The secular model of warfare as battles in Western history makes civilian war casualties seem peripheral damage. Battles are limited to armed hostile fighting men, while civilians are mainly women and children. Further, the present view that civilians should have immunity in warfare, which stems from medieval just war theories, treats the relatively enlightened theories as stand-ins for the actual war practices, precipitating the wishful but erroneous idea that Roman and other state-sponsored ancient, medieval, and premodern forces did not willingly subject civilian groups to devastating harm, for this was contrary to just war principles. This makes the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seem unique in civilian-targeting depravity from the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars to Armenia, Nazi Germany, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and ISIS in Syria and Iraq. This background makes civilian-targeting warfare elusive in earlier times despite its prevalence. As a result, warfare against the groups the Roman historian Livy terms “the noncombatant throng” (imbellis multitudo) still fails to be noticed and taken seriously as a mainstream norm from antiquity onward.
By my argument, civilian-assault warfare has long been a deliberate part of conquest. War practices from the Bronze age through the Byzantine empire bear out that civilians have regularly been targets of attack in ravaging conquest: The sacking of villages, towns, and cities; the organized killing in battle and/or organized slaughter in captivity of the adult males or of the males of all ages along with numerous mature women; the hunt-down and live capture of the girls and young women as slave plunder; and the distribution of the young captive women and girls among the aggressor forces for martial religious rape and enslavement. The latter was the emblem of making the forces “rich” by living off the coerced procreative and other productive labors of these enslaved girls and women and their forcibly inseminated and reproduced male and female offspring. Thus, although conquest is often presented as taking over land and annexing territory, the steps of ravaging aggression show that it more basically has worked to turn productive and collectively self-determining civil peoples seized and kept alive into enslaved throngs under the conquering rulers’ extractive control, frequently after killing off many of peoples’ mature role models and heritage bearers.
Not secular, conquest developed as a martial religious agenda with a fundamentalist intensity to impose enslavement on productive civil groups as constituted from the Bronze age onward—women, children, and men trying to continue their productive and collectively self-determining Neolithic-derived civil lifeways, despite the growing danger of being conquered. To the aggressors, the civil commitment to inviolable autonomy did not matter. A purported divine destiny was at hand summoning the civil groups to submit collectively or else face being ravaged once their turn to be conquered was at hand. Only civil subservience under martial religious dominance counted as cosmic order; civil autonomy was chaos.
