How war treated the enemy’s unarmed — and how, over ten thousand years, it slowly learned to see them.
45 exhibits8 galleriesc. 8000 BC – AD 1977
The oldest evidence of war is also the oldest evidence of massacre. In the earliest sites the two cannot be told apart: whole settlements lie in pits, skulls broken from behind, and the young women are often simply missing. The earliest epics describe the same world without blinking — in Homer, the sack of a city, the killing of its men, and the enslavement of its women is what victory means, and no one in the poem calls it a crime.
What changed, and when? This museum follows a single thread across ten millennia: the fate of the enemy’s non-combatants — the unarmed, the old, women, children — and, above all, what people said about that fate. The exhibits are the primary materials themselves: excavated bones, royal annals, epics and tragedies, chronicles, legal treatises, etchings, photographs, treaties. The arc they trace is not a straight line from savagery to law. It is a long argument, in which the voice of protest appears astonishingly early (a Sumerian lament, an Athenian tragedy), hardens into doctrine (Augustine, Vitoria, Grotius), collapses spectacularly in practice (Magdeburg, Guernica), and is finally written into positive law only within living memory — after the worst century of all.
Two cautions for the visitor. First, norms and practice are different things: this collection charts the norms, and practice falls short of them in every age, including ours. Second, the restraint of each age usually protected an in-group — fellow Greeks, fellow Christians, fellow “civilized nations” — and the story of the law of war is partly the story of that circle widening until, on paper at least, it closed around everyone.
Exhibits run in chronological order, numbered 1–45. Quotations are set large because they are the point: read the sources first, the curator’s notes second. Gilded cards mark the exhibits that most changed — or most nakedly revealed — the norms of their age. Use the rail to jump between galleries or filter by kind of artefact.
I
c. 8000 – c. 4500 BC
Before Moral Witness
Prehistory speaks only in bone. What the bone says is that the annihilation of whole communities — men, women, children — is older than writing, older than the state, older than any surviving word of protest. There is no voice in this gallery except the excavator’s.
The site at Nataruk, West Turkana, Kenya — once the fertile edge of a lagoon · Wikimedia Commons
Archaeologyc. 8000 BCExhibit 1
Nataruk: the oldest massacre
The earliest generally accepted evidence of warfare is not a battlefield but the killing of a band of foragers — including women and children.
Field findings
Remains of at least 27 individuals, unburied where they fell at the edge of a lagoon: men, women, at least six children.
Blunt-force trauma to skulls, obsidian bladelets embedded in bone, arrow lesions to neck and thorax.
One young woman, in the final weeks of pregnancy, found in a position suggesting her hands and feet had been bound.
The deaths at Nataruk are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war.
M. Mirazón Lahr et al., Nature 529 (2016)
Curator’s note
Nataruk matters because its victims were hunter-gatherers, not farmers defending stores — pushing organized inter-group killing back before agriculture. And it establishes the pattern this museum will trace for ten thousand years: from the very beginning, the targets of such violence were not warriors but communities. There is no distinction here between combatant and non-combatant, because the distinction did not exist to be violated.
Skull from the Talheim pit, breached by a polished stone adze · Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart · Wikimedia Commons
Archaeologyc. 5000 BCKey exhibitExhibit 2
The Talheim Death Pit
A whole farming village of Neolithic Europe, clubbed down from behind and thrown into a pit — with its young women missing.
Field findings
34 individuals — 16 children, 9 men, 7 women, 2 undetermined — tumbled without ritual into a single pit at a Linear Pottery (LBK) settlement near Heilbronn, Germany.
Most skulls breached by the characteristic D-shaped blow of the LBK adze — the farmers’ own woodworking tool — struck mostly from behind; arrow wounds on others.
Almost no defensive wounds on the forearms: the victims were fleeing or captive, not fighting.
A conspicuous deficit of young adult women in the pit — read by most researchers as evidence the killers spared and abducted them.
The facts recovered by ethnographers and archaeologists indicate unequivocally that primitive and prehistoric warfare was just as terrible and effective as the historic and civilized version.
Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization (1996), discussing Talheim among his key cases
Curator’s note
Talheim shattered the mid-20th-century image of the peaceful Neolithic. It is a key exhibit because it shows, seven thousand years before the laws of war, the full grammar of atrocity that later ages would codify, condemn, and repeat: the killing of the men and children, the abduction of the women as reproductive plunder. Sister sites — Schletz-Asparn in Austria, Schöneck-Kilianstädten in Hesse (where victims’ shinbones were systematically broken) — show the same missing-women signature. Homer’s Troy, in the bone record, is millennia older than Homer.
Skull from the Herxheim enclosure, Palatinate, Germany · Wikimedia Commons
Archaeologyc. 5000 BCExhibit 3
Herxheim: annihilation as ritual?
In ditches around one LBK village lie the butchered fragments of some five hundred people — a find so extreme that archaeologists still argue over what it was.
Field findings
Fragmented remains of at least 450–500 individuals of every age, deposited over a few decades in the enclosure ditches.
Bones broken while fresh, skulls shaped into calottes; cut-marks and treatment closely paralleling butchery — interpreted by the excavators as evidence of large-scale cannibalism, contested by others as mortuary ritual.
Pottery with the victims came from regions hundreds of kilometres away: whoever they were, they were brought or driven to Herxheim.
Curator’s note
Herxheim closes the prehistoric gallery on a deliberately uncomfortable note: the evidence is overwhelming, and its meaning is opaque. Massacre, human sacrifice, trophy-taking, funerary rite — the categories we would use to condemn or excuse are ours, not theirs. Whatever happened at Herxheim, around 5000 BC entire groups of men, women and children could be processed like carcasses at the centre of a farming community, and no surviving trace of the event suggests anyone thought it needed justifying. That is the baseline against which everything that follows must be measured.
II
c. 2000 – c. 620 BC
Annals & Epics: Atrocity Speaks
With writing, the destruction of cities acquires voices — and the first voices are not ashamed. Kings carve their massacres into palace walls as advertisement; epic poets narrate them as the natural shape of victory. Yet in this same gallery hangs the first lament, and the first written rules.
Cuneiform tablet of the Lament for Ur, Louvre · Wikimedia Commons
Literaturec. 2000 BCExhibit 4
The Lament for Ur
Four thousand years ago, after Elamite and Šimaški armies destroyed the city of Ur, a Sumerian poet wrote the oldest surviving cry of grief over the killing of a civilian population.
In its lofty gates, where they were wont to promenade, dead bodies were lying about; in its boulevards, where the feasts were celebrated, scattered they lay. In all its streets, where they were wont to promenade, dead bodies were lying about; in its places, where the festivities of the land took place, the people lay in heaps.
Lament for the Destruction of Ur, after the translation of Samuel Noah Kramer
Ur — its weak and its strong perished through hunger; mothers and fathers who did not leave their houses were overcome by fire; the young lying on their mothers’ laps, like fish were carried off by the waters.
Lament for the Destruction of Ur, after Kramer
Curator’s note
The lament assigns no war-crime and demands no justice — the disaster is framed as the gods’ decision to abandon the city. But it is the earliest text in this museum to insist that the suffering of the unarmed is worth recording as suffering: not booty counted, but children on their mothers’ laps. Moral witness begins here, two millennia before anyone argues that such things should not be done.
Lines of the Iliad on a wooden school board, Roman Egypt · British Museum · Wikimedia Commons
Literaturec. 750 BCKey exhibitExhibit 5
Homer, Iliad: the sack as the meaning of victory
The founding poem of European literature assumes, without argument, that a captured city’s men die and its women are divided among the victors — and gives that assumption an unforgettable human face.
Let us not spare a single one of them — not even the child unborn and in its mother’s womb; let not a man of them be left alive, but let all in Ilius perish, unheeded and forgotten.
Agamemnon to Menelaus, who was inclined to spare a suppliant — Iliad VI, after Samuel Butler. Homer adds that Menelaus was persuaded, for Agamemnon “spoke justly”
Let no man hasten to sail for home until he has first lain with the wife of some Trojan, and avenged the toil and sorrow that he has suffered for Helen.
Nestor, rallying the army — Iliad II, after Butler
Well do I know that the day will come when sacred Ilius shall be destroyed... yet it is not the coming woe of the Trojans that troubles me so much as yours, when some brazen-clad Achaean shall bear you away weeping, and rob you of the day of your freedom.
Hector to his wife Andromache — Iliad VI, after Butler
Curator’s note
Nothing in the poem condemns Agamemnon; extirpation is what a wronged king may rightly wish. And yet Homer devotes his most tender scenes to the people awaiting that fate — Andromache, the infant Astyanax frightened by his father’s helmet, Priam kissing the hands of his son’s killer. This is the key to the whole gallery: the practice is unquestioned, but the poet forces the audience to feel its cost. Greek tragedy, three centuries later, will need only to shift the camera. The women’s fate Homer describes — abduction into concubinage and slavery — is precisely the “missing women” of the Talheim pit, now with names.
Ashurnasirpal II in relief, Nimrud · Wikimedia Commons
Documentc. 870 BCExhibit 6
The Annals of Ashurnasirpal II: terror as state policy
An Assyrian king records the fate of rebel towns in the first person, on his palace walls, as a boast — atrocity against the defeated as deliberate, advertised statecraft.
I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me and draped their skins over the pile of corpses; some I spread out within the pile, some I erected on stakes upon the pile... I burnt many captives among them. I captured many troops alive: from some I cut off their arms and hands; from others I cut off their noses, ears and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops... I burnt their adolescent boys and girls.
Annals of Ashurnasirpal II, campaign against the rebel city of Suru and the lands of Nirbu, after the translation of A. K. Grayson
Curator’s note
The horror is the point: these inscriptions stood where subject envoys would read them, and the reliefs beside them illustrated the same scenes. Assyrian policy calculated that spectacular cruelty to captured populations — alongside mass deportation, which the empire practiced on a vast scale — made costly sieges unnecessary. It is the purest surviving statement of a norm later ages would invert: here, sparing the conquered would have been the thing requiring explanation.
The Lachish reliefs from Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh, 701 BC · British Museum · Wikimedia Commons
Art701 BCExhibit 7
The Lachish reliefs: deportation carved in stone
The oldest detailed picture of what conquest meant for a town’s inhabitants: families filing into exile with their bundles, past the impaled bodies of the town’s leaders.
Sennacherib, king of the world, king of Assyria, sat upon a throne and passed in review the booty taken from Lachish.
Epigraph carved above the king’s figure on the relief itself
200,150 people, great and small, male and female, horses, mules, asses, camels, cattle and sheep without number, I brought away from them and counted as spoil.
Sennacherib’s prism, on the same Judaean campaign, after the translation of D. D. Luckenbill
Curator’s note
Notice the grammar of the prism: the people are listed in one breath with the livestock, counted as spoil. Yet the reliefs are also strangely precise about the deportees — a family with a cart, a man leading a child by the hand. Assyrian mass deportation was not extermination; populations were capital, moved to where the empire needed labour. The reliefs hang here as art because they are that rarest thing: the perpetrator’s own commissioned image of a civilian population’s fate, meant to be admired.
Papyrus Fouad 266, one of the oldest surviving manuscripts of Deuteronomy · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine7th century BCExhibit 8
Deuteronomy 20: the first written rules of siege
The Hebrew Bible’s law of war is the earliest surviving attempt to regulate the fate of a besieged population — and it contains, side by side, both restraint and commanded annihilation.
When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it... And if it will make no peace with thee... thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: but the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city... shalt thou take unto thyself.
Deuteronomy 20:10–14 (King James Version) — the rule for “cities which are very far off from thee”
But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.
Deuteronomy 20:16 — the rule of ḥerem for the cities of Canaan
Thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them: for thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down (for the tree of the field is man’s life) to employ them in the siege.
Deuteronomy 20:19 — the protection of fruit trees, seed of the later doctrine of proportionality
Curator’s note
Everything the next two and a half millennia will argue about is already here in miniature. There are rules — an offer of terms must precede assault; women and children of distant cities are spared (as property, not as persons); even trees have standing. And there is the exception — against the theologically designated enemy, annihilation is not merely permitted but commanded. The distinction between the normal enemy and the enemy outside all protection will echo through the Crusades, the wars of religion, and into the twentieth century.
III
416 BC – AD 98
Classical Antiquity: The Argument Begins
Greece and Rome practiced the sack with the same thoroughness as their predecessors — andrapodismos, the killing of the men and enslavement of the rest, was a recognized institution. What is new is the argument: a historian who stages power’s naked logic, a playwright who puts the victims on stage the year after a massacre, philosophers who begin to say not everyone is your enemy.
Thucydides · Pushkin Museum cast · Wikimedia Commons
Document416 & 413 BCKey exhibitExhibit 9
Thucydides: Melos, and the schoolboys of Mycalessus
The first historian to make the destruction of the defenceless a problem for the reader — once through the cold logic of the strong, once through undisguised horror.
Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
The Athenian envoys to the magistrates of Melos — History of the Peloponnesian War V, trans. Richard Crawley
The Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves.
The sequel, reported in a single sentence — V.116, trans. Crawley
The Thracians burst into Mycalessus, sacked the houses and temples, and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither youth nor age, but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and women... they even fell upon a school full of boys, the largest in the place, into which the children had just entered, and massacred them all. No calamity greater than this, none more sudden or more terrible, ever befell a whole city.
The massacre at Mycalessus, 413 BC — VII.29, after Crawley
Curator’s note
The two passages must be read together. At Melos, Thucydides lets Athenian realism speak uninterrupted — then records the massacre in one clause, and moves on; the flatness is the indictment. At Mycalessus, a small Boeotian town destroyed by barbarian mercenaries the Athenians could no longer afford to pay, his composure breaks: the schoolhouse detail, unique in his austere history, is chosen to horrify. A norm is visible in the horror — this, even in war, is felt to be beyond the line — and visible too is the line’s weakness: Athens itself had voted the same fate for Mytilene, reversing itself by one ship’s margin, and had inflicted it on Melos and Scione.
Astyanax torn from Andromache — the scene Euripides forces his audience to watch · Wikimedia Commons
Literature415 BCKey exhibitExhibit 10
Euripides, The Trojan Women: the victims take the stage
Months after Athens massacred Melos, Euripides staged the sack of Troy entirely from the perspective of its enslaved women — European literature’s first sustained act of moral protest against the treatment of the conquered.
How are ye blind, ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast temples to desolation, and lay waste tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie the ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die!
Poseidon, prologue — The Trojan Women, trans. Gilbert Murray
Ye have found and feared this child, a babe so young; and Troy has fallen, and ye slay him, lest he raise his fallen city!... O ye have found an anguish that outstrips all tortures — thrown from the very towers his father built.
Andromache, as the herald takes her son Astyanax to be flung from the walls — after Murray
Curator’s note
The play won second prize; Athens watched itself accused and gave the accusation a chorus. Whether or not Euripides wrote with Melos in view — the dates are tight — his audience had just voted for exactly what the play mourns. Nothing changed in Athenian policy. But The Trojan Women established a form that runs straight to Goya and Picasso: the artwork that answers a massacre by showing only its victims. Twenty-four centuries later it is still staged in wartime, needing no adaptation.
Opening of the Republic, Codex Parisinus graecus 1807 · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrinec. 375 BCExhibit 11
Plato, Republic V: not the whole people is your enemy
The first European philosophical argument that war should distinguish the guilty few from the innocent many — offered, tellingly, only for wars between Greeks.
They will not devastate Hellas, nor will they burn houses, nor ever suppose that the whole population of a city — men, women, and children — are equally their enemies, for they know that the guilt of war is always confined to a few persons and that the many are their friends.
Republic V, 471a–b, trans. Benjamin Jowett — Socrates legislating for his ideal city’s wars against fellow Hellenes
Curator’s note
Here, for the first time in this museum, is the intellectual core of the entire later law of war: collective belonging is not guilt. But mark the boundary — Socrates explicitly reserves this restraint for wars among Greeks; against barbarians, the old rules stand. The circle of protected humanity is drawn, and it is drawn small. Most of the next two thousand years of moral progress on this question consists of successive enlargements of Plato’s circle — Christians extending it to fellow Christians, Vitoria to Turks and Indians, the Geneva Conventions to everyone.
Ashoka in procession, relief from the Sanchi stupa · Wikimedia Commons
Documentc. 260 BCExhibit 12
Ashoka’s Thirteenth Rock Edict: a conqueror repents
Unique in the ancient world: an emperor publishes, across his own realm, his remorse for what his conquest did to a civilian population.
Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, conquered the Kalingas eight years after his coronation. One hundred and fifty thousand were deported, one hundred thousand were killed, and many more died from other causes. After the Kalingas had been conquered, Beloved-of-the-Gods came to feel a strong inclination towards the Dhamma... and deep remorse for having conquered the Kalingas.
Thirteenth Major Rock Edict, after the translation of Ven. S. Dhammika
Indeed, Beloved-of-the-Gods is deeply pained by the killing, dying and deportation that take place when an unconquered country is conquered... even those who are not affected suffer when they see friends, acquaintances, companions and relatives affected. These misfortunes befall all, and this pains Beloved-of-the-Gods.
The same edict — grief extended even to the bereaved, not only the dead
Curator’s note
This gallery’s cross-cultural exhibit, and its most startling. Assyrian kings carved their cruelty as boast; Ashoka carved his as confession, in public, forever. Cynics note he repented only after completing the conquest and never returned Kalinga. True — and yet no Greek or Roman ruler produced anything like it, and the edict’s insight that suffering radiates outward from every casualty anticipates arguments not made in Europe until the Enlightenment. Buddhist and Hindu traditions of restraint in war (the Mahābhārata’s rules against striking the unarmed among them) form a parallel history this museum can only gesture toward.
Lionel Royer, Vercingetorix Throws Down His Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar (1899) · Wikimedia Commons
Document52 BCExhibit 13
Caesar, Gallic War: massacre in the administrative voice
Caesar reports the annihilation of the town of Avaricum — forty thousand dead — in the same even tone he uses for grain logistics, in a book written to burnish his reputation at Rome.
The soldiers, incited by the massacre at Cenabum and the fatigue of the siege, spared neither those worn out with age, nor women, nor children. Of the whole number, which was about forty thousand, scarcely eight hundred... reached Vercingetorix in safety.
Commentaries on the Gallic War VII.28, after the translation of W. A. McDevitte
Curator’s note
The revealing thing is what Caesar thinks needs explaining: not the killing of women and children, but only his soldiers’ motive (revenge, fatigue) — a note of context, not apology. Roman practice institutionalized the sack; Polybius describes the deliberate Roman custom of killing every living thing in a stormed city, “even the dogs cut in half,” precisely to spread terror. At Uxellodunum Caesar cut the hands off every man who had borne arms and let them live as advertisement. All of this circulated in Rome as evidence of virtus, and the senate voted him thanksgivings. The moral vocabulary existed — see the next exhibit — but it did not govern.
Cicero · Capitoline Museums · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine44 BCExhibit 14
Cicero, De Officiis: duties even toward the enemy
Writing in the year of Caesar’s assassination, Cicero distills the Roman jurists’ scattered scruples into the first Western statement that war itself is governed by duties.
There are certain duties that we owe even to those who have wronged us. For there is a limit to retribution and to punishment.
On Duties I.33–34, trans. Walter Miller
The only excuse for going to war is that we may live in peace unharmed; and when the victory is won, we should spare those who have not been blood-thirsty and barbarous in their warfare.
On Duties I.35, trans. Miller
Curator’s note
Cicero’s limits concern mainly the defeated who surrender — he praises Rome’s reception of conquered peoples, while accepting the destruction of Carthage. There is no doctrine of the non-combatant here. But the sentence “there is a limit” is load-bearing for everything downstream: Augustine will read it, Aquinas will read Augustine, and the scholastics of Salamanca will read Aquinas. This little manual for his son is the aqueduct through which the classical idea of restraint reached Christian Europe.
Francesco Hayez, The Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (1867) · Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice · Wikimedia Commons
DocumentAD 70Exhibit 15
Josephus: the destruction of Jerusalem
A survivor on the Roman side describes what the fall of a great city meant for its population — the fullest eyewitness account of a sack to survive from antiquity.
They poured into the streets sword in hand, and slew without distinction all whom they caught, and burnt the houses with all who had fled into them. Often, when they burst in to plunder, they found whole families dead... They ran every one through whom they met, and obstructed the very lanes with the dead bodies, and made the whole city run down with blood, to such a degree that the fire of many houses was quenched with these men’s blood.
The Jewish War VI, after the translation of William Whiston
Curator’s note
Josephus — a Judaean commander turned Roman client, writing under the patronage of the very emperors whose army did this — must blame the catastrophe on Jewish rebel factions, and largely does. That makes his moments of plain grief the more telling. His account also preserves the mechanics later ages would recognize: the distinction Titus drew (kill those who resist, enslave the rest) collapsing in practice; soldiers beyond control; famine doing more killing than the sword. Rabbinic Judaism, born from these ruins, would develop its own deep tradition of regret over war’s cruelty.
A Roman senator gives the empire’s victims the most quotable indictment of imperial violence ever written — in the mouth of a Caledonian chieftain his father-in-law defeated.
Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land... If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion... To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.
The chieftain Calgacus before battle — Agricola 30, trans. Church & Brodribb
Curator’s note
Calgacus almost certainly never said it; Tacitus composed the speech, as ancient historians did. That is what makes it an exhibit: a consummate insider of the world’s greatest military power could imagine its wars from below, articulate the victims’ case at full strength, and publish it — and Rome applauded the style and changed nothing. The gap between moral perception and institutional consequence, visible from Euripides on, here reaches its classical extreme. Closing that gap is the entire remaining business of this museum.
IV
AD 410 – 1054
Late Antiquity: Sanctuary and Anathema
Two religions inherit the ancient world’s wars and begin, unevenly, to bind them. A sack in which the churches were spared astonishes; a caliph’s successor issues marching orders that read like a modern code; and the medieval Church invents the first institution — not merely the first argument — for protecting the unarmed.
Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, The Sack of Rome by the Barbarians in 410 (1890) · Wikimedia Commons
DocumentAD 410Exhibit 17
Jerome: the world broke at Rome
News of Alaric’s sack of Rome reaches Jerome in his cell in Bethlehem; his letters preserve the shock of a civilization discovering it could be a victim.
The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken; nay more, famine was beforehand with the sword, and but few citizens were left to be made captives... My voice sticks in my throat; and, as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance.
Jerome, Letter 127, to Principia, trans. W. H. Fremantle
Curator’s note
By late antique standards the three-day Visigothic sack was restrained — Alaric’s Christian Goths declared the basilicas of Peter and Paul inviolable refuges, and contemporaries marvelled at it. The event’s importance here is the reaction: for the first time in this museum, the literate world treats the sufferings of a sacked city’s population as a theological crisis demanding explanation. Pagans blamed the abandoned gods; Christians had to answer. The answer, composed over the next sixteen years, is the next exhibit.
Philippe de Champaigne, Saint Augustine (c. 1645) · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine413–426Key exhibitExhibit 18
Augustine, City of God: the just war is born mourning
Answering the sack of Rome, Augustine founds the tradition that war can be just — and simultaneously insists that even just war is a thing to grieve.
All the spoiling, then, which Rome was exposed to in the recent calamity — all the slaughter, plundering, burning, and misery — was the result of the custom of war. But what was novel was that savage barbarians showed themselves in so gentle a guise, that the largest churches were chosen and set apart to be filled with the people to whom quarter was given, and that in them none were slain, from them none forcibly dragged.
The City of God I.7, trans. Marcus Dods
For it is the wrongdoing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars; and this wrongdoing, even though it gave rise to no war, would still be matter of grief to man because it is man’s wrongdoing. Let every one, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery.
The City of God XIX.7, trans. Dods
Curator’s note
Augustine’s twin legacy shapes everything after. First: war is not outside morality — it requires just cause, right authority, right intention; this framework, systematized by Aquinas, becomes Europe’s official theory of war for a millennium. Second, and double-edged: by locating justice in intention, Augustine left the treatment of populations under-specified — a just cause could sanctify terrible means, as the Crusades would show. Note also what he certifies as novel: sanctuary observed in a sack. The exception of 410 is the seed of the rule the Peace of God will try to grow.
Calligraphic roundel with the name of Abu Bakr · Hagia Sophia, Istanbul · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrinec. 632Exhibit 19
Abu Bakr’s ten commands: an Islamic law of war
The first caliph’s instructions to his army bound soldiers to spare the unarmed — one of the earliest military codes of restraint anywhere, and the fountainhead of a rich Islamic jurisprudence of war.
Do not act treacherously; do not mutilate; do not kill a child, nor a woman, nor an aged man. Do not cut down fruit-bearing trees; do not destroy an inhabited place; do not slaughter sheep or camels except for food; do not burn palm trees... You will pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services: leave them alone.
Instructions attributed to Abu Bakr for the army sent to Syria, as transmitted in early Islamic tradition (al-Muwaṭṭa’; al-Ṭabarī)
Curator’s note
The echo of Deuteronomy’s fruit trees is audible, but the command not to kill women, children and the old is stated flatly, as soldiers’ discipline rather than theology. Classical Islamic jurists — al-Shaybānī’s eighth-century Siyar above all — built from such traditions a detailed law of war centuries before Europe’s equivalent. Practice diverged from norm here as everywhere (this museum’s Crusade and Mongol exhibits show Muslim populations as victims, and conquests under the same banner produced their own sacks). But as doctrine, this text stands beside Plato’s circle — and draws it wider.
Romanesque capital depicting the Tregua Domini — the Truce of God · San Andrés, Revilla de Collazos · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine989–1054Key exhibitExhibit 20
The Peace and Truce of God
Amid the private wars of a collapsing Carolingian order, church councils place the unarmed — peasants, clergy, merchants, women — under formal protection, on pain of damnation: Europe’s first institution of civilian immunity.
If anyone robs a peasant or any other poor person of a sheep, an ox, an ass, a cow, a goat, or a pig, let him be anathema.
Canon of the Council of Charroux, 989 — the founding act of the Peace of God
No Christian should kill another Christian, for whoever kills a Christian undoubtedly sheds the blood of Christ.
Council of Narbonne, 1054
Curator’s note
The genius of the Peace movement was to change the question. Not is this war just? but who may never be touched, whatever the war? — protection attached to categories of person, enforced by relics, oaths and excommunication, later by sworn peace militias, and extended by the Truce of God to protected times (Lent, feast days, eventually Thursday to Monday). This is the direct ancestor of the modern principle of distinction. Its limit is stamped on its face: the protected person is the fellow Christian. Preaching at Clermont in 1095, Urban II invoked the Peace at home — and launched its violence outward. The next gallery shows where it landed.
V
1099 – 1410
Holy War and the Law of Arms
The paradox of the Middle Ages: an age that exulted in the massacre of unbelievers was also the age that wept over Limoges, recoiled at the Mongols, and produced — in the professional law of arms — the first secular handbooks protecting the labourer in the field.
Émile Signol, Taking of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, 15 July 1099 (1847) · Versailles · Wikimedia Commons
Document1099Key exhibitExhibit 21
Jerusalem, 1099: massacre as miracle
When the First Crusade stormed Jerusalem, its own chroniclers described the slaughter of the city’s Muslims and Jews not with embarrassment but with liturgical joy.
In the Temple and porch of Solomon men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.
Raymond of Aguilers, eyewitness — Historia Francorum, trans. A. C. Krey
In the Masjid al-Aqsa the Franks slaughtered more than seventy thousand people, among them a large number of imams and Muslim scholars, devout and ascetic men who had left their homelands to live lives of pious seclusion in the Holy Place.
Ibn al-Athir, al-Kāmil fī’l-ta’rīkh, trans. after Francesco Gabrieli — the number is inflated, the grief is not
Curator’s note
Read Raymond against the Peace of God, one gallery back: the same Church that anathematized the robbing of a Christian peasant’s pig here celebrates wading in unbelievers’ blood. This is Deuteronomy’s dual structure returned in force — inside the circle, protection; outside it, ḥerem. The exhibit is key because it displays the mechanism by which sincere, rule-rich moral cultures license atrocity: not the absence of norms, but a boundary drawn around them. Modern scholarship debates the death toll, not the exultation, which is the crusaders’ own.
Massacre of the Albigensians, from a chronicle of Saint-Denis · British Library · Wikimedia Commons
Document1209Exhibit 22
Béziers: “Kill them; the Lord knows His own”
Opening the crusade against Christian heretics in Languedoc, a papal legate reports the indiscriminate killing of a whole town to Rome — as good news.
Our men, sparing no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, put to the sword almost twenty thousand people. After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt, as divine vengeance raged marvellously.
Arnaud Amalric, papal legate, reporting to Pope Innocent III, August 1209, trans. after W. A. & M. D. Sibly
Fearing that the heretics would pretend to be Catholics... they said to the abbot: “Lord, what shall we do? We cannot distinguish the good from the wicked.” The abbot said: “Kill them. For the Lord knows those that are His own.”
Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum (c. 1223) — the story as told a generation later; its historicity is debated, its plausibility to contemporaries is the point
Curator’s note
Béziers extends the crusade’s logic inward: the protected circle of “fellow Christians” could be redrawn by decree, and a Christian town’s women and children placed outside it by suspicion of heresy. The legate’s own letter — no hostile source — records the killing of Catholics along with Cathars in the church of Mary Magdalene where they had taken sanctuary. The infamous quip may be legend, but Amalric’s mirabiliter, “marvellously,” is authentic, and chills more.
The Mongols at Legnica, 1241, bearing the head of Duke Henry II — Legend of Saint Hedwig (1353) · Wikimedia Commons
Document1220s–1241Exhibit 23
The Mongol terror, seen from both sides of the world
When total-annihilation warfare returned to the old world’s cities, Christian and Muslim writers alike registered it as something beyond the categories of ordinary war — proof that norms of restraint, however violated, now existed to be shocked.
Swarming like locusts over the face of the earth, they have brought terrible devastation to the eastern parts, laying them waste with fire and carnage... For they are inhuman and of the nature of beasts, rather to be called monsters than men, thirsting after and drinking blood.
Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, on the Mongol invasion of Europe (1240), trans. after J. A. Giles
For even Antichrist will spare such as follow him, though he destroy those who oppose him; but these spared none, slaying women, men and children, ripping open pregnant women and killing unborn babes.
Ibn al-Athir on the Mongol destruction of Khurasan (1220s), trans. after D. S. Richards — written, he says, while “shrinking from the mention of this catastrophe” for years
Curator’s note
At Merv, Nishapur and Baghdad the Mongols revived, at unprecedented scale, the Assyrian calculus: exterminate a resisting city so the next one surrenders — and chroniclers report towers of skulls and killing counted by the hundred thousand. The exhibit’s subject, though, is the reaction. Two civilizations that routinely sacked each other’s towns discovered, in the Mongols, a violence they experienced as categorically inhuman. Measured horror of this kind is itself historical evidence: you cannot be scandalized without a norm to scandalize. (The Mongols had their own code — cities that submitted promptly were generally spared — a terror-economy Europeans did not perceive.)
The sack of Limoges, 1370 — illumination from Froissart’s Chroniques · Wikimedia Commons
Document1370Exhibit 24
Froissart at Limoges: chivalry weeps and kills
The chronicler of chivalry records the Black Prince’s massacre of a rebellious town — and, for the first time in a soldier’s chronicle, mourns it at length.
It was a most melancholy business; for all ranks, ages and sexes cast themselves on their knees before the prince, begging for mercy; but he was so inflamed with passion and revenge that he listened to none, but all were put to the sword, wherever they could be found, even those who were not guilty... upwards of three thousand men, women and children were put to death that day. God have mercy on their souls, for they were veritable martyrs.
Jean Froissart, Chroniques, on the sack of Limoges, trans. after Thomas Johnes
Curator’s note
The law of arms of Froissart’s day was real but property-shaped: a town taken by storm after refusing terms was lawful prey — the rule under which Limoges suffered, and under which Henry V would later threaten Harfleur. Froissart does not say the prince acted illegally; he says the thing was pitiful and the dead were martyrs — a moral judgment breaking through a legal one. Chivalry’s protections, moreover, ran along class lines: chroniclers who wept for captured knights held for ransom barely noticed the routine chevauchée, the deliberate devastation of peasant country that was the Hundred Years’ War’s daily method. The next exhibit is the age’s answer to exactly that.
Christine de Pizan lecturing · British Library, Harley MS 4431 · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine1387 & 1410Exhibit 25
Bonet and Christine de Pizan: the labourer is secure
Two civilian writers turn the scattered customs of the law of arms into handbooks — and state plainly that war against the poor is not war at all.
The ox-herd, and all husbandmen, and ploughmen with their oxen, when they are carrying on their business, and equally when they are going to it or returning from it, are secure, according to written law.
Honoré Bonet, The Tree of Battles (c. 1387), trans. G. W. Coopland
In these days all wars are directed against poor labouring people and against their goods and chattels. I do not call that war, but it seems to me to be pillage and robbery.
Bonet, The Tree of Battles — the complaint that made the rule necessary
Curator’s note
Bonet, a Benedictine prior writing after the routiers had devastated France, digested the jurists into French a soldier could read. Christine de Pizan’s Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry (1410) carried the material further — a laywoman instructing knights that the honourable man of arms must protect women, children, the aged and the poor, and her book was printed for English captains a century later. Between them they mark the moment civilian immunity became professional doctrine, taught to practitioners rather than preached at them — even as the practice of the age’s armies mocked it. Shakespeare’s Henry V, threatening Harfleur with “your naked infants spitted upon pikes,” shows how live the older rule remained.
VI
1527 – 1633
Sack & Scruple: The Wars of Religion
The century in which European warfare against civilians reached an early-modern nadir — Rome sacked by a Christian emperor’s army, Magdeburg erased — is the same century in which theologians and jurists built, almost finished, the modern doctrine of non-combatant immunity. The two facts are not a coincidence: the doctrine was written in the fire’s light.
Johannes Lingelbach, Sack of Rome, 1527 (17th century) · Wikimedia Commons
Document1527Exhibit 26
The Sack of Rome, 1527
Unpaid imperial troops — Catholic Spaniards and Lutheran landsknechts together — subject the capital of Christendom to months of murder, torture and ransom, and Europe’s humanists describe it as the end of a world.
Truly this is not the ruin of one city but of the whole world.
Erasmus of Rotterdam, on receiving the news from Rome
Curator’s note
Contemporary accounts — Luigi Guicciardini’s above all — dwell on tortures inflicted on non-combatants to extract hidden money, the systematic violation of nuns, the desecration of relics: perhaps ten thousand dead and the city’s population halved within a year. What makes 1527 an exhibit is who did it: not Mongols, not infidels, but the army of the Holy Roman Emperor, mutinying inside the moral capital of its own civilization. The shock helped push a generation of Catholic thinkers toward the question the next exhibit answers: if Christian arms could do this, what — if anything — did the just-war tradition actually forbid?
Francisco de Vitoria · San Esteban, Salamanca · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine1539Key exhibitExhibit 27
Vitoria, De Jure Belli: innocence crosses the religious frontier
Lecturing at Salamanca on Spain’s wars, Vitoria states the principle the whole tradition had been circling: the deliberate killing of the innocent is never lawful — and “innocent” includes the enemy’s children, even infidel children.
The deliberate slaughter of the innocent is never lawful in itself... hence it follows that even in war against the Turks it is not allowable to kill children. This is clear, because they are innocent. Aye, and the same holds with regard to the women... and also harmless agricultural folk, and also the rest of the peaceable civilian population.
Francisco de Vitoria, De Jure Belli (1539), trans. J. P. Bate
Sometimes it is right, in virtue of collateral circumstances, to slay the innocent even knowingly, as when a fortress or city is stormed in a just war, although it is known that there are a number of innocent people in it... would it be right to storm it, if it could not otherwise be taken? Certainly — but with this caution: the evil effects of the war do not outweigh the good.
De Jure Belli — the doctrine of double effect applied to siege warfare, trans. after Bate
Curator’s note
Both halves matter. The first breaks Plato’s boundary for good: innocence, not membership, is what protects — Turks, and (in Vitoria’s companion lectures) the Indians of the Americas, stand inside the circle. The second invents the modern world’s most consequential loophole: incidental killing of the known-innocent, if proportionate, is permitted. Every later argument about siege, blockade and bombing runs through this pair of sentences. The School of Salamanca — Vitoria, Suárez, and the Italian Protestant Gentili after them — made the law of war a subject; Grotius will make it a system.
Michiel van Mierevelt, Hugo Grotius (1631) · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine1625Key exhibitExhibit 28
Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace
Written in exile as the Thirty Years’ War began to devour Germany, Grotius’s treatise founds international law — driven, he says on the first pages, by disgust.
I saw prevailing throughout the Christian world a licence in making war of which even barbarous nations would have been ashamed; recourse being had to arms for slight reasons or no reason; and when arms were once taken up, all reverence for divine and human law was thrown away, just as if men were thenceforth authorized to commit all crimes without restraint.
Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Prolegomena §28, trans. F. W. Kelsey
One must take care, so far as is possible, to prevent the death of innocent persons, even by accident... Children are always to be spared; women, unless they have been guilty of an extremely serious offence; and old men.
De Jure Belli ac Pacis III.11, trans. after Kelsey — from the chapter of temperamenta, the “moderations” of war
Curator’s note
Grotius’s method is the innovation: he concedes that the bare “law of nations” as practiced permits horrors (killing captives, enslaving populations), then piles chapter upon chapter of temperamenta — restraints that justice, humanity and prudence demand beyond what custom requires — grounding them in a natural law that binds even if God did not exist, and thus binds across confessional lines. That move made restraint arguable between Catholic and Protestant belligerents who shared no church. Gustavus Adolphus reportedly slept with the book under his pillow; what his war did anyway hangs opposite.
Peeter Meulener, The Siege of Magdeburg (1631) · Nationalmuseum, Stockholm · Wikimedia Commons
Document1631Exhibit 29
Magdeburg, 1631: the atrocity that named itself
The destruction of Magdeburg — some twenty thousand dead of thirty thousand inhabitants — became the Thirty Years’ War’s emblem, and gave German a verb: magdeburgisieren, to magdeburgize.
Then was there naught but beating and burning, plundering, torture, and murder... In this frenzied rage, the great and splendid city that had stood like a fair princess in the land was now, in its hour of direst need and unutterable distress and woe, given over to the flames, and thousands of innocent men, women, and children, in the midst of a horrible din of heartrending shrieks and cries, were tortured and put to death in so cruel and shameful a manner that no words would suffice to describe, nor no tears to bewail it.
Otto von Guericke, citizen of Magdeburg (later inventor of the vacuum pump), eyewitness — trans. in J. H. Robinson, Readings in European History
I believe that over twenty thousand souls were lost. It is certain that no more terrible work and divine punishment has been seen since the destruction of Jerusalem. All of our soldiers became rich. God with us.
Count Pappenheim, commander of the storming imperial troops, in his report
Curator’s note
Set the two voices side by side: the burgher’s grief, and the general’s ledger closing with a pious motto. Pappenheim is no Assyrian — he must frame the horror as divine punishment, an act of God his own troops merely executed; even perpetrators now reach for exculpation. Magdeburg circulated through Europe in hundreds of pamphlets — an early media atrocity — and the war’s cumulative catastrophe (a third of Germany’s population dead of violence, famine and plague) discredited confessional war so thoroughly that the peace of 1648 rebuilt Europe around sovereign states. Restraining their wars is the next gallery’s subject.
Jacques Callot, The Hanging, plate 11 of Les Grandes Misères de la guerre (1633) · Wikimedia Commons
Art1633Key exhibitExhibit 30
Callot, The Miseries of War: art turns on the soldier
Eighteen small etchings from occupied Lorraine — pillage, burning villages, reprisals, ruined peasants — the first great print series to make war’s effect on the population its whole subject.
Finally these infamous and abandoned thieves, hanging from this tree like wretched fruit, show that crime, horrible and black species, is itself the instrument of shame and vengeance, and that it is the fate of vicious men to experience the justice of Heaven sooner or later.
Engraved verse caption beneath The Hanging, trans. from the French of the abbé de Marolles
Curator’s note
Callot’s sequence is a moral machine: soldiers enlist, plunder a farmhouse, torch a village, violate a convent — then swing from the tree, are broken on the wheel, are shot. The caption’s moralizing (crime punished) sits over images whose sympathy belongs unmistakably to the peasants; in the final plates the maimed veterans themselves join the beggars by the road. Made while Richelieu’s armies occupied Callot’s native Lorraine, the series established the visual genre — war seen from under the horse’s hooves — that Goya would radicalize and Picasso complete. Its exhibits hang, so to speak, throughout the rest of this museum.
VII
1758 – 1907
Reason & Codification
The Enlightenment reconceives war as a duel between states, from which the people stand apart; the nineteenth century writes that idea into military codes and treaties. For a moment — a European, professional-army moment — the norm and the practice nearly touch.
Emer de Vattel (1714–1767) · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine1758Exhibit 31
Vattel, The Law of Nations: enemies who make no resistance
The century’s standard handbook of international law — carried by diplomats and quoted by American founders — states civilian immunity as settled, almost accomplished, law.
Women, children, feeble old men, and sick persons, come under the description of enemies; and we have certain rights over them, inasmuch as they belong to the nation with whom we are at war... But these are enemies who make no resistance; and consequently we have no right to maltreat their persons or use any violence against them, much less to take away their lives.
Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations III, §145 (1758)
At present, war is carried on by regular troops: the people, the peasants, the citizens, take no part in it, and generally have nothing to fear from the sword of the enemy.
The Law of Nations III, §147 — describing, and idealizing, the “lace wars” of his century
Curator’s note
Vattel’s serene “at present” records a real achievement: the disciplined, magazine-fed professional armies of the eighteenth century did touch civilians far less than the Thirty Years’ War’s foraging hordes — partly from humanity, partly because plunder wrecked discipline and supply. But the achievement was structural, and structure would change: the French Revolution’s levée en masse made the whole nation a belligerent again, and Napoleon’s wars — see Goya, opposite — buried Vattel’s “at present” within a generation. Norms that ride on convenient structures die with them; the century’s end would have to write the norm into law that survives structure.
Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1753) · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine1762Key exhibitExhibit 32
Rousseau: war is between states, not men
In four sentences of The Social Contract, Rousseau gives the civilian’s immunity its enduring philosophical foundation — the one on which the Geneva Conventions still rest.
War then is a relation, not between man and man, but between State and State, and individuals are enemies only accidentally, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of their country, but as its defenders.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract I.4 (1762), trans. G. D. H. Cole
The object of the war being the destruction of the hostile State, the other side has a right to kill its defenders while they are bearing arms; but as soon as they lay them down and surrender, they cease to be enemies or instruments of the enemy, and become once more merely men, whose life no one has any right to take.
The Social Contract I.4, trans. Cole
Curator’s note
Where Vitoria and Grotius protected the innocent as a class of persons, Rousseau redefines the war itself: enmity attaches to the role of combatant, not the human being — put down the rifle and the enmity evaporates. This is the cleanest statement ever given of the principle of distinction, and nineteenth-century jurists treated the passage as scripture. Its weakness is its premise: wars between compact states, fought by uniformed defenders. Peoples’ wars, partisans, revolutions and terrorism — everything where the fighter and the population interpenetrate — strain the elegant dichotomy, then and now.
Francisco de Goya, Por una navaja (“For carrying a knife”), plate 34 of The Disasters of War (1810–15, published 1863) · Wikimedia Commons
Art1810–1820Key exhibitExhibit 33
Goya, The Disasters of War
Eighty-two private etchings of the Peninsular War — famine, reprisal, rape, execution, and the crowds they happened to — captioned in the artist’s own scrawled voice. The titles are the text.
Yo lo vi. — I saw it.
Goya’s caption to plate 44, fleeing villagers
No se puede mirar. — One cannot look at this.
Caption to plate 26, women and men awaiting execution
Por una navaja. — For carrying a knife.
Caption to plate 34, above: a civilian garrotted, the offending knife hung around his neck
Curator’s note
Goya, court painter to the Spanish crown, witnessed the French occupation and the guerrilla it provoked, and recorded both sides’ atrocities without heroism, uniform-worship or perspective’s consolations — the victims fill the frame; the executioners are often faceless machinery. He never published the series; it appeared only in 1863, thirty-five years after his death, when it detonated through European art. Yo lo vi founds the ethics of the modern war witness — the photographer’s ethics before photography — and plate 34’s occupation “justice,” death for a pocketknife, indicts the reprisal logic that would return in Belgium in 1914 and Europe in 1941–44.
Henry Dunant, around the time of Solferino · Wikimedia Commons
Document1862–1864Exhibit 34
Dunant, A Memory of Solferino: “Tutti fratelli”
A Genevan businessman stumbles onto the aftermath of the battle of Solferino, watches village women nurse the wounded of both armies, and writes the book that creates the Red Cross and the first Geneva Convention.
The women of Castiglione, seeing that I made no distinction between nationalities, followed my example, showing the same kindness to all these men whose origins were so different, and all of whom were foreigners to them. “Tutti fratelli,” they repeated feelingly. All are brothers.
Henry Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (1862)
Would it not be possible, in time of peace and quiet, to form relief societies for the purpose of having care given to the wounded in wartime by zealous, devoted and thoroughly qualified volunteers?
A Memory of Solferino — the closing question that became the Red Cross (1863) and the Geneva Convention (1864)
Curator’s note
Solferino’s wounded were soldiers, not civilians — but Dunant’s machinery is the hinge of this museum’s last act. He proved that humanitarian protection could be organized: a permanent neutral body (the ICRC), a treaty signed in advance of war, an emblem. Once that architecture existed for wounded soldiers, extending it — to prisoners (1929), and at last to civilians (1949) — became a matter of catastrophic lessons and diplomatic time. The peasant women of Castiglione, refusing the combatant/enemy distinction altogether, supplied the movement its motto.
Francis Lieber · Brady–Handy collection, Library of Congress · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine1863Key exhibitExhibit 35
The Lieber Code: the norm becomes an order
In the middle of the American Civil War, Lincoln issues General Orders No. 100 — the first modern military code binding an army in the field to spare the unarmed, drafted by a Prussian-American professor who had fought at Waterloo.
As civilization has advanced during the last centuries, so has likewise steadily advanced, especially in war on land, the distinction between the private individual belonging to a hostile country and the hostile country itself, with its men in arms. The principle has been more and more acknowledged that the unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honor as much as the exigencies of war will admit.
Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field (Lieber Code), Article 22
All wanton violence committed against persons in the invaded country... all rape, wounding, maiming, or killing of such inhabitants, are prohibited under the penalty of death.
Lieber Code, Article 44
Curator’s note
The Code’s significance is its address: not princes or philosophers but soldiers, with courts-martial attached. It is unsentimental — it permits devastating “military necessity,” starvation of besieged towns, and much that later law forbids (Sherman’s marches proceeded under it) — and Article 44’s death penalty for rape marks how far it also reached. European armies copied it within a decade; the Hague Conventions grew directly from it. Note the article’s historical self-consciousness: Lieber, who knew this museum’s earlier galleries well, writes the norm’s own history into the order enforcing it.
The First Peace Conference, The Hague, 1899 · Imperial War Museum · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine1899 & 1907Exhibit 36
The Hague Conventions and the Martens Clause
The powers codify the laws of land war by treaty — and, where the rules run out, a Russian jurist’s clause places populations under the protection of “the laws of humanity” itself.
Until a more complete code of the laws of war is issued... populations and belligerents remain under the protection and empire of the principles of international law, as they result from the usages established between civilized nations, from the laws of humanity, and the requirements of the public conscience.
The Martens Clause, preamble to the Hague Convention (II) of 1899
The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.
Hague Regulations (1907), Article 25 — “by whatever means” added with airships already in mind
Curator’s note
Two limits shadowed the achievement. The rules bound “civilized nations” toward each other — in the same decades, colonial wars (the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904–08 among them) proceeded outside the circle, Plato’s old boundary redrawn on racial lines. And the code protected civilians only indirectly, through rules about sieges, occupation and undefended towns; no treaty yet said plainly that the civilian population may not be made the object of attack. The gap between “undefended” and “defended” towns would be blown open from the air within a decade — the last gallery walks through the breach.
VIII
1914 – 1977
Total War and the Civilian Century
The century of the codified norm was also the century in which more civilians died in war than in all previous history — by massacre, genocide, blockade and bombing. Out of that abyss came everything the modern law of war now says about the people who do not fight: the named crime, the tribunal, the convention, and a norm so strong that its violation became the scandal by which wars are judged.
Évariste Carpentier, The Execution of the Notables of Blégny, 1914 · Wikimedia Commons
Document1914–1915Exhibit 37
The “Rape of Belgium” and the Bryce Report
In the war’s first weeks German troops, gripped by a franc-tireur panic, shoot some 6,500 Belgian and French civilians in reprisal and burn the library of Louvain; the documented atrocity and its propaganda inflation arrive together.
Murder, lust, and pillage prevailed over many parts of Belgium on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilised nations during the last three centuries.
Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages (the Bryce Report), 1915
Curator’s note
Two lessons hang in this frame. First, the events were real: modern scholarship (Horne & Kramer’s German Atrocities, 1914) confirmed the mass executions at Dinant, Tamines, Andenne and Louvain from German records — reprisal doctrine applied to civilians as deliberate policy. Second, the reporting poisoned itself: the Bryce Report mixed solid evidence with unverifiable horror stories, and its wartime exploitation bred an interwar cynicism so deep that when reports of German atrocities came again after 1939 — this time of something far worse — many refused to believe them. Atrocity propaganda’s worst casualty is the credibility of the true report.
Henry Morgenthau Sr., U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, 1913–16 · Wikimedia Commons
Document1915Key exhibitExhibit 38
Armenia, 1915: “crimes against humanity” is coined
As the Ottoman government destroys its Armenian population, the Allied powers issue a joint declaration containing a new phrase — and, for the first time, the threat of personal criminal responsibility for a state’s treatment of civilians.
In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.
Joint declaration of France, Great Britain and Russia, 24 May 1915
I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.
Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (1918)
Curator’s note
Around a million Armenians died by massacre and death march. The 1915 declaration’s two innovations — the phrase crimes against humanity and the principle that individual officials answer for them — went unenforced: the postwar trials collapsed, the perpetrators’ escape was noted, and in 1939 Hitler could ask his generals, by one account, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” The phrase, however, survived, waiting in the diplomatic record for 1945. Raphael Lemkin, who would coin genocide, began with the Armenian case.
Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937) · Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
Art1937Key exhibitExhibit 39
Guernica: the bombed town becomes the age’s image
The Condor Legion’s destruction of a Basque market town — reported within hours by a Times correspondent, answered within weeks by Picasso — fixes the aerial bombardment of civilians as the twentieth century’s emblematic atrocity.
Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air raiders... The object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralisation of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.
George Steer, The Times, 28 April 1937
In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.
Pablo Picasso, statement of May–June 1937
Curator’s note
Steer’s dispatch — establishing German aircraft, incendiaries, and market day — ran in London and Paris and put the town’s name in front of Picasso, who had been stalled on his Paris Exposition commission. The mural he produced in five weeks contains no aeroplane and no enemy: only the population — women, a child, animals, fire — in black, white and newsprint grey. It completed the arc begun by Euripides and Callot: the definitive image of modern war is its civilian victims. That the bombing of cities would nonetheless become every major belligerent’s practice within five years is the tragedy the next frames record.
Marie Uchytilová’s memorial to the 82 children of Lidice murdered at Chełmno · Wikimedia Commons
Document1942Exhibit 40
Lidice: annihilation announced by press release
In reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS erase a Czech village — and, uniquely among Nazi atrocities, proclaim the deed to the world in an official communiqué.
All male inhabitants have been shot. The women have been transferred to a concentration camp. The children have been taken to educational centres. All houses of Lidice have been levelled to the ground, and the name of this community has been obliterated.
German official announcement, 10 June 1942
Curator’s note
The announcement backfired into one of the war’s great moral mobilizations: towns in Mexico, Brazil and the United States renamed themselves Lidice so that “Lidice shall live,” and the village became shorthand for the Nazi war on civilians — 173 men shot on the spot, most of the women to Ravensbrück, 82 of the children gassed at Chełmno. Lidice stands in this museum for the uncountable villages of the East — Oradour, Khatyn, and thousands without memorials — where reprisal doctrine, the logic of Goya’s plate 34 industrialized, met the race war that the Holocaust made total. Against Ashurnasirpal’s boast, twenty-eight centuries later: the same genre of proclamation, and now a world that answers.
George Bell, Bishop of Chichester · Library of Congress · Wikimedia Commons
Document1944Exhibit 41
Bishop Bell against area bombing
At the height of the bomber offensive, a bishop of the established church rises in the House of Lords to argue that his own side’s destruction of German cities betrays the cause it serves.
Why is there this blindness to the psychological side? Why is there this inability to reckon with the moral and spiritual facts? Why is there this forgetfulness of the ideals by which our cause is inspired? How can the War Cabinet fail to see that this progressive devastation of cities is threatening the roots of civilization?
George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, House of Lords, 9 February 1944
The Allies stand for something greater than power. The chief name inscribed on our banner is “Law.”
The same speech
Curator’s note
Bell spoke for a minority and paid for it — he was widely execrated, and is often said to have lost Canterbury over the speech. The exhibit hangs here for what it shows about norms under total war: strategic bombing of cities, culminating at Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo and Hiroshima, killed civilians by the hundred thousand lawfully in the sense that no treaty squarely forbade it — the Hague gap of 1907 at full width — and no Allied or Axis airman was ever tried for it. The moral argument had to be made, as Bell made it, from first principles inside a democracy at war. Law would not close the gap until 1977; the debate Bell opened has never closed.
The dock at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945–46 · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine1945–1946Key exhibitExhibit 42
Nuremberg: the crime enters the statute book
Thirty years after the phrase was coined for Armenia, “crimes against humanity” becomes positive law, and men are hanged for what a state did to civilian populations — including its own.
Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds... whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.
Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Article 6(c), 8 August 1945
Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.
Judgment of the International Military Tribunal, 1946
Curator’s note
Nuremberg’s two sentences answer this museum’s oldest exhibits directly: what Ashurnasirpal carved as glory and Caesar reported as administration is now murder, and “I served the state” is no defence. The tribunal’s flaws were real — victors’ justice; the bombing of cities carefully omitted from the charges because the prosecutors’ own air forces had done it; the Soviet judge’s presence. But the precedent held and grew: the Genocide Convention (1948), the Eichmann trial, the Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals, the International Criminal Court (1998) all descend from Article 6(c) — the legal machinery, at last, for the intuition first staged by Euripides.
The original Geneva Convention of 1864, ancestor of the four Conventions of 1949 · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine1949Key exhibitExhibit 43
The Fourth Geneva Convention: a treaty for civilians alone
Four years after the camps were opened, the nations sign the first treaty in history devoted entirely to the protection of civilians in enemy hands — Dunant’s architecture extended, at last, to the people this museum is about.
Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs. They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof.
Geneva Convention IV, Article 27 (1949)
Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited... Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.
Geneva Convention IV, Articles 33–34 — Blégny, Lidice and Oradour written into law
Curator’s note
Every article answers a remembered crime: the ban on collective punishment answers the reprisal shootings; the ban on deportation answers the transports; common Article 3 extends a minimum of humanity to civil wars. The Convention’s great omission was deliberate — it protects civilians in enemy hands (occupied or interned), not civilians under bombardment from the air; the nuclear powers of 1949 would not sign away the bomber. Nearly every state on earth has ratified the Conventions: formally, Plato’s circle now contains everyone. The remaining gap is the subject of the last two exhibits.
Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., who landed his helicopter between American troops and Vietnamese villagers · Wikimedia Commons
Document1968–1971Exhibit 44
My Lai: massacre as scandal
American soldiers kill some five hundred Vietnamese villagers — old men, women, children — and for the first time in this museum, a massacre’s exposure convulses the perpetrator’s own nation in trial and self-examination.
Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname “Rusty.” The Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968 in a Viet Cong stronghold known as “Pinkville.”
Seymour Hersh’s dispatch of 13 November 1969 — the lede that broke the story
These people were looking at me for help, and there was no way I could turn my back on them.
Hugh Thompson Jr., recalling why he set his helicopter down between the villagers and the advancing troops and ordered his crew to cover him
Curator’s note
Compare the frame of 1099: there, massacre reported as miracle; here, as crime — the inversion of the norm is complete, in discourse if not in conduct. Everything about the case is modern: the photographs (Ronald Haeberle’s, published in Life), the cover-up and its unravelling by a single letter-writing veteran (Ron Ridenhour), the trial that convicted only Calley, the public that half-condemned and half-embraced him, and the thirty-year delay before Thompson’s intervention was honoured with the Soldier’s Medal. Practice had not caught up with the norm — Vietnamese civilians died by the hundred thousand under bombs that were never anyone’s crime — but concealment is itself the tribute vice now pays: no one photographs a boast onto a palace wall.
Emblem of the International Committee of the Red Cross, guardian of the Conventions and Protocols · Wikimedia Commons
Law & doctrine1977Exhibit 45
Additional Protocol I: the Basic Rule
Ten thousand years after Nataruk, the norm receives its plainest statement yet in positive law — the civilian population may not be attacked, ever, by anyone.
In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants... and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions, Article 48 — headed, in the treaty itself, “Basic rule”
The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.
Protocol I, Article 51(2) — the article the bombers of 1944 never faced
Curator’s note
Protocol I finally closes the Hague gap: attack from the air is bound like attack on the ground, indiscriminate bombardment is defined and banned, and Rousseau’s distinction becomes the law’s “basic rule.” The Rome Statute (1998) added a standing court. That the decades since contain Cambodia, Halabja, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Aleppo, Bucha and Mariupol is not this exhibit’s refutation but its context — this museum has charted norms, and norms are what atrocity must now be committed against: denied, concealed, or prosecuted, never again inscribed in stone as glory. Whether that difference saves lives is argued case by case; that it exists, these forty-five frames attest.
Epilogue: the shape of the arc
Ten millennia compress into five movements. Silence — massacre without witness, legible only in bone (Nataruk, Talheim). Voice — grief and even protest, without any claim that things could be otherwise (the Ur lament, Homer, Euripides). Doctrine — the slow construction of the argument that the unarmed may not be touched: Plato’s circle, Cicero’s limit, Augustine’s mournful just war, the Peace of God’s protected persons, Vitoria’s innocents, Rousseau’s duel of states. Law — the norm given teeth: Lieber’s general order, the Hague, Geneva, Nuremberg’s gallows. Scandal — the present dispensation, in which the norm is strong enough that its violation must hide, and weak enough that it must hide so often.
Two threads run the whole length. The circle of the protected — kin, then co-religionists, then “civilized nations,” then everyone — widens by catastrophe: nearly every legal advance in this museum was drafted in the ashes of the failure that made it undeniable. And witness precedes law by millennia: the poet who saw, the chronicler who wept, the etcher who signed yo lo vi — these came first, and the lawyers followed. If the collection has one lesson, it is that seeing the unarmed enemy as human was never the automatic endowment of civilization. It was argued into existence, exhibit by exhibit — and it is maintained the same way.
