Sacking in Low/High/Dark Fantasy Settings

[CarlManvers2019]

If anybody doesn’t know what a “Sacking” is in-regards to fantasy settings, it is when right after having essentially beaten the enemy or not even doing so, every single soldier suddenly gets real horny, sadistic and full of bloodlust

This results in them raping, mutilating, torturing and massacring loads of civvies for pure fun on pure instinct

The one issue I got with this other than, WTF man....are these guys really just dudes who are farmers outside of battlev

Is that, I wonder, just how practical is this? I mean yes, the soldiers do need supplies and pay and a way to relieve “stress” but if its for conquest there would be a LOT of broken infeastructure as well as too many maimed, traumatised and dead citizenry who may have grudges and just can’t keep working

So that valuable city isn’t so valuable anymore, as the people who were in it were part of its value, doing that stuff to the majority whilst destroying infrastructure and looting the place of valuables means that it is no longer a source of income for the conqueror

 

[ShieldWife]

This isn’t just a fantasy thing, this happened in real life all the time. Mass murder, genocide, vandalism, theft, rape, torture, looting, slavery, mutilation, and the like have all been common through out history and have often been a major part of war. Is it practical? Often times, yes there can be some benefit to doing this.

While civilizations people have engaged in this too, it tended to be worse in more primitive communities. In his book War Before Civilization, Lawrence Keeley discusses how insanely violent tribal/prehistoric people are/were.

We can see this is period historical writings as well. The Bible describes sacking, genocide, rape, and slavery as the aftermath of war. Accounts of Assyrian kings show similar levels of brutality towards defeated foes. With time, things slowly got better, but the idea of showing compassion to the conquered is both relatively recent and largely Western.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

@ShieldWife
I know it’s a very real life thing and extremely prevalent in primitive societies

But I’ve heard before that supposedly, the commanders hold back their soldiers in doing the sacking while they’re doing conquest for practicality’s sake and mostly only do it when they get to the main areas

Not sure how you can expect the people, not the nobility, to follow you or integrate with your people when your people just horribly brutalized them for fun and may have wiped out a good portion of the local population

 

[CarlManvers2019]

I doubt simply or only having the noble’s children as wards/hostages would be enough to deter the locals now subject to a new ruler to follow and I doubt so much time and resources can be spared to guarding the newly conquered territories

And how many people would be around or be around and still be both physically and mentally able to continue working

 

[Marduk]

But I’ve heard before that supposedly, the commanders hold back their soldiers in doing the sacking while they’re doing conquest for practicality’s sake and mostly only do it when they get to the main areas

Depending on the force composition, the question was : can the commander hold them back?

With more professional forces, the answer might be yes sometimes, with a bunch of pissed off levied peasants, not really.

Not sure how you can expect the people, not the nobility, to follow you or integrate with your people when your people just horribly brutalized them for fun and may have wiped out a good portion of the local population

The question is, did the conquerors expect the local population to follow them? Depends on a lot of details. The whole operation could have been a raid, as such leaving a bunch of uninhabited ruins just meant the pissed off enemy would be weaker in the future, and the decades it would take to rebuild would be purely his problem.
Could be that the conquerors planned to resettle the area with their own people, so, don't care how the former owners feel about them.
For quite a few factions sacking meant enslaving what locals they could, making them part of the loot.
Mongols, for example, would just massacre most of city populations that didn't surrender.
In some cases the population was infidels/heretics to the conquering faction, in which case they weren't expected to follow willingly either way.

So in the end, only if the conqueror does want the city and its population intact, and has a force disciplined enough to hold back (which they probably have to pay themselves in a different form than loot), then they go on without sacking.