Sexual violence has accompanied warfare in virtually every known historical era.
Women's historian Gerda Lerner writes that:
Antiquity In the Ancient Near East, wartime sexual violence and the pillaging of women were widespread practices often driven by a combination of strategic subjugation and personal gratification. While royal records often omitted these details to focus on grand military triumphs, legal codes and prophetic literature confirm that women were systematically treated as "spoils of war". Assyrian warfare often used intimidation in campaigns against foreign territories. When surrounding a capital city and demands of surrender proved futile, Assyrian forces resorted to attacking smaller nearby settlements, where buildings were burned and the inhabitants killed, mutilated, enslaved, or raped.
The Hebrew Bible contains several narratives and laws that acknowledge or regulate sexual violence in the context of conflict. In Numbers 31, the account of the war against the Midianites describes Moses ordering the execution of male captives and non-virgin women while sparing virgin girls for the Israelite soldiers a passage some scholars interpret as making sexual use of captives a normative practice in war. Other texts, such as Deuteronomy 21:10–14, establish specific regulations for taking a "beautiful woman" from among war captives as a wife; while some commentators view these as attempts to minimize brutality, modern critics argue they effectively endorse sexual slavery and genocidal rape.
The Greek and Roman armies reportedly engaged in war rape, which is documented by ancient authors such as Homer, Herodotus, Livy and Tacitus. Ancient sources held multiple, often contradictory attitudes to sexual violence in warfare. Haaretz writer and archaeologist Terry Madenholm explains that rape did not only serve as an instrument of sexual gratification or a tool for anger relief management.
For the Roman army, rape was more than just a weapon of terror; rape was regarded as the right of the victorious. It symbolized revenge, subjugation and the enslavement of the defeated. Polybius describes Roman soldiers carrying out conquest rape, while Livy portrays rape as synonymous with the capture of a city.
Women and children were not the only victims of ancient wars. Rape of adult men remains one of the most closely kept secrets possibly because it was incompatible with the notion of masculinity; being sexually submissive as a man was considered utterly unmanly, even for the ancient writers. In the Greco-Roman world a "true man" could play only an active role, and those who were submissive were stigmatized. Tacitus mentions Roman recruiting officers dragging off the most striking Batavian boys to non-consensual sex (rape), saying it was one of the causes of the Revolt of the Batavi.
According to medieval historians, the Avars—who invaded Eastern Europe during Late Antiquity—harassed Wendish women and kept them in bondage as sex slaves:
During Late Antiquity, India also saw countless invasions by warriors from Central Asia such as the Kushans, Hephthalites, and the Hunas. The Huna invasions of the Indian subcontinent helped hasten the decline of the Gupta Empire.
The Huna invaders conquered Kashmir, Punjab, and finally entered into the Ganges valley, in the very heart of India, slaughtering, pillaging, looting, burning, demolishing, and raping. Many cities in India were wiped out by the onslaught of the invaders; monasteries, temples, schools, and libraries were not spared, causing immense cultural destruction to the Indian subcontinent. Accounts are consistent that the Huna warriors practiced mass rapes of women in India.
Middle Ages
The Vikings were Scandinavians who raided and colonized wide areas of Europe from the late 8th century to the early 11th century.Roesdahl, pp. 9–22. Viking settlements in Britain and Ireland are thought to have been primarily male enterprises, with a lesser role for female Vikings. British Isles' women are mentioned in old texts on the founding of Iceland, indicating that the Viking explorers had acquired wives and concubines from Britain and Ireland. The Vikings' "rape and pillage" image is disputed, and it may have arisen due to "exaggeration and distortion" in the Middle Ages.
Female slavery was common during the medieval Arab slave trade, where prisoners of war captured in battle as well as commercial slave trade from non-Arab lands sometimes ended up in sexual slavery as concubine slaves in the Arab world. Most of these slaves came from places such as Sub-Saharan Africa (mainly Zanj), the Caucasus (mainly Circassians),"Horrible Traffic in Circassian Women—Infanticide in Turkey". New York Daily Times, 6 August 1856. and Central Asia (mainly Tartars). A famous incident was the Siege of Jerusalem (1187), when Jerusalem was conquered by Muslim Ayyubid Sultanate of Egypt under Saladin. 15,000 of the Christian inhabitants of the city who could not pay the ransom were sold into slavery in the Ayyubid Sultanate. According to Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, 7,000 of them were men and 8,000 were women and children. Contemporary Muslim sources describe the rape and enslavement in sexual slavery of non-Muslim women and girls after the fall of Jerusalem:
Before the Jurchens overthrew the Khitan, married Jurchen women and Jurchen girls were raped by Liao Khitan envoys as a custom which caused resentment by the Jurchens against the Khitan. Song Dynasty princesses committed suicide to avoid rape or were killed for resisting rape by the Jin.
The Mongols, who established the Mongol Empire across much of Eurasia, caused much destruction during their invasions. Documents written during or after Genghis Khan's reign say that after a conquest, the Mongol soldiers looted, pillaged and raped. Some troops who submitted were incorporated into the Mongol system in order to expand their manpower. These techniques were sometimes used to spread terror and warning to others.Man, John. Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection (London; New York: Bantam Press, 2004) .
The Mongols invaded Hungary (Pannonia) and penetrated Austria almost to Vienna in 1241–1242. To the south of Vienna, they reached the Austrian town of Wiener Neustadt and devastated the countryside around the town, where, according to Frenchman Ivo of Narbonne, they tortured and ate Austrian civilians before the Mongols eventually retreated to Hungary.
Similar accounts of Ivo of Narbonne's description of Mongol rape and cannibalism appear in Chronica Majora by Matthew Paris. However, some modern historians have suggested that medieval European sources often rhetorically depict the Mongols and other steppe peoples using barbaric tropes, which may exaggerate or misrepresent accounts of practices such as cannibalism.
Rogerius of Apulia's account of devastation and slaughter the Mongols wrought upon Europeans during the Mongol invasion of Hungary and Transylvania is in his book Carmen Miserabile.
In 1302, the army of Mamluk Sultan Al-Nasir Muhammad, who was of Kipchak Turkic descent, crushed a Bedouin rebellion in Upper Egypt and "slew mercilessly every Bedouin in the land and carried off their women captive". G. W. Murray said that "This drastic solution of the Bedouin question removed the pure Arab descendants of the Conquerors from the scene and so enabled the Beja to preserve themselves as an African race practically uninfluenced by Arab blood, while leaving the desert edges of Upper Egypt free for settlement by the Western Bedouin." The army was led by the Oirat Mongol Mamluk Sayf ad-Din Salar and Circassian Mamluk al-Baibars al-Jashnakir (Beibars).
During Timur's invasion of Syria, in the sack of Aleppo (1400), Ibn Taghribirdi wrote that Timur's Tatar soldiers committed mass rape on the native women of Aleppo, massacring their children and forcing the brothers and fathers of the women to watch the gang rapes which took place in the mosques. Ibn Taghribirdi said the Tatars killed all children while tying the women with ropes in Aleppo's Great mosque after the children and women tried to take refuge in the mosque. Tatar soldiers openly raped gentlewomen and virgins in public in both the small mosques and the Great Mosque. The brothers and fathers of the women were being tortured and mutilated while forced to watch their female relatives get raped. The corpses in the streets and mosques resulted in stink permeating Aleppo. The women were kept naked while being gang raped repeatedly by different men. Alternative URL Ibn Arabshah witnessed the slaughters and rapes Timur's Tatar soldiers carried out. Mass rapes were also recorded in Timur's 1401 Sack of Damascus.
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a scene of mass atrocities in form of rape, followed by enslavement of women, girls and young boys in sexual slavery, and contemporary witnesses describe the pillage committed by the troops of the Muslim Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmet II. Contemporary witness reported how the marauding Ottoman soldiers raped and captured civilians inside the Hagia Sophia cathedral itself, where they:
"trussed up... maidens whom the sun had not looked upon, maidens whom even their fathers had scarcely seen, and dragged away; and if they tried to resist, they were driven onward with blows. Each rapacious Turk was eager to lead his captive to a safe place, and then return to secure a second and a third prize. The plunderers, the avengers sent by God, worked with force and speed, and in one hour everyone there had been tied up, ... women with their headcloths. Then long chains of captives could be seen leaving the church and its shrines, being herded along like cattle or flocks of sheep, weeping and wailing, with no one to show pity for them."Jones, J.R. Melville (red.), The siege of Constantinople 1453: seven contemporary accounts, Hakkert, Amsterdam, 1972, Ducus, 98-99
Women and girls were taken captive and dragged to the soldier's camps: "Many of the lovelier maidens... were almost torn to death as their captors quarreled over them. Soon a long procession of ill-assorted little groups of... women bound tightly together was being dragged to the soldiers' bivouacs, there to be fought over once again."Runciman, Steven, The fall of Constantinople 1453, Canto ed., Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1990 p. 147 In accordance with Islamic law around slavery in Islam, the non-Muslim war captives could be sold on the slave market to a life of sexual slavery in the form of concubinage in Islam, and according to Nicolas de Nicolay, slaves were displayed naked at the city's slave market, and young girls could be purchased.
Early modern period
Ottoman expansion into Christian lands In the Ottoman Empire, the practice of taking Christian captives as slaves, including as sex slaves (concubinage in Islam), was a notable aspect of the empire's expansionist and military activities, particularly in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, since by Islamic law on war prisoners, it was halal (legitimate) to enslave kafir (non-Muslim) from dar al-Harb (non-Muslim lands) in war with dar al-Islam (the Muslim world).Erdem, Y. Hakan. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its Demise, 1800–1909. London: Macmillan Press, 1996.
There are many testimonies that rape often preceded the enslavement of non-Muslim women by the Ottomans. During the fall of Constantinople in 1453, George Sphrantzes says that people were raped inside Hagia Sophia. Critobulus described the enslavement and sexual abuse committed by the Ottoman troops inside the Hagia Sophia:
The elder refugees in the Hagia Sophia were slaughtered and the women raped.
During the Siege of Vienna in 1529, the Ottoman troops pillaged the countryside around Vienna and took many surviving civilians as slaves. Peter Stern von Labach described it: