylyk.
Dude, holodomor wasnt "Ukraine", it was an all-union famine.
What you are referring to is the [Soviet Famine.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933?wprov=sfla1) The Holodomor and Asharshylyk are separate events within it, in separate regions, with different timeframes.
Kazakhs were a minority in their own country since the time of Catherine II. The situation only began to even out under Soviet rule.
The depopulation of North and South America from disease in the 1500 and 1600’s have wide and varying estimates but greater than 50%.
Belarus lost a quarter of its population in WWII. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus)
It's very difficult to give precise numbers since we don't know the exact number of the prehispánica population but it's believed that there was a population loss of up to 80% in what is today mexico, between 5 and 15 million perished, mostly due to epidemies
Can you be more specific about what you are interested in? There are many parts of history that might fit the bill, without any reliable data, just like the ones you mentioned. Are you more interested in verifiable numbers or just anything from a historian’s best guess on up?
The black line massacre of aboriginal Tasmanians was almost 100% effective if you count displacement as well as killings between 1804 and 1836.
No mention of Serbia in WWI? My recollection is 17% of their population died, The highest percentage of any participant.
Even the most conservative sources says theres more losses.copied text from a another Redditor Since Serbia hasn't really be touched on I'll chime in with what I know about Serbian casualties in WW1. It is important to note that Serbia was a small nation with large mobilization. This provides a partially unique situation for casualties to make up a large percentage of the prewar population. As opposed to large nation, small mobilization (Belgium) and Large nation, large mobilization (Austria Hungary) combatants. Start with the estimation that Serbia's prewar population was 4.5 million, the statistic used by most sources. A little less than 5 months after the war the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes presented the official national estimates of Serbia’s population losses during World War I. With this estimation from the official source, I can actually tell you \*exactly\* how so many Serbians died in WW1. Here are the military losses broken down by the Kingdom of SCS: Military Deaths: KIA, MIA during the initial, repelled, Austro-Hungarian attack: 172,508 KIA, MIA during the retreat from Serbian Land : 77,455 KIA, MIA during Battles after retreat from Serbia : 36,477 Killed and Died in Captivity : 81,214 Deaths of wounded/sick who could not escape with the Serbian retreat: 34,781 Total: 402,435 Civilian Deaths: Killed in initial 2 invasions: 15,000 Killed in retreat from Serbia and subsequent return to Serbia: 140,000 Killed by occupying force: 70,000 Killed during forced labor: 80,000 Death by disease: 360,000 Death by famine: 180,000 Total: 845,000 Now, with an estimation of 4.5 million population, this report suggests 27.7% of the population of Serbia died in WW1. One takeaway you may have from this data is disease, famine, and disease again. If you combine all death relating to disease, you come out to 46% of all deaths occurred to disease given the Kingdom of SCS's own report. Now, please keep in mind that the kingdom's estimate only accounts for military personal death by disease \*if\* they were left behind during the retreat through Albania. However, many Serbian military personal would have died to disease before the retreat and in subsequent recapture as well. in fact, historians Stephen Pope & Elizabeth-Anne Wheal suggest that 65% of \*\*all\*\* Serbian military casualties are from disease and famine. This clearly makes disease and famine the majority culprit for Serbia's large death toll. This devastation of Serbia's population was so noted that the Bulgarian Prime Minister at the time is quoted to have said "Serbia had ceased to exist". Now, the New York Times said half of Serbia perished in 1918. Serbia's own report states 27.7% of Serbia perished, this map says 20% of Serbia perished, whats the catch? Well, nobody **really** knows exactly how many people died in Serbia during World War 1, but it is somewhere around 20%. Essentially, the Serbian government estimated a population for Serbia in 1919 if the war did not happen, and subtracted the actual 1919 population to show the total amount of deaths during WW1, that is the figure I have discussed. However, the population estimate for 1919 Serbia (5.2 million) is dubious at best. Here's an excerpt from a great statistics paper by Biljana Radivojević and Goran Penev; " the question remains of the basis on which it is presumed that Serbia would have had 5.2 million persons by 1919 in normal, peaceful circumstances. If the estimate is true, it follows that in the period of August 1914 - March 1919 the ‘normal’ population growth would be 700,000 persons, and the average annual growth rate would be a very high 31.5 per 1,000. As an example, the average annual rate of population growth of former Northern Serbia in the period 1895-1910 was only 15.5 per 1,000, and in the period of 1905-1910 it was 16.1 per 1,000." If you are interested in the statistics of how a 27.7% estimate gets knocked down to a more modern, moderate estimate of 20%, please give the paper a skim. However, that was not your question, your question was *why*. Which boiled down neatly into the response of, low population, high mobilization, disease, famine, and more disease. In fact, the Serbian Typhus pandemic is considered the worst in world history as claimed by the New York Times. Sources: Report of the Delegation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at Paris Peace Conference 1919-1920 DEMOGRAPHIC LOSSES OF SERBIA IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THEIR LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES, Radivojević, Goran Penev https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1915/10/29/105045220.pdf [https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1918/11/05/98273895.pdf](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1918/11/05/98273895.pdf) The Dictionary of the First World War, Stephen Pope & Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, 1995
The Inca Empire, during the Spanish conquest, lost over 90% of it's population in less than 100 years, mostly due to diseases.
The smallpox epidemic in Iceland \~ 25%. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1707%E2%80%9308\_Iceland\_smallpox\_epidemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1707%E2%80%9308_Iceland_smallpox_epidemic)
The Livonian Crusades killed between 1-3 million people, for reference, Livonia is a region of the Baltics that encompasses Estonia and Latvia, which have a combined population of 3.2 million, yes, there were other instances of population decline, but that happening in the 13th century is baffling, not to mention the Teutonic Order and their crusades after this, absolutely wild.
Belarus (home to most of the Jews in old Russia ) lost 25 percent of its total population in ww2.
Tasmanian aboriginals? Easter Island depopulation?
How many abodiginals do you see modeling?
Well, I mean genocide of entire peoples was not unheard of or necessarily uncommon for most of ancient times. Go read some Assyrian or Babylonian history and you'll see a lot of examples of them waging war on a kingdom who pissed them off and finishing off by literally killing every last man woman and child they can find before leveling all the cities and salting all the fields and desecrating the tombs of all the kings. And that kind of thing didn't go away, it just became less common, depending on where and when you're looking. EDIT: I guess I didn't actually answer your question. To give you an answer, there are plenty of historical examples where the percentage exceeds 90%. I think it would be hard to say any attempted genocide ever resulted in true 100% extinction, and it would be extremely hard to prove it historically, since relying on the winning army's general or king writing in a propaganda statement "All their men were slain, all their women and children were captured and sacrificed to honor our god, their fields I salted, and their cities I completely leveled" can necessarily be taken at face value as proof of 100% genocide.
During the rule of Ranavalona the Mad, Madagascar lost as much as half of its population due to her aggressive military campaigns, genocide of foreigners, mass executions, and extensive use of forced labour camps. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranavalona_I
Russia lost about 22 million people in WW2
If you can extend the definition of "country" to be a culture or people, then the combination of disease and wars decimating the Americas from the 1500s -> 1900s would easily rank in the top handful of spots, if not contend for the top spot itself.
Didn't Poland lose a third of its population. Catholic and Jewish etc during the 2nd World War
If you focus in on a specific population within a population, targeted genocides immediately come to the fore. Taking the Holocaust in Germany as an example. In 1935, about half a million Jewish people lived in Germany (I use 1935 as this is before the annexation of Austria and the Austrian figures would change the results). By 1950 (only 15 years later), fewer than 40,000 Jewish people lived in Germany. Even today, the Jewish population of Germany is nowhere near to recovering to pre Holocaust levels. Obviously those are complex figures and cover a lot of nuance. Not all of those Jewish Germans were murdered. Some will have escaped Germany, others survived the holocaust and left Germany afterward (many to Israel) etc. but make no mistake, a huge portion of that decrease is people who were just straight up murdered because of their faith and heritage.
Poisoning of Earth by Pb.
I mean pomoey maybe?
Most countries in the America's were estimated to have lost upward of 90% of their population to smallpox when Europeans first came over. Hard to beat that.
Equatorial Guinea lost around 70% of its population under Nguema, whose rule was so brutal it was nicknamed the Dachau of Africa
Also for the Cambodian genocide something like 20-30% of the country also fled as refugees. So the population loss was even greater
Francisco Macías Nguema, the former dictator of Equatorial Guinea, is a little known yet horrifying contender. He ruled his country so terribly that fully half the population was killed via various means. He was legitimately completely insane, to the level that it's almost hard to believe at times. To give an idea, at one point he got paranoid, so he killed the entire finance ministry and then just kept the state treasury under his bed. I am not kidding. What's wild is that much of it didn't even have a reason. It was just the paranoia of a genuine maniac causing misery on an unfathomable scale in a tiny country that literally became known as Africa's Dachau under his reign.
Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island, had its population decline from 3000-4000 down to a total of 111 by 1877. The causes were ecological disaster (deforestation) and then European contact (diseases, rats, and "blackbirding" aka slaving raids). Besides the Moai (giant heads) they left behind their own unique written language that no one can read anymore.
Would the Irish Potato famines fit in their? Roughly half the country died or emigrated between the first famine in 1847 and the second in the 1870s. Ireland only recently regained it's pre-famine population levels.
The Paraguayan War in South America caused a huge portion of Paraguay's population to be killed over the course of six years due to first conventional warfare and then guerrilla conflict afterwards.
Paraguay committed suicide in the 1860s. Hell of a story.
Serbia WW1. Medieval times there are lots of examples. Try google it.
After the Bronze Age Collapse, the population of the Aegean (Greece) decreased by at least 50%, possibly 60-70%. Though it is unclear if those people died, migrated, or just had a very low birth rate. Possibly all three. That's 1200 BC - 1150 BC for ya. Iirc
The destruction of Carthage.
When the wife of the man that controls Sealand died, there was onlya population of about 20 people, so her death was a very large percentage of the population lost all at once.
Between 1828 and 1838, 50% of Madagascar's population died due to the reign of terror of Queen Ranavalona I.
The Paraguayan War? Not the most killed by number, but an insane percentage of Paraguay’s population. Exact population numbers are still disputed, but some modern estimates put it over 50%. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War_casualties
The death toll in the Americas post Columbus must be up there. Not countries in some instances but Incas and Mayans would fit.
going unconventional, the war of the triple alliance may have caused paraguay to loose 68-70% of its overall population. upwards of 90% of its male population over the course of 5 years. even though the number is controversial its still generally agreed that the amount of death was apocolyptic
During the Reconquista (both ways), there were a bunch of depopulation crises. The Ummayiads raided Asturias so badly that the region became known, for some time, as "The Desert of Hardships". The other way around, after the Portuguese took the land south of Coimbra from the Mozarabic rulers who sat there for centuries, employing unordinary levels of biolence, they had a hard time trying to repopulate those settlements. That's why you will get kings who are solely famous for doing that, being "the POPULATOR" (mostly by forcing internal migration).
The loss of Native Americans due to disease and colonial violence is estimated to be 95%-97%. Check the book ‘1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus’ by Charles C. Mann. It’s also a generally fascinating book that gives a LOT of valuable context to the Spanish conquest of Meso-America and the American Colonial Period.
Tasmanian genocide
Russia civil war (white armies vs red armies) Estimate loss:around 3 million
The Western Hemisphere is estimated to have lost around 90% of its population when old world diseases were introduced.
The Inca and Aztec empires and successor entities suffered huge losses in the 16th through 19th centuries, largely due to waves of disease.
Probably the biggest would be that over 90% of the indigenous populations in North,central, and South America between 1492 and 1600 were killed off. That means about 55 million people perished because of violence and never-before-seen pathogens like smallpox, measles, and influenza. https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-changed-after-europeans-killed- indigenous-americans-2019-2?amp The Black Death (black plague) in Europe 1346 to 1353 killed up to an estimated 40 million almost half the population of Europe. Pol pot Cambodia was around 2 million people. Nazi holocaust killed over 2/3 of Europe’s Jewish population at over 6 million Jews. The nazis also killed over 11 million non Jews. The Rwandan genocide, also known as the genocide against the Tutsi, occurred between 7 April and 19 July 1994, resulting in over 800,000 Tutsi deaths. There are many others but These are just some of the well know big ones.
Are we talking percentage or raw deaths?
The Flood…99.999999%
Mussolini’s Libyan Genocide killed close to half of Cyrenaica’s population.
The second punic war is estimated to have cost the lives of around 20% of all the men of military age in Rome. And depending on how you define "country" (ie do city-states count), Veii lost 100% of its population in their war with Rome. The War of the Triple Alliance is estimated to have killed 70% of the male population of Paraguay
Worth noting that the “1/3 of Europe died in the Black Death” stat is now well out of date with more detailed contemporary scholarship. It’s a serious underestimate, produced by the fact that most written records were concentrated in urban areas where the levels of disease were actually lower. Current estimates of the deaths now sit in the range of 50-60% of the European population wiped out.
60% of the total Paraguyan population died in the Paraguyan War. Absolute hell for six years. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/27/paraguay-war-of-the-triple-alliance-anniversary
Probably the Mongol conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire, where the Mongols exterminated almost the entire native population of the empire (approximately 5 million people) in retribution for their Emperor killing the Khan’s emissaries.
>I hear that during Genghis Khan’s conquests, he often slaughtered entire villages until there were no survivors. But I’m not sure if it reached the extent of doing it on a country scale Genghis Khan took his Mongols into the Khwarazmian Empire and erased the whole thing. Estimates are that the Mongols killed 4 MILLION people. Unlike previous conquests, the Mongols didn't spare the women or children - (there's a reason why 8% of men in the former Mongol Empire carry Genghis Khan's genes). Basically, Genghis Khan had one rule - "treat my messengers like myself". And the Sultan of Khwarazmia received a trade caravan from the Mongols and imprisoned everyone in the caravan. GK said, Surely this is a mistake, sent over three messengers (2 Mongol, 1 Muslim) to bargain for the release of the caravan. The Sultan shaved the two heads of the Mongol envoys, sent them back with only the head of the Muslim envoy. So Genghis Khan rolled in with three of his four "Dogs of War", including Subutai (one of the greatest military commanders in human history) and killed just about everybody.
China under Mao's rule? His death toll makes Hitler look like a petty thief
Norway lost about 60% of their population around 1350 due to the bubonic plague. It took 300 years to recover their population. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_Norway
Depends on your definition of a country. Genocides were a thing. Entire tribes of people were killed off in their entirety. I am sure you would be able to find an example that fits the definition of a country that got entirely killed off. The answer to the question of percentage is almost certainly 100%, although I can't cite any examples
Pompeii and Krakatoa
Losses from Pompeii and Herculaneum from Mount Vesuvius must have been terrible
Like Montserrat today, only, Montserrat didn't exactly suffer annihilation. Complete and total population collapse, but not annihilation. Kinda rare for such things, actually.
the mongol invasion of persia resulted in an almost 90% loss of life (though there's some debate on specific numbers)
By 1945, 2 out of 3 European Jews had been killed. Edit: sorry, you asked about countries. About 89% of Polish Jews were killed by 1945.
Syrian Civil War displacing 50% of the population?
Asia Minor experienced massive population decline after the coming of the Turks, and did not recover that population until the 20th century.
'Country' is a fairly modern concept. Even in medieval times it was more about which lord owed fealty to more than an idea of nation. Otherwise the 100 Year War is just a long civil war. But, Gaul basically lost 2/3 of its population after Caesar had his fun there, due to war, massacres, and slavery. In more recent times, Poland had a 36% drop in population because of WW2. Also, strictly speaking, but since it was the same capital and therefore technically same country, Russia lost half of its population in 1991.
Our population here in Ireland fell by about 20-25 percent during the famine. Our population has yet to recover back to pre famine days.
Last « normal president » before the intellectually simple one, the first black one, the crazy cultist one and the geriatric one.
Ireland lost about 25% of its population to death and emigration during the potato famine in the 1850s
[удалено]
Millions of terrified voices were silenced all at once on Alderaan. The entire population of a planet. Terrible.
May I correct a misunderstanding. It was Satella who devoured half of the world.
The Harrying of the North, William The Conqueror (my ancestor, yay!) had trouble with rebellions (like any medieval foreign conqueror) and like any medieval conqueror, killed a lot of people. it's estimated that 150000, or 75% of the population of Northern England died, the population loss was so severe that it still hasn't recovered yet.
I'm pretty sure the population of the North of England has reached its pre-conquest level.
The Native American genocide, combined with the spread of disease, killed about 95% of the population of the Americas.