"If coldbloodedly ranking body counts seems like an odd business, Mr. White, a bearlike man of 54 with a shy laugh and incipient Santa Claus beard, is an even odder person to be doing it.
He has no college degree or formal training in history or statistics. He does not attend academic conferences or publish in scholarly journals. He does not visit archives, instead culling numbers from far-flung secondary sources during off hours from his job as a librarian at the federal courthouse in Richmond."
I DO have a formal university degree in history, and studied that period (but neighboring region) specifically. Recorded deaths get wildly inflated. Accounts of deaths from the 20th century are far more reliable than the 13th.
As an example: the sack of Jerusalem. Accounts from both sides claim the crusaders sacked the city so thoroughly that you had to wade through the streets because there were blood and bodies everywhere. Admitted carnage. This is a major muslim holy city. Death count? 40k muslims and 10k jews on the high end.
Compare this to one of the bloodiest Mongol sacks, Urgench. This a very major silk road stop, based on rare good land amidst marsh. The city is taken after block by block attrition war. Similar descriptions to Jerusalem. The death toll? According to Persian scholars, 1.2 million. The total population of Samarkand, a bigger city on the same route, was estimated at 10% of that number. The mongols would have had to kill 10x the total population of a larger analogous city, or 22x the kill count of an analogous description of a sack, to reach the counts of what scholars said at the time.
Sorry, but no. Genghis high counts are 13th century and one sided (only enemies tended to record it, versus others where both sides liked to actually write things down). Mao counts are modern. Reconsider your numbers and sources.
