Top 10 Most Brutal Empires in History

The worlds most brutal and violent empires in history.
The Top Ten
1 Mongol Empire

Hands down, this empire truly made a testament of inspiring fear. The only reason it isn't thought so now is because of anti-western centric bias in history curriculums nowadays. Their record of human rights abuses isn't a shady history to them. It was a medal of honor in their minds at the time.

They razed cities and killed civilians. They also burned the grand library of Baghdad. They depopulated the Khwarazmian Empire significantly, did bad things to China, and razed Beijing.

Most ruthless conquerors, wanted to rule the whole world. Throughout their conquest, they wiped over 10% of the global population by killing, raping, and destroying everyone and everything against them. Genghis Khan is alone the biggest killer and rapist in history. 1/200 people are descendants of him.

2 Japanese Empire

The Japanese Empire was worse than Nazi Germany for two reasons:

1. They killed more people than Nazi Germany.
2. They killed people in more gruesome ways than Nazi Germany.

The Japanese Empire was so cruel and inhumane. They didn't care how cruelly they punished or tortured people. They tortured and killed anyone who opposed them, adults or children.

One word: China. What they did to the Chinese was so uniquely terrible that it still sours relations between them to this day.

3 British Empire

They plundered 45 trillion dollars from India. Yes, they banned slavery, but they were one of the most racist empires in history. They plundered every village and were very racist.

Forget the Mongols, these guys did it all! From hooking an entire country on opium to get a better trade deal, to mass enslavement and conquest of Africa, to starving the Irish to "civilize" them, no empire has been more consistently damaging and cruel. Their misdeeds in the Americas are rivaled only by the British and the Spanish.

As a British person myself, I can agree that the British Empire was one of the most evil empires in the history of humanity, but I do think the French, Spanish, Belgians, Nazis, Soviets, Japanese, and Mongols were much worse.

4 Nazi Germany

How on earth is the British Empire higher than Nazi Germany? The British Empire set out to rule other races while Nazi Germany set out to exterminate other races.

Everyone knows what they did. They used the Final Solution (Holocaust), which is the worst crime against humanity ever committed. There were people like Klaus Barbie who tortured people while smiling and holding a cat. The worst part of the Holocaust were the human experiments by Josef Mengele when he sewed two twins together.

Should be at number 1 for this because of how bad they were during World War I and World War II. Think about what the Nazis did to more than a million people from countries in Europe. By far responsible for overpowering for what they believed in, which was going out and ruling the world by doing mass killings. Such a sad time. The Nazis were also responsible for the mass killing of the Jews. Blows my mind that Nazi Germany is not at number 1 when they should be. The Nazis did the worst thing by far that no other empire could imagine or even think to do, and yet continued to follow through in Hitler's orders.

5 Belgian Empire

The Belgian Congo was called "the heart of darkness" for very good reasons. They were far more cruel and brutal than all the other European empires combined.

If anyone thinks the British, French, Spanish empires were brutal, then they need to read up about the Belgian Congo. That is horrendous to read about.

They killed 10 million people in Congo via bad slave labor, torture, and killings.

6 Ottoman Empire

They did not just kill Armenians. They also killed Assyrians and Greeks too. Need I mention, how do you expect Armenians to just sit back and take what their occupiers are giving to them? The difference is: Armenians defended themselves and they didn't systematically kill Turks, but the Turks systematically killed them. They called Greek people a bunch of slurs, labeling them as infidels. Oh! How can I forget the Janissaries?

Where other Ottoman soldiers killed the parents of young Christian boys, brought them back to Anatolia, to be converted and sent to work in the Ottoman army. Yes, they were paid, but that doesn't matter, since they were literally kidnapped from their murdered families. And that's unethical. Here's another massacre they did, called the Batak massacre, where Ottomans, along with converted Muslims from Bulgaria, killed Christian families, including women and children, and they left their bodies in fields to rot for everyone to see.

Not to mention, Ottoman Empire defenders say that Balkan and Caucasian people stole their food, when in reality it was semi-assimilation and a cultural exchange. They made the Balkans miss out on the Enlightenment, and the Greeks and Balkan Slavs had to wait to do theirs 300 years later. The empire was vile, and disenfranchised Balkan people, Caucasian people, and the Arab people too. Ottoman Empire keyboard warrior defenders are even more vile than that relic of an empire itself.

7 Aztec Empire

The Aztec Empire should be much higher.

Their brutal warmongering and enslavement of local indigenous tribes. The deliberate ritualized torture, slaughter, and mutilation of an estimated hundreds of thousands to millions of innocents, including children, is something the world had never seen before or never saw after, besides perhaps in Nazi Germany.

To get an idea, 4,000-8,000 people were sacrificed in just 4 days in the opening ceremonies of what today is referred to as the Templo Mayor. This is twice as much as the total number of victims of the Spanish Inquisition spanning 4 centuries.

Can you spell ritualized cannibalism of enemy combatants and vestal virgins alike? Hundreds of thousands barbecued.

Ha! If the Aztecs had nukes, we would have wiped every country off the map.

8 Timurid Empire

The Timurid Empire was one of the most brutal empires in history. Located in Western Asia, spanning from modern-day Iraq to the west to Afghanistan to the east. The Timurids were incredibly cruel to their people. Some even say Amir Timur, the founder of the empire, was comparable to the Mongols.

9 Soviet Union

I travelled to the USSR in 1985. Decades of forced movement of dissidents and "political prisoners" to the gulags, plus a fearsome internal security service, had left the average citizen cowed by authority. Anyone speaking up, especially in East Germany and the Baltic states, was risking a lot. Organised religion was virtually banned, the leaders were homophobic and drunkards. That lasted 72 years, from 1917 to 1989. Now, Putin wants to bring it back.

The Holodomor killed 6 million Ukrainians in a man-made famine. It removed Ukrainian culture from Kuban and caused the Donbass War we have today. This would show a long line of Russification where Stalin would deport many of an ethnicity to Siberia and replace them with Russians so as to prevent rebellion from happening. Today, 25 percent of Kazakhstan and Estonia and 17 percent of Ukraine is Russian.

This era was just awful. The Soviet Union itself was awful, but this empire also impacted other countries for the worse, like Cuba and Ethiopia.

10 Assyrian Empire
The Contenders
11 Spanish Empire

Dios Mio, why isn't this in one of the top slots? They committed genocide on a level that has never been seen before or since and eradicated entire civilizations of South and Central America. All driven by Catholic zeal. You thought ISIS was bad - this is on another level. They even invaded (or attempted to invade) European countries just because they were of a different denomination of the same religion. I would say these guys were many times worse than the Nazis.

The Spanish slaughtered over 15 million Aztec people. The Aztecs were not evil at all. Human sacrifices happened very rarely. We kill prisoners of war too, but we just don't offer the hearts to the sun god. All those "evil" things that the Aztecs did were just propaganda created by the Spaniards to make people like you think that the Aztecs were evil.

Gold and power are what the empire chased, killing many indigenous communities in South America due to disease and genocide.

12 Roman Empire The Roman Empire was a post-Republican period of ancient Rome that lasted from 27 BC to 476 AD. It was characterized by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia. The Roman legal system and Latin language have had a lasting impact on the Western world. At its height, the empire was one of the most powerful economic, cultural, and military... read more

The Roman Empire deserves first place. They mistreated their people in many bad, torturous ways that would be illegal today. For starters, they'd peel your skin off while you're still alive, set people on fire, and even kill people by beating them with sticks to death. Of course, they'd also make people watch these deaths happen, like in arenas where gladiators fought ferocious animals or other gladiators.

The Roman Empire wasn't as bad as Nazi Germany or North Korea, but they were still very brutal. By far one of the most evil countries in world history.

They razed Carthage and did other bad things, but not as bad as the top ones, as what they did was not uncommon at the time.

13 Russian Empire
14 French Empire

I don't understand why France is considered to have a worse empire than Spain. Just look at the difference between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The DR is much richer than Haiti because of what the Spanish did compared to what the French did. Obviously, there are other factors to Haiti's poor development, but I feel like this is a key factor that determines Haiti's poverty.

The French Empire, over history, wasn't so bad, but the crimes they committed during Algeria's struggle for independence are astonishing. They would open fire on peaceful protestors and were often too controlling.

15 Portuguese Empire

In the 1970s, the Portuguese were losing their empire, so they decided that the best way to keep it was to commit genocide throughout Africa. And all to own a fraction of a pebble.

16 Mughal Empire
17 Persian Empire

Although Persia's often considered a tolerant empire for its time, and sometimes rightfully so (especially with Cyrus issuing the Edict of Toleration), it was not tolerant to the people that didn't submit to their rule upon conquest. The Achaemenid shahs slaughtered, subjugated, and destroyed the history of entire foreign peoples. Completely erased. Herodotus even gives an account of how the Lydians were disarmed, pacified by the Persians, and had their honour and culture erased.

18 Greek Empire

Best empire? Just kidding. They were among the most barbaric people of antiquity, who disguised themselves as philosophers and freedom-fighting people, which couldn't be further from the truth. Their philosophy, for example, named women to be corpses which imprisoned the human soul. If that is the kind of philosophy that the West wants to see as their cultural heritage, I will be out.

And the Persian vision of freedom contained the ability to enslave whichever people they wanted without having greater forces like the Persians, who in fact forbade slavery throughout their empire's history, to take away the Hellenistic will to be immoral people. It's so absurd how they used to call the Persians barbarians. Haha. The Persians freed the Jews from Babylon and helped them rebuild their temple. And the first charter of human rights was created by the Persians too.

What did the hypocritical Greeks do? Giving them credit for having "saved" Western culture and values is straight up wrong and incorrect. And it goes on my nerve to hear people everywhere call Alexander the "great." He doesn't deserve that epithet. There is nothing outstanding about him except his military campaigns, but military achievements are not a measurement of greatness. It's the values and the will to change the world for good that makes people great. Nelson Mandela is GREAT. Martin Luther King is GREAT, and Cyrus THE GREAT was GREAT.

The Greeks murdered people in the most barbaric way as they would execute citizens in public by locking them into an iron bull, boiling them alive, making the screams of the executed scream out the bull's mouth. DISGUSTING!

19 Abbasid Caliphate
20 German Empire
21 Dutch Empire
22 Italian Empire

Italy's colonial rule in Libya was brutal. Even before the war for Libya, the Italians committed crimes by creating the so-called Tripoli massacre, where 10,000 Turkish and Arab troops were put in concentration camps and executed.

During WWI, Libyan tribesmen rose up against their colonial rulers, and the Italians didn't fully engage until Mussolini came into power and "pacified" the region by bombing villages. Men, women, and children were executed daily and put in concentration camps. It is estimated that half of Libya's population was killed or "relocated" during that period.

During the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, due to international pressure, Mussolini authorized chemical weapons, and a quarter of Ethiopia's population died during that war.

During WWII, Italy committed atrocities in the Balkans, such as the Domenikon massacre in Greece. The Italians used brutal tactics to quell rebellions in Yugoslavia, executing 50 Yugoslavian civilians for every Italian soldier killed.

23 Umayyad Caliphate

They killed the companions and descendents of its own prophet Muhammad as well as treated people of Madinah badly and got killed ahlul beyt. They forcefully converted people from other religions to Islam for their personal gains. They used to steal wives of other people and rapped Muslim and non Muslim women equally.

24 Byzantine Empire
25 Ancient Egyptian Empire

They are the greatest empire of all time. Their brutality and cruelty are well documented in the best book of all human history, the Bible.

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