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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 3047451, member: 72790&quot;]In the case of Cannae we rely on Polybius and Livy, but in this instance we can infer from the legions&#039; present there no longer being mentioned that they must have been wiped out almost to a man. I am aware that both these historians, and just about all of the ancient historians, were not privy to statistics that we can independently verify but in this instance I have never heard of this one being off base. As for the Medieval statistics, the Crusades, the most medieval of medieval wars,&nbsp; started with the massacre of thousands of Jews in Germany, thousands of Hungarians, and an unknown number of Byzantines, by these Crusaders, even before they reached the Holy Land. When they took Jerusalem in 1099 they slaughtered all but a handful of the inhabitants and, as one of the chroniclers put it, the knights rode through gore up the cruppers of the horses. I am afraid that this notion of chivalry was applied pretty much only by members of the nobility to others of the nobility and the peasantry benefitted little from it. Take a look at the Hundred Years War and what the English did to the French civilians in that war, not to say, that English soldiers, archers, were also quite happy to give the coup de grace to downed French knights who they could not hold for ransom as the archers were not nobility and entitled to collect a ransom. No, I am afraid that living in the Middle Ages was as dangerous as the ancient period probably right up to the 16th Century Wars of religion (Saint Bartholomew&#039;s Day Massacre) and the Thirty Years War it took the German people a century to recover from. We are fortunate to live in an age when there really is an attempt to limit non combatant deaths, even though that limitation goes out the window when necessity compels its abandon.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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