I used Pitirim Sorokins numbers because there is a famous paper written by William Eckhardt in the 1990s called War-related Deaths Since 3000 BC which describes Sorokins numbers as "the only systemic estimates from 500 BC to 1500 AD for 11 European nations"

There are at least a dozen estimates of the deaths in the Crusades from various historians, which range between 1 million to 9 million. I am not sure I understand the logic of overturning the work of a dozen (or more) historians based on the word of one historian. Unless Mr. Eckhardt's opinion is the consensus opinion among the majority of historians today? Can you confirm this?

I am also unsure about the reasoning behind including only "battlefield deaths". If the point is to prove that fewer people died as a result of war in the Christian era than in pagan Greece, then this criteria is singularly useless. A death is a death, and a civilian's life is no less worthy than that of a soldier. Some might argue that violence which kills women and children is even worse than that which kills soldiers, who at least understood their fate.

Wars kill people in many ways, among which battlefield deaths are only a part. Deliberate policies of killing civilians, burning farmland, setting fire to cities with their populations inside - these are all deaths directly attributable to war - and it makes not one whit of difference to the original post about deaths in the name of religion.

It makes me wonder whether Sorokins' number includes the various purges against the Jews during this period. They were certainly not battlefield deaths, but they were definitely caused by religion.

I read through some of your previous posts about education and illiteracy during the middle ages, and the role of the Catholic Church in science and the arts. While I appreciate the fact that you take the trouble to provide citations for what you say, I get the uncomfortable feeling that this does not avoid a major bias on your part, since you choose to tell one side of the story, which you back up with citations. Of course, people here are free to provide citations of their own, but many of us are not historians and don't have them handy.

The reason why I think your account biased is because it touches only upon the consequences, not the causes. Yes, it is a fact that learning was kept alive in the monasteries. Yes, it is a fact that many of the scholars, few as they were, did belong to the Catholic Church. But does this really mean anything unless you also ask why, and what the situation might have been without a Catholic Church?

In a time when people got burned at the stake for small heresies, is it any wonder that most scholars in the western world were Christian? If they were not Christian, wouldn't they have been dead? Being a scholar requires some freedom from daily concerns. If you wish to write a book or study a scientific subject, you can only do so if you have some education to begin with, and aren't grubbing for food from sunup to sundown. Peasants didn't have much free time for this, nor the education. They couldn't write those beautiful manuscripts or even read them, since they were illiterate.

My perspective is that the Church did these things because the Church could afford to - it was among the wealthiest institutions of the time. Not only were people required to tithe 10% of their income to the Church, many gave freely above and beyond that. Many others had their property revert to the Church, either over Church-led accusations of heresy, or because their were problems with inheritance, or because they died without heirs. Kings tried these things too, but no King lasted very long, whereas the Church has lasted for 2000 years.

So against the fact that the Church produced many scholars is the fact that the Church also taxed the peasants to within an inch of their lives, leaving them with no safety margin to do anything other than head back to their labor every morning and hope to have enough food to survive. They produced scholars because they made sure no one else could.

This situation did not change until the mid-14th century, when the Black Death depopulated much of Europe. Then, the survivors suddenly found themselves in possession of land that would normally have been split between 2 brothers and 3 cousins, had they been alive. This produced a shortage of labor and consequent wage increases, as well as the greater amount of acreage per person. No doubt this would also have been taken away by the Church and petty Kings in time, as it had been taken away before, but fortunately this particular plague came at a time which was soon to be followed by a serious weakening of the power of the Catholic Church, with the Protestant Reformation, and the Renaissance. So this was when the wealth finally "stuck" to the peasants, eventually leading to the rise of towns, commerce, and eventually a middle class who could afford to educate their children and produce secular scholars of their own.