Open Questions

Open Seventh Crusade

Why It Is Open The Seventh Crusade's defining battle at Mansurah and the surrender of Louis IX's army afterward are described in detail by the eyewitness chronicler Jean de Joinville and by the historians who follow him, but none converts that narrative into a bounded total across combat losses, disease and the army's captivity.

What Would Settle It A military historian's combined accounting of Mansurah's battle deaths, the army's losses to disease in the Nile Delta, and deaths among those held captive afterward.

Expertise Needed Crusading history, medieval military history.

Question posed in God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman.

Open Eighth Crusade

Why It Is Open The Eighth Crusade never reached major battle: an epidemic, understood at the time as dysentery, swept the crusader camp outside Tunis and killed Louis IX along with a substantial part of his army's leadership, and the historiography describes that outbreak narratively without estimating how many died from it.

What Would Settle It A historian's or epidemiologist's estimate of deaths in the crusader camp outside Tunis during the 1270 outbreak, distinguishing disease deaths from the campaign's minimal combat losses.

Expertise Needed Crusading history, historical epidemiology.

Question posed in God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman.

Open Ninth Crusade

Why It Is Open The Ninth Crusade is the smallest of the numbered Crusades in the scholarship, a short campaign by the future Edward I remembered chiefly for its limited raids rather than pitched battles, and none of those actions carries a recorded casualty figure to build a total from.

What Would Settle It A military historian's identification of casualty figures, however small, for the raids and skirmishes of Edward's 1271 to 1272 campaign.

Expertise Needed Crusading history, medieval military history.

Question posed in God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman.

Open Northern Crusades

Why It Is Open The Northern Crusades ran from the twelfth into the fifteenth century as separate campaigns against the Wends, the Prussians, the Livonians and Lithuania, fought by different military orders at different times, and the scholarship studies each campaign on its own rather than totaling losses across the whole span.

What Would Settle It A historian's period by period and campaign by campaign casualty accounting across the different Baltic wars, rather than the single figure a shorter, bounded conflict can be given.

Expertise Needed Crusading history, Baltic medieval history, historical demography.

Question posed in God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman.

Open Schmalkaldic War

Why It Is Open The Schmalkaldic War is remembered chiefly for its decisive battle at Muhlberg, where Charles V defeated the Protestant princes, and Reformation historiography covers that battle and the war's political consequences in depth without ever totaling deaths across the short campaign's other, smaller engagements.

What Would Settle It A military historian's combined accounting of losses at Muhlberg and in the war's earlier maneuvering and smaller clashes across 1546 and 1547.

Expertise Needed Reformation history, early modern military history.

Question posed in The Reformation: A History (MacCulloch), Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Open Ridda Wars

Why It Is Open Early Islamic chronicles report specific casualty figures for battles such as Yamama, but modern historians of the early Islamic conquests regard those numbers as products of a later, formulaic chronicle tradition rather than contemporary counts, so no synthesis treats them as a reliable basis for a total.

What Would Settle It A source critical study weighing which, if any, of the early chronicle casualty figures for the Ridda Wars can be treated as historically reliable, or an archaeological approach to Arabian population loss in the period.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Second Fitna

Why It Is Open The Second Fitna was fought across several separate fronts at once, the killing of Husayn at Karbala, the siege of Mecca, and provincial fighting over the caliphate itself, and the scholarship studies each front on its own terms, Karbala above all, rather than combining them into one casualty figure for the war.

What Would Settle It A historian's accounting combining losses at Karbala, the siege of Mecca and the war's provincial fighting into a single total, or a source critical study of the surviving casualty figures for each front.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Third Fitna

Why It Is Open The Third Fitna combined provincial uprisings across the Umayyad caliphate with the Abbasid Revolution that ultimately overthrew it, fought in different regions at different times with a final purge of the Umayyad family at its close, and the scholarship follows that sequence of events narratively rather than tallying deaths across it.

What Would Settle It A historian's combined accounting of the war's provincial battles and the Abbasid purge of the Umayyad family that followed, or a source critical study of the surviving casualty claims.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Abbasid history.

Question posed in The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Fourth Fitna

Why It Is Open The Fourth Fitna's central event, the prolonged siege of Baghdad during the civil war between the brothers al-Amin and al-Ma'mun, is described in narrative detail by the historians who study it, but none converts that description into a casualty estimate for the siege, and the war's fighting beyond Baghdad is even less quantified.

What Would Settle It A military historian's estimate of deaths during the siege of Baghdad combined with an accounting of the civil war's fighting in the wider caliphate.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Abbasid history.

Question posed in The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Muslim Conquest of the Levant

Why It Is Open The Byzantine and early Islamic sources for the conquest's decisive battle at Yarmouk disagree sharply on the size of the forces involved, and the conquest itself unfolded as a long sequence of sieges and smaller engagements across Syria and Palestine that the scholarship narrates city by city rather than totals.

What Would Settle It A source critical study reconciling the Byzantine and early Islamic casualty traditions for Yarmouk, combined with a historian's accounting of losses across the conquest's separate sieges.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Byzantine history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Muslim Conquest of Persia

Why It Is Open The conquest's decisive battles at al-Qadisiyyah and Nahavand are described in the surviving Arabic sources, written generations after the events they record, and the scholarship treats those figures with caution while narrating the fall of the Sasanian empire province by province, without ever totaling losses across the whole campaign.

What Would Settle It A source critical study of the earliest surviving casualty claims for al-Qadisiyyah and Nahavand, combined with a historian's accounting of losses across the conquest's provincial campaigns.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Sasanian history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Muslim Conquest of Egypt

Why It Is Open The conquest is narrated through both the Coptic chronicle tradition and later Arabic accounts, which characterize the fall of Byzantine Egypt differently, and neither the individual sieges of the fortress of Babylon and of Alexandria nor the campaign as a whole has been given a casualty figure by modern historians.

What Would Settle It A source critical study comparing the Coptic and Arabic accounts of the conquest's losses, combined with a historian's estimate for the sieges of Babylon and Alexandria.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Coptic history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Muslim Conquest of North Africa

Why It Is Open The conquest of North Africa took decades of intermittent campaigning against Byzantine coastal strongholds and successive Berber resistance movements, and the scholarship follows that long, uneven sequence of events narratively rather than tallying losses across it the way a shorter, single campaign war can be totaled.

What Would Settle It A historian's period by period accounting of losses against Byzantine garrisons and against Berber resistance across the decades long campaign.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, North African history.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Muslim Conquest of Iberia

Why It Is Open The Visigothic kingdom's defeat at the battle traditionally called Guadalete is described by the near contemporary Chronicle of 754 and by the modern historians who draw on it, but the campaign's rapid overrunning of the Iberian Peninsula afterward is narrated as a sequence of surrenders and sieges rather than quantified, and no historian totals losses across the whole conquest.

What Would Settle It A source critical study of the Chronicle of 754's account of Guadalete combined with a historian's estimate of losses during the conquest's rapid overrunning of the peninsula's cities.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Visigothic history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Byzantine Iconoclasm

Why It Is Open The persecution of iconophile monks and clergy under the iconoclast emperors is well attested in general terms, exiles, imprisonments, forced marriages and some executions, but every specific figure traces back to iconophile hagiography written decades later by the winning side, after the opposing texts had been suppressed or destroyed. No scholarly aggregate of deaths or of exiled monks and clergy across the whole period has been found.

What Would Settle It A modern historian's systematic count, cross checking the hagiographic accounts against archaeological, epigraphic or administrative evidence, of documented deaths and of monks and clergy exiled during the two iconoclast periods (726 to 787 and 815 to 843).

Expertise Needed Byzantine history, hagiography and source criticism.

Question posed in Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c.680-850: A History (Brubaker and Haldon), Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon.

Open Hussite Wars

Why It Is Open Surviving chronicles report battle and siege deaths individually across fifteen years of campaigning and five crusades, and demographic studies estimate Bohemia's wider population loss over the era, but nobody has reconciled combat deaths against the indirect toll of famine and disease that followed the campaigning armies into one figure attributable to the war itself.

What Would Settle It A historical demographic study working from Bohemian parish, manorial and tax records where they survive across the 1419 to 1434 period, disaggregating direct war casualties from the era's broader disease and famine mortality.

Expertise Needed Medieval Bohemian history; historical demography

Question posed in The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia, Thomas A. Fudge.

Open Maccabean Revolt

Why It Is Open The Books of Maccabees report casualty figures for a handful of individual battles, but modern military historians consider those ancient counts inflated for morale and legitimizing purposes, most of the revolt's many engagements across seven years have no surviving figures at all, and no historian has attempted to build a single reconciled war-wide death toll from what remains.

What Would Settle It A study working from archaeological evidence, destruction layers and burial contexts in Judea dated to the revolt's decades, that could independently test or bound the ancient chronicles' battle figures rather than relying on the literary sources alone.

Expertise Needed Second Temple Judaism; Near Eastern archaeology

Question posed in Judas Maccabaeus: The Jewish Struggle Against the Seleucids, Bezalel Bar-Kochva.

Open The Persecution of Christians in Nigeria's Middle Belt

Why It Is Open USCIRF and other monitors document individual attacks and community-level deaths from Fulani militant violence against Nigerian Christians in the Middle Belt in detail, but no monitor separates a religiously motivated death toll from Nigeria's wider, overlapping farmer-herder and insurgent violence, so no campaign-wide aggregate isolated to religious persecution exists.

What Would Settle It A researcher or monitoring organization's systematic count of deaths in Middle Belt violence specifically attributable to religious targeting, distinguished from farmer-herder land disputes and from Boko Haram or ISWAP insurgent violence further northeast.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation, conflict studies specific to the Nigerian Middle Belt.

Question posed in Nonstate Violators of Religious Freedom in Nigeria: Fulani Militants, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Open White Lotus War

Why It Is Open The figure most often repeated, roughly one hundred thousand rebel dead, circulates in general reference works without a traceable scholarly derivation, and no historian, including Dai's recent archival study, has reconciled it against Qing military records or attempted to add the civilian toll of the pacification campaign's scorched earth tactics and the famine that followed in its wake.

What Would Settle It A study working systematically from surviving Qing provincial and military archives, of the kind Dai draws on for the campaign's administrative history, extended specifically to build a reconciled casualty count across both combatant and civilian deaths for the war's full eight years.

Expertise Needed Late imperial Chinese history; Qing administrative and military archives

Question posed in The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China, Yingcong Dai.

Open Persecution of Christians in North Korea

Why It Is Open The United Nations Commission of Inquiry and other outside monitors document the North Korean state's treatment of Christians in detail, arrests, detentions, camp imprisonment and collective punishment of family members, but the country's total closure to independent verification means no monitor has ever published a defensible aggregate count of deaths tied specifically to religious persecution, as distinct from the wider political prison camp population.

What Would Settle It Independent access to North Korea's prison camp system, or a systematic accounting by a body with reliable access to defector testimony, that separates deaths attributable to religious persecution from the general political prisoner population, comparable to the disaggregated reporting already possible for detention and camp population estimates.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation, North Korean studies.

Question posed in Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, United Nations Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.