Rape, Pillage, and Burn

Maxim 1: Pillage, then burn

Taggart: We'll work up a Number 6 on 'em.
Hedley Lamarr: [frowns] "Number 6"? I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that one.
Taggart: Well, that's where we go a-ridin' into town, a-whompin' and a-whumpin' every livin' thing that moves within an inch of its life. Except the women-folks, of course.
Hedley Lamarr: You spare the women?
Taggart: Naw, we rape the shit out of them at the Number Six Dance later on!
Hedley Lamarr: Marvelous!

— Blazing Saddles

One of the many ways your hometown can become a Doomed Hometown. A group of bandits, pirates, Army of Thieves and Whores and, including, soldiers working under the Big Bad, cause trouble primarily by sacking the town—that is, looting, damaging property, and sometimes even murdering and kidnapping innocent townsfolk. Raping is optional(-ly shown), but the town is almost always burned down afterward. This gives an excellent opportunity for the bad guys to Kick the Dog. Rape, Pillage, and Burn is guaranteed to appear in any work involving Pirates or Horny Vikings. Sometimes appears, though not as frequently, in The Wild West or Medieval European Fantasy. This activity is a common pastime of The Horde.

This is one way to gain Plunder. If this problem persists, villagers may resort to hiring The Magnificent Seven Samurai.

Truth in Television; historically, this was known as "chevauchée." This is generally a problem in areas without a strong government to keep order, even today. In many civilizations, it was not resolved until power, money, and land were consolidated under noblemen and kings rich enough to afford standing armies. It is also one reason why peasants in older times tolerated kings and nobles who were quite nasty, as the alternative was almost always constant chaos caused by dozens and dozens of rival warlords (although they could still suffer this in wars the nobles or kings waged with each other). These days, this trope is considered a Crime Against Humanity.

It should be noted that as nasty as this trope can get, it's not entirely unjustified in terms of cold hard pragmatism, at least in less civilized settings. It provides food, supplies, and funds for an army far away from home which is in constant need of all three. It raises morale among the attacking forces, demoralizes the victims, and builds a fearsome reputation that can be used to coerce surrender. The downside is that it creates a lot of resentment from the population, turns enemy troops fanatical and invites reprisals, damages the economic value of the area you conquer, postpones cultural assimilation by decades, and can become addictive to the troops, which is a big problem when they return home. Even "good guys" like Lincoln in the Civil War were known to order pillaging because supply issues were making the army tactically sluggish, along with burning crops in the South to destroy their resources and hasten a surrender. Also, rape can mean multiple things. One of the more archaic definitions is "to capture" (although this was frequently to commit sexual assault later, thus the changing meaning).

And remember, to avoid (even more) squick or damaged goods, it's rape, pillage, then burn.

noreallife

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Altair: A Record of Battles, the imperial army raping, pillaging, and burning its way across the continent inspires not only fear but disgust in the "civilised" nations, since although such behaviour is common it's not considered honourable.
• Angolmois: This is standard fare since the story takes place during the Mongol invasion of Japan. Kano, Princess Teruhi's female bodyguard, is captured at the end of episode 12, and is last seen being thrown to the ground and being undressed, presumably to be raped by the Mongol soldiers who captured her.
• Berserk:
  • In the first chapter, the Lord of Koka Castle enacts this on the nearby village after several of his henchmen were assaulted by a lone swordsman in the town tavern. However, he reveals to the town mayor that he does not truly care for gold or prisoners, and would prefer to see humans in a fiery apocalypse and listen to the snapping of their bones under the hooves of horses. As his henchmen take the mayor away, the Snake Lord dons his battle armor, having resolved to lay waste to Koka For the Evulz.
  • Wyald, the leader of the Black Dog Knights, loves to invoke this trope. Being a depraved hedonist, he especially enjoys the first part. After the runaway Band of the Hawk are supplied by a nearby village, the pursuing Black Dog Knights follow them to that village, brutalize and massacre the populations, and later attack the Hawks, carrying pikes with burnt human body parts attached. Wyald's pike has the torso of the young girl who approached Gut earlier and thanked him for his service (who was then raped and killed by Wyald directly), which angers Guts.
• Eikou No Napoleon Eroica:
  • Defied. The Right of Sacking was a given for armies of the time, but Napoléon Bonaparte denied it to his men (and stopped their protests by eating somewhat less than the men, who, upon finding out, didn't have the courage to make such demands). This is out of sheer pragmatism: Napoleon knows that if they sack a place they'll get some money and food once but will ruin it and embitter the neighbours, but if they don't the locals and their neighbours will give them what they need willingly.
  • Played straight at the Battle of the Pyramids. Once again, it's Napoleon's pragmatism at work: his men were tired from the long march through the desert, and by giving them the right of sacking just that once and pointing out the enemy Mamluks went at war wearing large amounts of gold jewels he motivated the Army of Egypt in inflicting the Mamluks a devastating Curb-Stomp Battle.
• Fist of the North Star:
  • This is often inflicted upon the people Kenshiro must save, and is an excellent way to encourage him to pop some heads. Especially if you even think about doing this to children.
  • Averted with Raoh's army. He wants to conquer humanity, the last thing he needs is wasting time suppressing revolts. His motto to his troops was basically "kill all who oppose my reign, but if you do anything that'll make them live and hate us, I'll personally crush your skull under my horse's hooves" (which he did)
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • What happened to Rose's hometown of Lior, after Father Cornello had been revealed to be faking his "miracles", using just alchemy, in the first Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) series. Next time Ed sees Rose she has a young baby.
  • It gets pretty well sacked in Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood as well.
• Fushigi Yuugi: This is an important part of Nakago's Start of Darkness. Nakago (then known as Gi Ayuru, and a very sweet boy) was a member of the Hin tribe. The Hin were disliked because they (with their blond hair and blue eyes) looked different to most of the people of Kutou, and (more than that) worshipped a different god than the surrounding people, who worshipped Seiryuu. The Emperor of Kutou sent his armies to wipe out the Hin, and the Kutou army sacked their villages. Ayuru witnessed his mother being gang-raped by Kutou soldiers, as she urged him to flee to safety. Enraged, Ayuru sent out waves of chi at the soldiers, but since he wasn't able to control that power yet, ended up killing his mother, too. When other soldiers saw what happened, they realized that Ayuru was one of the Celestial Warriors they were hoping to find for the arrival of the Priestess, and took him to the Palace of Kutou. Unfortunately, it went From Bad to Worse as the emperor decided to keep Ayuru as a Sex Slave.
• Goblin Slayer: The goblins are very eager to do all three to any unfortunate settlements they find. It's how they survive and thrive (especially on the first one; there are no goblin females), which makes their numbers more than a little unnerving to think about.
• Hellsing: Invoked by The Major before the burning of London. The Last Battalion is only too happy to fulfill this in both letter and spirit.
• One Piece: Most pirate crews attack and pillage settlements for a living, after which they will inevitably sell their loot for money.
  • Case in point, the Blackbeard Pirates attacked the Drum Kingdom not long before the Straw Hat Pirates arrived and pillaged it to their hearts' content. Rather than try to fight them off, however, King Wapol took his soldiers, along with the 20 doctors who worked for him, and escaped to the sea to save himself, leaving his kingdom to its own fate.
  • Buggy's siege on Orange Town was so devastating that its citizens fled to other parts of the island, only returning after Luffy defeats him.
  • Conomi Island used to be a peaceful place. Then the Arlong Pirates showed up, made an example of anyone who stood up to them and imposed a heavy tax on the people living there in order to build up their power base for the next few years, killing anyone who couldn't pay. When one village refused to pay up, Arlong retaliated by tearing the houses from their foundations and flipping them upside-down.
  • Upon Roger's death and the start of the Golden Age of Piracy, pirate crews swarmed towards the New World, inevitably passing through Fishman Island. Several of them went on to pillage the place and attempted to kidnap mermaids and fishmen in order to sell them into slavery. Whitebeard quickly put a stop to that by declaring Fishman Island to be his territory in order to honor his sworn brotherhood with King Neptune. For the next twenty years, no pirate dared to cause trouble in Fishman Island again.
  • After the Dressrosa arc, the Barto Club attack an island and take down the toughest gang in town, after which they... start selling Straw Hat Pirates memorabilia. And burn the Red Hair Pirates flag marking the place under their protection.
  • After Orlumbus cuts ties with his country and becomes a pirate sailing under the Straw Hat Grand Fleet, he tries attacking an island to pillage it. When he learns that the place is highly impoverished, however, he takes pity on them and gives them some supplies before taking his leave. Clearly, his piracy still needs work.
• Vinland Saga: Inevitable, being the manga about Vikings. It makes no effort to tone down the more brutal aspects of Viking culture, and the glorification of it by (most) norsemen. Setting villages on fire, stealing the food and resources, killing most of the men, raping the women and selling the survivors into slavery... it's all there.
  • Thorfinn himself sets a few villages on fire while travelling with Askeladd's crew, at least one of which gave him food and shelter beforehand. Years later the guilt for all the deaths he caused consumes him to the point that he swears off violence.
  • Einar's village in northern England, originally founded by Norse settlers, was attacked by English troops when he was a child, which resulted in the death of his father. Many years later, the village is attacked again by Danish raiders, who burn the houses, steal the food and valuables and capture the survivors to sell them into slavery. They would've probably raped Einar's mother and sister if they hadn't killed them first, but Einar himself ends up being sold as a slave to Ketil.
  • Canute at least finds the rape and slavery bits a little distasteful, and explicitly forbids his soldiers to take advantage of their displaced victims like that. When a few of them disobey his orders, Canute orders them beheaded and their heads displayed along the road as a warning. When one of his advisors complains that "collecting the spoils of war" is a time-honored military custom, Canute has none of it and retorts that he has no use for undisciplined men who cannot follow orders.
  • Canute later forbids the Jomsvikings from entering Ketil's farm, well aware that they would start pillaging the place if left alone. He then states that the whole point of coming to the farm was to requisition it in its entirety, not to pillage it.

Arts

• In Brennus and his Share of the Spoils◊ by Paul Jamin, a Gallic chief is about to enjoy plundered Roman gold and captive Roman women after the Senones' sack of Rome.

Comedy

• Comedian/Impressionist Rich Little once impersonated John Wayne as Ghenghis Khan: "We're gonna go in and we're gonna rape the women and steal the sheep. And for God's sake, get it right this time!"
• Hannibal Burress' album 'My Name is Hannibal' contains a joke about creating the phrases 'rape and pillage' and 'pillage and plunder': "How about 'rape and pillage'?" "What's pillage?" "I was focusing on the rape". Later on, "What about 'pillage and plunder'?" "What's plunder?" "Honestly I was still focusing on rape"

Comic Books

• Crécy: Discussed Trope. The English, as the narrator gleefully admits, have been busy burning several villages on their progress from Caen to Crecy. This tactic was a favorite of Edward the Black Prince and intended to terrorize the population into believing that the French wouldn't protect them and the English would. The narrator still insists, despite murdering French peasants, that they are the real underdogs against the French aristocratic army.
• Dracula Lives!: One tale has a pirate crew venturing inland to loot the (mostly) abandoned Castle Dracula. On their journey there, they go through all the items in the trope name when they attack the village next to the castle, before moving on to the structure itself.
• In Paperinik New Adventures the Evronians are known to bring the pillage and burn parts to the extreme (though they avoid the rape part because they have a different way to reproduce): the pillaging includes every sentient, as they feed on their emotions and need some undrained to maintain a breeding stock, and the burning includes everything they don't have a use for... Including the food supply, forcing them to regrow it at a later date to feed their slaves. It's apparently done because they can.
• Rat-Man: Parodied in the The Expendables parody, I sacrificabili: Steppan Dranjavic (an Expy of Arnold Schwarzenegger) orders his soldiers to attack a village and burn the women, kill the houses and rape the men. They dejectedly comply and comment how they'll start with killing the houses.
• Strontium Dog: In "Traitor to his Kind", Cuthbert asks Wulf if he ever raped and pillaged England. Wulf responds that he did a lot of pillaging back in the day, but there was no raping — the girls were only too willing.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: Capt. Storm was notorious for giving no quarter, stealing everything of value when he attacked, killing all his victims, and sinking those ships he couldn't steal for himself.

Comic Strips

• Parodied in several The Far Side strips, usually with Horny Vikings:
  • As most of a Viking crew are looting and burning a village and carrying off the women, two are in the foreground, casually having lunch, one of them complaining (as he looks in a lunchbox), "Well, she did it to me again. Tuna fish!"
  • Vikings are depicted running about tossing eggs at huts, with the caption explaining that "for many years, until they became truly nasty, Vikings would plunder, loot, and then egg the houses of coastal villagers".
  • A party of Viking raiders are waiting outside a "Small Defenseless Village" that has designated plundering hours, patiently waiting for the time to arrive.
• Hägar the Horrible and his crew pillages a lot, and occasionally burn, but they spare the women. (Kids read the strip, after all.) There are a lot of jokes about this; for example, in a strip, Hagar is leading an army with siege engines and a battering ram against a castle, but it has a sign that says, "No looting and pillaging allowed!" Hagar says, "Gee, I kinda hate to turn back now..."

Fan Works

• Chasing Dragons: As in canon, armies routinely rape and sack their way through Westeros and Essos. Even the normally honorable Blackfish accepts this as a reality of war in a time where soldiers are paid in plunder and the chance to rampage. The Ironborn embrace it, and for Lyn Corbay it's a specialty.
• I Am Skantarios: The titular character makes a habit of sacking captured cities and looting everything of value within to fund his war machine. He does, however, spare a few towns that he needs for future campaigns.
• The Lunar Rebellion: A couple of examples show up:
  • Griffon reivers menace Equestria's shores early in the story, attacking coastal settlements, sacking them, and kidnapping their inhabitants, whom they either enslave or eat.
  • The Avatar of Nightmare Moon uses the possibility of this as a threat to try to force Shadow to convince Celestia to surrender Canterlot, claiming that she'd take the city anyway and it’d be impossible to control victory-drunk soldiers seeking retribution for a long, hard siege and the deaths of close companions.
    "If I take the city by storm, half of it will burn to the ground, and a year later most of the surviving mares shall have new pegasus foals."
• The Night Unfurls:
  • The Always Chaotic Evil fantasy species, like orcs, are really fond of attacking villages, abducting townsfolk, raping them, and/or razing said villages to the ground.
  • Essentially the Black Dogs' modus operandi during their conquest to build a Sex Empire, taking whatever and whoever they wish in every attack. Special mention goes to their assault on Navarus Village in Chapter 4, where the men are taken to be executed, while the women, children included, are rounded up in a church for an orgy.
• Our Blades Are Sharp:
  • Ramsay has been conducting raids to terrorize the smallfolk in the area around the Weeping Water and the Lonely Hills.
  • The Mountain is pillaging and terrorizing the Riverlands and Jon winds up accompanying Beric to arrest the Mountain. Jon actually sees the Mountain watching the razing of one village, with a look of disinterest.
• Ripples: During the civil war, Cedric's Changeling Legions engage in claiming enemy estates as their habitations. They rape women who can bear children in order to make new Changeling bloodlines as revenge towards the noble lines with history of tormenting Changelings.
• The Royal Sketchbook: Twilight tries to help a pillaged village from bandits. Alas, not all problems can be solved with friendship. This situation is beyond her skillset. It even leaves seasoned soldiers like Flash Sentry shocked.
• Soul Eater: Troubled Souls: This happens on a country-wide scale. Cancer and Henderson effectively isolate the British Overseas Territory of Bermuda from the rest of the world. Then, Cancer sends out all of the Anria to go wild on the surface. They destroy villages and prey on the residents, presumably to eat their souls. Not only did Cancer order this to strengthen Novus Partus' main fighting force, she wants to see if any of them will develop like fellow Anria Gilgamesh did.
• Star Wars vs Warhammer 40K: Happens on a global scale in Episode 32 when Space Marines from the Crimson Razors Chapter invade Utapau. After destroying all the Separatist droid factories on the planet, the Razors then systematically sack every city and drive out all the civilian inhabitants into the planet's deadly wilderness where they are hunted down like animals. Afterwards, the Razors hold a cannibalistic victory feast where they eat some of the native Pau'ans alive while the rest are killed and have their corpses piled up and burnt.
• A Song of Ice and Fire fanfic Two And Ten: The Sack of King's Landing, an example of this trope in canon, is shown through the eyes of a 12-year-old Sandor Clegane.
• A Young Woman's Political Record: The Francois army occupying Rhine makes a habit of raping and murdering the civilians living there.
• In RWBY: Scars, Cinder's Start of Darkness happened after Raven's tribe pillaged her village and sold survivors into slavery.
• War of Remnant: A RWBY Anthology
  • Qrow accuses Raven of allowing the Branwen tribe to do this, but it’s averted, as she is shown to do a good job of keeping even the most vicious members in check.
  • Play Straight with the Warrior and her band. They butcher Salem’s kingdom, taking the survivors as sex slaves, and have done this before.

Films — Animation

• At the beginning of Princess Mononoke, when Ashitaka has left his home village, he sees an army raid a village, plunder it and burn it down. He kills two samurai who attack him, but then decides to stay out of the fight and flee.

Films — Live-Action

• In Andrei Rublev, while on the way to Moscow, a horde of Mongol-Tatars decide to prey on the undefended town of Vladimir. Men are cut down and shot with arrows, thatched roofs are set aflame, women of all ages are raped, a cow is set on fire, a horse falls down a flight of stairs; general pandemonium ensues. The majority of the townsfolk barricade themselves in the town's cathedral. What makes it so heinous is that they are being guided by a pretender to the Moscovian throne and many Russians are among their ranks.
• Apocalypto: Happens when the protagonist's jungle village is razed to the ground by Mayan slavers.
• The Blade Master: Ator's home village is destroyed by a group of barbarians, who take the survivors home to sacrifice to a giant snake.
• Blazing Saddles: Spoofed at the beginning, where the mayor of Rock Ridge complains of "people stampeded and cattle raped", and in the part where Slim Pickins' character is describing his plan to Hedley — it initially seems like the bandits are just planning to steal things and kill those who resist but spare the women, but it turns out that they just mean to rape them after they're done with the town.
• Come and See: The last act of the film largely follows the main character as he gets caught in a Belarusian village overrun by a Nazi death squad. As you might guess, things go very poorly for the residents. In real life, the Einsatzgruppen were indeed such psychopaths that even regular SS were disgusted by them.
• Conan the Barbarian (1982) kicks off the main plot with a barbarian raid on the title character's village when he is just a kid. Plenty of raping, pillaging, and burning goes on, and both of Conan's parents are killed (the father by being ripped apart by hounds, the mother by having her head chopped off by the Big Bad). Conan and the other kids are sent off to be enslaved. It's implied that he later raids villages for fun himself:
  Chief: Conan! What is best in life?
  Conan: To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!
• Erik the Viking: Lampshaded and parodied when the inept hero defensively assures the village maiden he's failing to ravish that he's burned and pillaged his way up and down the coast, to which she responds "Burning and pillaging. What about the raping?"
• Flowers of War: Done by Imperial Japanese Army troops, since the story takes place during the Nanking massacre.
• Future World (2018): The Warlord is introduced attacking a settlement in a factory with his gang, slaughtering everyone and stealing their possessions before setting fire to the area while they leave. He later does the same thing with Drug Town, while Ash states her certainity that he'd do this to Oasis too, after he and his gang raped them (although that's only mentioned, and not shown).
• Glory. The 54th Massachusetts find themselves working with Colonel Montgomery's "contraband regiment", which unlike the 54th is an undisciplined rabble used by their commander to burn 'secessionist' farms and make off with the loot within. However when Montgomery sees one of his black soldiers manhandling a white woman, he shoots the man on the spot.
• The inciting incident of Hundra. An enemy tribe of barbarians do this to the amazons, leaving the title character (who was out on a hunt) the only survivor. Hundra herself shows that she has no compunctions against the first part of the trope later on when she comes close to forcing a man to impregnate her.
• The Island (1980): The standard tactic for the pirates is to sneak up on an isolated pleasure craft and stealthily board it, murder everyone on board, loot anything of value, and then burn or blow up the boat to hide all evidence of the crime. Their actions towards the woman on board the schooner indicate that they may indulge in rape as well, if the time allows. (This particular woman is shot while trying to escape before any rape can occur.)
• King Arthur (2004): The Saxons do this except rape — not because they find anything morally wrong with it, but because their leader believes their offspring would be born weak.
• The Malay Chronicles: Bloodlines: The film's main villains, a legion of pirates called the "Garuda" (eagles) and led by their ruthless, bloodthirsty captain, the Fallen Hero Kamawas, spends entire decades terrorizing the waters of Malaysia and Indonesia, destroying villages, passing ships, and in the backstroy killed the hero Merong's parents, turning Merong into an orphan and a drifter. Later on when Merong falls for a village maid named Embun, it's revealed that Embun was another survivor of the Garuda attacks, after Kamawas raped her and have her left for the dead.
• Mars Attacks!: Minus the rape part, the novelization for the film clarifies this is the basis of the entire Martian civilization; invade planets, blast, kill, and destroy everything, take anything that might interest them (like porn magazines), and then move onto the next planet.
• Of Gods And Warriors: After Prince Bard usurps the throne, food starts running low. He says to his henchman "Shouldn't you be off raping and pillaging?"
• Pale Rider: Early in, the Big Bad's men raid the gold miners' camp to try to scare them off the land. They even shot a poor little puppy.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl: Jack Sparrow's plan after he stole a ship from Port Royal is to "raid, pillage, and plunder [his] weaselly black guts out". The Black Pearl pirates make their first full appearance sacking Port Royal, burning and looting shops and homes in search of the MacGuffin that summoned them there in the first place.
• Pope Joan: On the day Johanna is supposed to be married, a group of Vikings sacks the village, killing everyone except Johanna. Johanna disguises herself as a man and flees to Fulda, setting off a chain of events that eventually see her elected Pope.
• The Sack Of Rome, a 1992 Italian/Russian movie starring Franco Nero, as you can imagine from the title. When the German mercenaries enter Rome they engage in rape, slaughter, looting, and pointless destruction.
• Serenity: Early in the movie, the Reavers are shown doing this to the town that the titular ship's crew are busy swindling.
• Seven Samurai: The titular seven are hired to defend a village of Japanese farmers from bandits. The Magnificent Seven is actually a remake of Seven Samurai as a Western. The villagers in both films expect the raping part, going as far as to hide the women away from the village.
• Star Wars: Tusken Raiders often raid outlying settlements and farms on Tatooine, and one of their tribes is responsible for Anakin's mother's kidnapping and death.
• In ¡Three Amigos! this is the standard M.O. of El Guapo. This leads to a bit of dialogue when Dusty poses as one of the banditos and starts making up recollections for an inebriated and celebratory El Guapo:
  El Guapo: Oh-ho, you...
  Dusty Bottoms: Jose!
  [the banditos cheer]
  El Guapo: Together, we...
  Dusty Bottoms: Burned the village!
  El Guapo: Burned the village!
  [the bandidos cheer]
  El Guapo: And, uh...
  Dusty Bottoms: ... rrrrrrrrraped de horses!
  [the bandidos cheer]
  El Guapo: And we...
  Dusty Bottoms: Rode off on de wimmin!
  El Guapo: Rode off on de wimmin!
  [the bandidos cheer, a bit more quietly]
  El Guapo: And uh...
  Dusty Bottoms: Plundered!
  El Guapo: Plundered!
  [the bandidos cheer]
  El Guapo: And uh...
  Dusty Bottoms: Pruned!
  El Guapo: ...pruned the, uh...
  Dusty Bottoms: Hedges!
  El Guapo: ...hedges of...
  Dusty Bottoms: Many small villages!
• Troy: The city of Troy gets this treatment from the Greeks as they finally break into the city.
  • The Director's Cut of the film takes it to a whole new level, showing the conquering Greek soldiers' transgressions on the Trojans in an even more vicious light with rapes, hangings, and throwing babies into burning buildings.

Jokes

• Attila the Hun, busy during a campaign, sends one of his first lieutenants to attack a city, while Attila and the rest of the army are occupied with another. When the lieutenant comes back, Attila asks him where the loot is. "There is none, answers the lieutenant. We burnt the city, so after there was no booty". Then, the lieutenant is hanged by feet, and has to write a hundred lines of "Rape first, pillage next, and then burn."
• A joke of unknown origins roughly goes: "(Group whom you want to insult) were so violent, they killed all the men, raped all the women, looted everything that wasn't nailed down, raped all the livestock, burned everything and then raped the ashes for good measure."
• A knight and his army marched before their king, to report the results of their crusade: "Your Majesty, today's raid is a success! We sacked the town, slaughtered all resistance, executed their generals, massacred the peasants, burned the buildings, stole the livestock, threw babies into fire, and even pleasured ourselves with the women for good measure. Nevertheless, our army is victorious, and now your reputation will strike fear in the hearts of your enemies in the western regions..."
  The king, suddenly horrified, jumped out of his throne. "You what?... you idiots, I don't have any enemies in the west!"
  "Oh," the knight said, with a Beat. "... well, you do now."
  

Literature

• 1632: Common, due to the setting. The Americans have a few issues with this, and they have no qualms about voicing their opinions on the subject. At gunpoint. In 1635: The Eastern Front, there's even an entire army regiment dedicated to maintaining discipline, including preventing the "downtimer" troops from carrying out what they consider "normal".
• The Art of War (Sun Tzu) advocates this practice as a way to keep an army supplied while simultaneously weakening the enemy. Doesn't say much about rape, though.
• Belisarius Series: Standard procedure by the Malwa not only doing this but selling whatever is left of the captured girls to pimps. Which makes it rather poetic justice that they were destroyed by the husband of a former prostitute.
• Bernard Cornwell: This happens whenever a city is captured. In one of the Sharpe books, the hero storms an impossible breach in order to get to his wife and daughter ahead of the pillaging hordes of his own side who have got in elsewhere. Truth in Television, as demonstrated by numerous siege-and-storms in the Napoleonic Era, of which Badajoz was one of the most infamous.
• Beware of Chicken: Sun Ken and the Whirling Demon Blade Gang make a lifestyle of this. Sun Ken spells it out plainly in his Villainous Vow upon encountering Jin's disciples.
  “I am the Whirling Demon Blade, Sun Ken! What I do is what I desire to do! I take what I please from your Great Master! I shall slay his brothers, and rape his wife! I will burn down his home, eat his flesh, drink his blood, and sleep in his skin for daring to mock me so! Sending a spirit beast, a chicken, against me instead of facing me himself?! A more worthless “Great Master” I can’t imagine!”
• Bored of the Rings at one point mentions "rumors of renegade bands of mounted sheepmen who ravaged northern Twodor, pillaging, raping, burning, killing, and raping."
• In Candide, when the Bulgars and Avars go to war, each side burns the other's towns and disembowels and rapes their inhabitants, all in accordance with international law. Cunegonde is reported by Pangloss to be one of the many victims of Bulgar gang-rape and disembowelment, though she turns out not to have been killed but sold into slavery.
• The Chronicles of Magravandias: In The Crown of Silence, invaders decimate a village and rape any survivors, regardless of gender.
• Conqueror: The Mongols do this quite a lot, generally as punishment for not surrendering immediately.
• Council Wars lampshades this when Bun-Bun complains that the bad guys were getting the order wrong.
• Courtship Rite: The Mnankrei are an overclan of sea-raiders, and one of the chief rivals of the protagonists' Kaiel clan. Their goal is to rule the planet through force of arms. In the meantime, they routinely pillage coastal towns which refuse to swear fealty to them. Like the Kaiel, they have a well-deserved reputation for eating babies, although in their case, it's less morally ambiguous.
• Darkover: Parodied in one story where some raiders don't recall what they're supposed to do to who when sacking a town.
  We have to tell them again and again:
  Rape the women and kill the men.
  Sometimes I think they'll never learn:
  First you pillage and then you burn.
• In The Dinosaur Lords, it's the standard practice for many lords, especially more conservative ones, to let their soldiers rape, pillage and burn anything they wish to on their way to war, bringing many headaches to their appointed leader, progressive count Jaume, who has to resort to hanging rapists lest the army be at war with its own nation before they even reach the battlefield.
• Discworld
  • In Interesting Times Cohen has to explain to one of his senile warriors which things one rapes, and what things you burn.
    Rincewind: Rape? That's not very—
    Cohen: He's eighty-seven. Don't go and spoil an old man's dreams.
  • In The Last Hero however, when Lord Vetinari describes "heroic" deeds as "murder, pillage, theft and rape", the head of the Guild of Historians clarifies that Cohen's band ravish rather than rape, in line with Cohen's a) generally decent if disinterested attitude to people who aren't likely to fight back, b) improbable charisma.
    Vetinari: There is a difference?
    Mr Betteridge: It's more a matter of approach, I understand. I don't believe there were ever any actual complaints.
• The Draka: The Draka call this L&R, "Loot 'n Rape", and they do a lot of it.
• The Empirium Trilogy: During Eliana's airing of her grievances against Astavar to Navi, she mentions that the Empire's soldiers raped Ventera's civilians, killed the royal family, then burned down agricultural lands and libraries.
• The Foundation Series features a planet sacked after revolting against an Imperial viceroy. As an added Tear Jerker, there was already a fleet approaching to take out that viceroy for revolting against the Emperor, but its commander was highly displeased at being denied his chance for plunder and glory and had the planet bombed anyway.
• The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England: The Hordamen, who are this world's version of Vikings, attack settlements on the coast, kill all the men, kidnap women and children, pillage and burn everything.
• The General Series: This is what happens when a city is taken by storm. Well, not burning, but the troops are customarily allowed to rape and pillage for twenty-four hours. Call it incentive to surrender on terms.
• In A Harvest of War, this is both the MO and ultimate goal of the villains in Draeze.
• Hellbender: Played for Black Comedy (just like everything else). Lock's forces engage in horrific amounts of brutal rape and even more brutal murder. One of the heroes worked for her nation's propaganda department and says that rather than making Lock look worse they actually had to make them look better because no one would believe the truth. Lock teaches that the only way to prevent rape, murder, and other violent crime is to allow those aggressions a healthy outlet. They even have charts showing how the rate of these crimes has fallen drastically since they adopted this policy. Of course, these charts don't count all the rape and murder they're allowed to do.
• Hope: Discussed — prior to The American Revolution, it was considered perfectly acceptable for armies traveling from battlefield to battlefield to; 1) eat everything edible, 2) steal everything not nailed down and 3) have sex with anyone they wanted. This 1) made feeding soldiers simple, 2) made paying for soldiers simple, and 3) was a great perk for soldiers. Also, doing all that kept the "enemy" from doing the exact same thing for the exact same reasons. This was the reason the Third Amendment was passed; America was the first nation made by/for/of commoners, and the third order of business once they'd won was declaring these things illegal — right after ensuring the freedom to protest such acts (First Amendment) and having the weapons to Just Shoot people engaged in such behavior (Second Amendment).
• Hurog: In Dragon Bones, the heroes encounter a group of bandits who are about to start with the raping. They stop them there so that the bandits never get around to the pillaging and burning. However, they later see some villages that weren't as lucky. The situation is thus that it is actually warfare, but the high king who should protect the villagers claims it's just some random bandits who have nothing to do with the neighbouring country. This is not good for his reputation — his subjects tolerated a lot of his misbehaviour, but not protecting them means they're better off without him...
• The Immortals: What happened to Daine's family. She got her revenge, though, when a local wolf pack took her in, finally understood what happened when she tried to explain it to them — wolves don't hunt their own kind — and went more or less batshit with rage.
• Inheritance Cycle: In Eragon, the Urgals slaughter every living thing in the village of Yazuac and pile their corpses in the town's center.
• John Carter of Mars had the First-Born pirates attacking the Holy Therns's domains for ages, to regularly kidnap their females to what is generally believed to be a Fate Worse than Death:
  They were popularly supposed to inhabit the lesser moon, from which they descended upon Barsoom at long intervals. Where they visited they wrought the most horrible atrocities, and when they left carried away with them firearms and ammunition, and young girls as prisoners. These latter, the rumor had it, they sacrificed to some terrible god in an orgy which ended in the eating of their victims.
• Kane Series:
  • As a Villain Protagonist, Kane has nothing against it, although it is mostly kept to his Back Story, such as his days as a pirate in Thovnos in Darkness Weaves and as a bandit leader in "Raven's Eyrie".
  • It's also what the followers of Orted Ak-Ceddi's cult of Sataki do to every town and city that does not surrender and join their titular Dark Crusade.
• Sadly not uncommon in the German SF series Maddrax because the setting is a Bronze Age world after a comet apocalypse. These raids on villages and towns are often successful, but they also fail again and again. Two cases in particular stand out.
  • In one case, a group of barbarians raided a village, killing most of the residents and kidnapping only young women of child-bearing age and a few small children. When they reach a rest area, the barbarians decide to rape the women. But one of them has telepathic powers, and uses them to call a pack of mutated giant wolves. The barbarians are then dealt with very quickly.
  • In the second case, soldiers from an Arab country want to invade a European village while they are on a campaign of conquest. The soldiers see a village in the distance, and the whole army immediately runs there. As soon as they arrive, they find that this village is inhabited by taratzes, who are superhumanly strong and outnumbered. This is pretty much the end of the campaign of conquest.
• The Magic Tree House: Viking Ships At Sunrise has Jack and Annie narrowly escape a Viking raid. No violence is shown onscreen, but the Vikings clearly intend to do some raiding and sacking.
• In Maresi, this is what men attacking the abbey usually intend. There's a door that still has burn marks from one such attempt. The women have their own means of defense, even though a lot of knowledge on magic was lost since the abbey was founded.
• Martín Fierro: At song III of this Narrative Poem, Martin Fierro describes how the Indians destroyed the settlements of the Frontier: They Plunder and Burn Baby Burn the town, kill kids and old people, and take the women captive and torture them. (Argentinians even have a name for this attacks: a malón). Fierro was conscripted into defending the settlements, but he can’t do it properly: The army has no firearms because the Colonel sold them to the settlers so they can hunt ostriches. The Argentinian army is exploiting this trope: As long as there are malones the settlers will ask for the Government to continue Settling the Frontier, so the army recruits the Gauchos as Cannon Fodder who cannot stop the malones, while the army officials become CattleBarons until is time to implement the Final Solution.
• Mistborn: The Original Trilogy: Subverted in the third book. Elend, strapped for resources and with no other choice, sends his armies to pillage the enemy countryside as part of a campaign to get one of the last holdout cities to submit. The villages are so pathetic that his armies end up sticking around to help them for a few days. Elend's advisers note that this is the first time they've ever heard of armies passing up the opportunity for pillaging, and clearly Elend has rubbed off on them.
• Oathbringer (third book of The Stormlight Archive): In flashbacks to Dalinar's younger days, he interrupts the looting of a conquered town and stops his ally Sadeas from selecting women to "accompany" him for the night. Not because of any moral objections, but he just recruited an elite archer from the town, and bought his service by promising not to harm the town further. This is a huge contrast from modern-day Dalinar, who would never allow even minor looting or other disrespect to a defeated enemy.
• The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski: This happens to several Polish peasant villages during World War II. These villages have been neglected for centuries, lack electricity, and lie in a war-torn country. Towards the end of the book, the protagonist Jewish boy comes to a village that is attacked by a band of deserters from the Red Army. They go on an orgy of gang-raping and slaughter, and it's a real Tear Jerker scene.
• In The Prophecy of the Stones, pillaging and burning (rape is not mentioned) is part of the Army of Darkness's (no, not that one) job description, from the sound of it.
• Protector of the Small: The concept of raiders is touched upon, which acknowledges that while the rape, pillaging, and burning is a pretty terrible thing, it's encouraged by systemic poverty and even though you can bring individual raiders to justice, there are no easy answers.
• Quest for Fire: Paleolithic life is portrayed as an endless cycle of this though possibly without the burning, given the limited understanding of fire. Even the protagonists have participated in it, which is what leads to them losing said fire in the first place as their own settlement is raided in retaliation.
• The Reynard Cycle: Pretty much every army in the series commits atrocities of this kind on a regular basis. Even Reynard's own. He knows about it but shrugs it off with a War Is Hell attitude.
  • Engadlin, the region directly between warring Arcas and Luxia, has had this done to it so many times that the regional character trait is swift capitulation and a disturbingly relaxed attitude regarding cannibalism due to enduring a hundred years of famine. Even when it's the Other Other White Meat.
  • The Calvarian army does this as a matter of practice, though they omit the rape. Their culture views rape and torture as utterly vile, something you wouldn't even do to an enemy. So, the good news is: You won't be raped or tortured. The bad news? You will be massacred to the last man, woman, and child, and everything you ever cared about will be burned to the ground. Mainly because inferior architecture annoys the average Calvarian.
• Rogue Warrior: This is the Rogue Warrior's modus operandi. He doesn't actually rape anyone, but the rest is pretty accurate.
• Safehold: Cayleb Ahrmahk, Emperor of the Empire of Charis, works very very carefully to avert this trope. While the burning is unavoidable, raping is punished harshly and pillaging is largely avoided by Cayleb willingly paying the going for the property and materials he takes from the people he's conquering. The reason for this, besides being a decent person, is that with a Corrupt Church eagerly smearing him with all the propaganda they can get or make up, Cayleb knows his best defense is to not behave the way the Church claims.
• Sarny: This occurs after the slaves are let free due to all the violence during the final days of the The American Civil War. Sarny and her friend Lucy come across a plantation that was completely ransacked. Even the dogs and horses were killed. The family was murdered and the sole woman was heavily implied to have been raped. The Sole Survivor was a toddler who hid in a closet.
• The Silerian Trilogy: The Valdani start using terror tactics as the rebellion increases, leading to entire villages being destroyed and the inhabitants slaughtered by the end. They also did this to Tansen's village before while hunting Armian. Later, Silerians take revenge on the Valdani left in the country with the same means.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: This is considered common practice during war:
  • The cultures of the Ironborn and the Dothraki are based on the concept of invading, looting, burning the place to the ground, and raping women claimed as trophies. The Ironborn especially take this to an extreme. Pillaging is a religious mandate to them and they glorify raiding to the point that they think actually buying things is for wimps. House Greyjoy's motto is "We do not sow". This is eventually rooted in the fact that, since the Iron Islands have so little actual arable land, they probably can't sow, and eventually came to trap themselves in something of a vicious circle where they need to constantly steal resources from everybody else in order to keep their culture from collapsing.
  • Gregor Clegane is the avatar of this trope, a true expert in cruelty and savagery. He kills the Red Viper after confessing to raping and murdering his sister. And then the venom Oberyn Martell put on his lance killed Clegane in horrible agony.
  • This little excerpt of A Clash of Kings says it all:
    Bronn: A lordling down from the Trident, says your father's men burnt his keep, raped his wife and killed all his peasants.
    Tyrion: I believe they call that war.
  • The Wildlings go over the Wall to pillage any village nearby, as there's almost nothing else for them to pillage on their side save each other, and habitually kidnap women to take as brides.
• St. Edmund of East Anglia: In The Martyrdom of St. Edmund, right after landing their fleet in East Anglia, the Danes seize a town by surprise, set it to fire, and kill and rape the inhabitants. The massacre is ordered by the Danish leader Ingwar "from sheer love of cruelty".
• Sword of Truth: All the evil armies engage in enormous amounts of raping and pillaging; not just villages, but whole cities and countries they roll over. Once Richard takes over one of these armies along with the state, he orders the practice stopped. Not everyone is happy, but outright disobedience is not mentioned.
• "Trantor Falls": Gilmer describes the women his soldiers have captured much the same way that he describes the gems and wine available on Trantor. Even his lowest-ranking members can be choosy about what they take from the enormous City Planet. In contrast, Dean Sarns is aware that they have forty-two rape victims (37 women and 5 men) in their medical clinic (and an unknown number around the planet) and doesn't particularly care what "treasures" they take, as long as the University is left alone.
• William Makepeace Thackeray: In two novels, The History Of Henry Esmond and The Luck of Barry Lyndon, the main characters are part of armies during the European wars of the 18th century, and their side is depicted as doing this. Barry is a Villain Protagonist, so he joins in. Esmond is a more honorable guy, so he doesn't really take part, but does assent when his faithful servant wants to join in the raping and pillaging.
• The Witcher: In "Something More", Dandelion mentions the attacking Nifgaardian army which "burns, kills and rapes everything in its path...not obligatory in this order".
  • During the Second Northern War, this is stated as Nilfgaard's official policy:
  “War to the castles, peace to the villages,” Coehoorn said to his commanders yesterday. You know that principle,’ he added at once. ‘You learned it in officer training. That principle applied until today; from tomorrow you're to forget it. From tomorrow a different principle applies, which will now be the battle cry of the war we are waging. The battle cry and my orders run: War on everything alive. War on everything that can burn. You are to leave scorched earth behind you. From tomorrow, we take war beyond the line we will withdraw behind after signing the treaty. We are withdrawing, but there is to be nothing but scorched earth beyond that line. The kingdoms of Rivia and Aedirn are to be reduced to ashes! Remember Sodden! The time of revenge is with us!’

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The opening of Season 6 has a gang of demon bikers discovering the Slayer is dead and doing this to Sunnydale. At one stage Spike watches the demons force their way into a house and hears a Screaming Woman; he has a big grin as he remembers doing such things himself. Fortunately Spike has Dawn with him.
• Dave Allen at Large: A number of sketches focus on Vikings raiding, raping, and killing their way through the Middle Ages.
  Viking #1 (Allen): Rape all the men and kill all the women!
  Viking #2: Don't you mean kill all the men and rape all the women?
  Viking #1: You pillage your way and I'll pillage mine.
• Farscape: Despite his efforts to stay below the radar (to avoid the various bad guys who want him dead), Crichton and his exploits still become well known...and blown way out of proportion
  Borlik: You know, I heard he destroyed a Peacekeeper Gammak Base. Murdered an entire Nebari battalion—even laid waste to a shadow depository. Guy was a devil. He raped and pillaged, he popped eyeballs—
  John: Whoa, whoa! Where—? Where do they get these stories? Let's set the facts straight. First off, there was no raping, very little pillaging, and Frau Blucher popped all the eyeballs.
• Game of Thrones:
  • The Dothraki are shown indulging in this at one point which comes back to bite Khal Drogo when he needs some medical attention. Also mentioned as happening offscreen.
  • During the Battle of Blackwater, Tyrion Lannister successfully plays on this for his Rousing Speech. The forces of Stannis Baratheon are pounding on the gate with a battering ram, King Joffrey has abandoned them, and the badass Hound has deserted. Tyrion offers to lead the counterattack, but no one takes a dwarf seriously. How to motivate his soldiers?
    "Don't fight for your king, and don't fight for his kingdoms. Don't fight for honor, don't fight for glory, don't fight for riches, because you won't get any. That is your gate Stannis means to break down, this is your city he means to sack. If they get in, it will be your homes they will burn, your gold they will steal, your women they will rape. Those are brave men knocking at our door. Let's go kill them!"
  • The Wildlings climb up the Wall to sack any village they find, as they have almost nothing else on the other side of the Wall.
  • Lannister forces rape, pillage, and burn the Riverlands in retaliation for their rebellion against King Joffrey (or their lords rebelling; the peasants never had any say in the matter). Ser Gregor is Lord Tywin's go-to guy for this when he's not "accidentally" killing people in tourneys. Ned is so appalled that he attaints him and sentences him to death. After the attempt to stop him fails, Gregor continues this throughout the war. We get a close look at what's left afterward in Season 4 when Sandor Clegane and Arya Stark trek through it on their way to the Vale.
  • This is the specialty of the people from the Iron Islands, the ironborn and their leaders, House Greyjoy. They have a unique culture centered on maritime raiding and pillaging other peoples. Euron Greyjoy considers this his greatest purpose in life.
  • In season 8, Daenerys demands King's Landing's surrender after Cersei refused to commit her forces to stopping the Army of the Dead, then attacks Dany's forces several more times, killing one of her dragons and closest advisors in the process. After forcing a breach with her last dragon and with her armies already in the city, someone manages to order the bells of the city to start ringing to signal the surrender, but by that point, Dany is in no mood to be lenient and decides to bring fire and blood upon the entire city as she starts to burn it down while her armies murder and rape their way through the streets.
• This was the favorite pastime of Methos, Kronos, Silas, and Caspian, the four immortals known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse during the Bronze Age in Highlander.
• Mythbusters: Played for humor in the pirate episode.
  Adam (while dressed as a pirate): Let's... PILLAAAAGE!
  Tory: I don't think that's legal in California.
• Norsemen:
  • Arvid basically dedicated his whole life to this prior to the start of the series. When he gets married he has trouble with consensual sex and they try a roleplay scenario where he pretends to pillage his own farm, mock-kills his slaves, and attempts to have sex with his screaming wife... but overthinks it and can't get it up. Apologizing to the slaves afterwards.
  • Jarl Varg's vikings have no problem pillaging and raping in foreign lands, but they seem to develop a kind of PTSD after being ordered to assault a nearby village. Ironically when Varg himself loudly threatens to rape Arvid's wife to lure him out of hiding, he gets "performance anxiety", much to her disappointment.
• Rome: When Caesar crosses the Rubicon, he makes a point of ordering no "raping, pillage or burning" as he's fighting a civil war inside Italy and needs to get the public on his side. It's made clear that otherwise this is routine procedure for the legions after they've won a battle.
  Titus Pullo: Me, I have simpler tastes. I like to kill my enemies, take their gold, and enjoy their women.
• Soviet Storm: World War II in the East has both the Germans and Soviets doing this to the others' civilian population during the Great Patriotic War. The latter case is due in part to many Russian soldiers losing their homes and loved ones this way when the Germans occupied, and in retaliation, they do this to the Germans once they manage to enter Germany in late 1944 and early 1945.
• A The Two Ronnies sketch had two characters discussing the origins of a feud between two Scottish clans. One of them mentions how the clan "rode into the village, killed all the men, raped all the women and stole all the cattle. <beat> Or perhaps it was the other way round."
• Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter: The Wehrmacht does a lot of pillaging and burning, followed by rape once the Russians arrive. Even the Polish partisans aren't above some pillage.
• Vikings shows the titular warriors wreaking havoc upon the hapless Saxons in this manner, with all the rape, slaughter, and pillaging shown on-screen. Well, the rape is surprisingly low-key. In fact, we only see two instances of it, and only barely.
• The Wheel of Time (2021): A party of Trollocs raid Emond's Field in the pilot. Many are killed and much of it's torched before they've retreated in the face of Moiraine's spells.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: Xena's backstory as a warlord is littered with this. Half the series she has to confront this past with people displaced from villages she had razed.

Music

• Cannibal Corpse's "Remaimed" is about a band of raiders repeatedly doing this to a same place (plus forcing the survivors they spared to eat the dead victims' corpses).
• Procol Harum, "Whaling Stories".
  Sack the town and rob the tower
  And steal the alphabet
• The official video for "Krigsgaldr" by Heilung shows some obviously male Stone Age stick men engaging in this trope. NSFW, unsurprisingly.
• The Viking Birthday Dirge, unsurprisingly, features several references
  May the candles on your cake
  Burn like cities in your wake
  Burn the castle and storm the keep
  Kill the women, but save the sheep
  Burn, then rape by firelight
  Add romance to life tonight
  This one lesson you must learn
  First you pillage, then you burn
• On Gloryhammer's first album, Tales From the Kingdom of Fife, "The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee" describes what Zargothrax and his army of undead unicorns do to Dundee. He also carts off a beautiful princess.
  Fireballs and Lightning
  are raining from the sky,
  Chaos and bloodshed,
  As all the people die!
• Or this little ditty credited to Matt Mullin (to the tune of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious")
  Pillage, rape, and loot and burn,
  but all in moderation.
  If you do the things we say
  then you'll soon rule the nation.
  Kill your friends and enemies,
  and then kill your relations.
  Pillage, rape, and loot and burn,
  but all in moderation.

Mythology and Religion

• The Bible: This occurs several times. Jerusalem has been sacked more than once.
  • Deuteronomy has a requirement that if the Israelites have a desire for the women captured in war, they are required to marry the captives and must treat them well, they are not allowed to mistreat them or sell them for money even when they're not pleased with the captured women.
  • It wasn't always done to the Israelites either. See, e.g. Numbers 31:7-18, Deuteronomy 20:10-14, and Judges 21:10-24.
  • In Book of Psalms, one of David's malicious prayers is to wish it happens to his enemies, one of which wishes the mothers of enemy nations to have their babies thrown against the rocks. (Even in the ancient world, violence against children was considered one of the worst calamities to happen to a captured city, to the point where it's now considered a war crime.)
  • In Zechariah 14:2, God says, "For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem for battle. The city will be captured and the houses plundered and the women ravished. Half of the city will go to exile, but the remainder of the people will not be cut off from the city."
• The Trojan Cycle: While the official goal of the Greeks is to retrieve Helen, most of them are fully intent on doing this to Troy. The actual event was covered in the now-lost epic Iliou persis, The Sack of Ilion, which described the specifics of how the victiorious Greeks rampaged through the city, stealing, killing, burning, and carrying women off as slaves. The only thing that they show any hesitancy towards harming are the temples of the gods, as they gives serious thought to stoning Ajax the Lesser to death when he damages Athena's alter while wrestling Cassandra away from it. The Achaeans' conduct during the sack is so debauched and feckless in the eyes of the gods that only two kings' troops got to sail home unimpeded — the rest all managed to severely offend some god or another, who promptly makes their return treacherous. A variant version from the Trojan perspective is covered in the opening of The Aeneid. The Iliad indicates that the Greeks also sacked neighboring cities during the long siege of Troy itself. It opens just after the sack of Lyrnessus, where Briseis was enslaved.

Pro Wrestling

• At WWF King of the Ring 1996, Brian Pillman said "I'm gonna rape, pillage and plunder this entire federation!"

Puppet Shows

• The Muppet Show: In one "Veterinarian's Hospital" sketch, Bob claims to descend from a Viking so bad at plundering and pillaging that they called him the pillage idiot.

Radio

• The Burkiss Way: One sketch features Ivan the Terrible, who gets introduced as being (in)famous for this trope. Except the narrator can't keep the order of items correct when attempting to list them all, which causes Ivan to get more and more exasperated:
  Narrator: With his vicious handpicked troop of Cossacks, he roamed the countryside, slaughtering the menfolk! Nicking things.^note He didn't want to say "pillaging villages", and exclaimed "Luton Towns" instead of "looting towns", so eventually they settled on this instead. Setting chimney tops to the women! Raping the fires and burning his valuables!
  Ivan the Terrible: Stop! Stop! (dramatic music stops) You know what you are, don’t you? An idiot with a capital C!

Tabletop Games

• Blackbeard: If you have a big enough ship, you might be able to sack ports. If you have enough weaponry and information from hostages, you might even be able to sack Boston or New York.
• Warhammer: The Dark Elves prowl the seas making slave raids or murderous surprise attacks, the Orcs like pillaging and burning as a prelude to a good scrap, and Chaos (notice a pattern?) Marauders are a constant menace in the northern lands, particularly the Norscans and their longships. The Beastmen who lurk in the forests and hills of the Old World also make this their entire modus operandi as they hate anything civilized and man-made.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Dark Eldar routinely raid other species' worlds for resources and prisoners to torture and enslave.
  • The Orks will sack and pillage for fun, but they're asexual and they'd be happier if the villagers put up a decent fight.
  • Chaos Space Marines will also raid and pillage For the Evulz.
  • Followers of the Chaos God Slaanesh are the best example. The Dark Eldar pillage and torture, Orks burn, pillage and burn again, followers of Khorne Killmaimburnkillmaimburn! (none of them really cares about raping, literally all they want is fighting and killing), but followers of Slaanesh will rape, pillage, rape, torture, rape and burn^note And did we mention rape?. They like rape!, and not necessarily in that order either.

Theater

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: The Cut Song "There's Something About A War" has Miles Gloriosus and the soldiers sing in praise of this:
  There's always a town to pillage,
  A city to be laid waste.
  There's always a little village
  Entirely to be erased.
  And citadels to sack, of course,
  And temples to attack, of course,
  Children to annihilate,
  Priestesses to violate,
  Houses to destroy — hey!
  Women to enjoy — hey!
  Statues to deface — hey!
  Mothers to debase — hey!
• Henry V: Henry doesn't actually do this to Harfleur, but he does have an absolutely hair-raising speech about it:
  Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
  Take pity of your town and of your people,
  Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
  Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
  O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
  Of heady murder, spoil and villainy.
  If not, why, in a moment look to see
  The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
  Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
  Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
  And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls,
  Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
  Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
  Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
  At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
• In Hermanoteu na terra de Godá, the titular prophet wannabe meets a duo of Visigoth barbarians, who pride themselves on their "rape and kill" lifestyle.
  Hermanoteu: So that's all you guys do?
  Fat Visigoth: Of course! At every village we come across!
  Thin Visigoth: Just at the last village, we killed all women and raped all goats!
  Both Visigoths: *Beat, both look at each other like they forgot something important*
• In Pippin, after Charles defeats the Visigoths in battle, he says that it's time for his men to rape and sack. "Oh yes, it's required." The Infidel Hun is alleged to have "destroyed three villages, raped hundreds of women, tortured and murdered thousands."
• The Trojan Women is probably the Ur-Example of a play dealing with the grief caused by war and from the point of view of civilians.
• A popular pre-show theater exercise involves the cast chanting VERY LOUDLY:
  WE'RE GONNA RAPE, KILL, PILLAGE, AND BURN
  WE'RE GONNA RAPE, KILL, PILLAGE, AND BURN
  EAT THE BABIES!

Toys

• In BIONICLE, it's heavily implied this is what Makuta Icarax's plans for taking over the Matoran Universe would amount to if he had his way, minus the "rape" part (since most of the sentient biomechanical organisms don't have a need for reproduction anyways). He briefly took his own personal army and took over several islands and settlements before Teridax swooped him to remind him why he's the leader. And then there's what he tells himself when he executes a master stroke to derail Teridax's plans once and for all.
  "If the Brotherhood still wishes to rule, it will be done my way. With fire and protosteel."

Video Games

• 9 Monkeys of Shaolin has the Wukou invaders terrorizing coastal towns and raiding multiple villages throughout the game, with the first stage being their assault on your home with you being the Sole Survivor. You're then rescued by some Shaolin monks, trains with them for revenge, and later spend much of the game traveling through various towns slaughtered by the Wukou while fighting their forces.
• Blasto: Parodied in the opening cutscene, where the Evil Overlord Bosc announces that his plan for the invasion of Earth is to "enslave their women, eat their children, and rape their cattle."
• Civilization: In all games, most land units can pillage the infrastructure (roads, farms, mines, etc.) outside enemy towns. Marauding barbarians are especially fond of this. Even if you zero out the A.I.s and the barbarians, if you have the Random Events generator on, you'll still have bandits raiding and pillaging to deal with.
• Crusader Kings: In Crusader Kings II, pagans, Hindus, and tribes of any religion can raid other realms for loot and captives. The resultant pillaging reduces the affected holdings' income for the next few years. Noble captives can be ransomed back to their families for gold, sacrificed in pagan rituals, arbitrarily executed, or, in the case of adult women, made into concubines.
• Divinity: Dragon Commander: This is a common headline in the in-universe newspaper, and serves as a plot point when dealing with Catherine, one of your Generals.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Molag Bal, Daedric Prince of Domination and Corruption, is practically the patron deity of the trope. While he enjoys committing these acts himself, he especially enjoys it when he can manipulate mortals into doing this to each other.
  • Pillaging and slaughter were fairly common acts in the wars throughout Tamrielic history, especially in the Merethic Era. Most notable was the genocide of the Falmer (Snow Elves) by Ysgramor and his Five Hundred Companions when he invaded Skyrim. In later eras, it became much less common, as armies invaded and only occupied lands, but the Orc kingdom of Orsinium suffered this fate pretty regularly by its High Rock and Hammerfell neighbors, and, during the Great War in the 4th Era, the region of Cyrodiil and particularly the Imperial City were subjected to this by the invading Aldmeri Dominion armies and their fanatically racist Thalmor leaders.
• Fallout: New Vegas:
  • This is the modus operandi of Caesar's Legion, their first victim in the game being the town of Nipton. In the endgame, if the Courier has a maxed-out Barter skill (which in this game means a very good understanding of economics and trade), they can point out to Legate Lanius that raiding is a very poor long term way to properly sustain a nation, especially considering that NCR towns make very poor raiding targets since they depend on trade, thus meaning even if the Legion wins the battle for Hoover Dam, they'll ultimately be defeated via attrition. This will be enough for Lanius to agree to retreat.
  • The White Legs tribe from the Honest Hearts DLC also practice this trope and have never developed any skills, such as agriculture or foraging, that they'd need to survive in the Wasteland without it.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Many maps include villages, which are often set upon by bandits. If they get there before any of your units can, the village will be destroyed and whatever item or character you would've received is lost forever. On the other hand, if you get there first, the village subsequently locks its gates, preventing this from happening.
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War: The villages will be pillaged over the course of several turns until you get there. Getting to a village before your enemy will give 5000 gold to whichever unit gets there (and occasionally gives you items along with it); if the enemy reaches it, then for every subsequent turn, the money reward is reduced by 500 gold. If the enemy occupies the village for ten turns, the village and whatever money or items one would receive are destroyed. This is likely due to the much larger maps the game has in comparison to other entries in the series, which would make it unfair if the village is destroyed immediately upon being attacked.
  • Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones: At the start, the kingdom of Renais is invaded. It's mentioned that "homes were destroyed, possessions stolen, [and] women kidnapped".
• In Forever Home, the Judgment Faction has a modus operandi of firing cannons at defenseless towns to reduce them to dust, and then sending in their mooks to kill the survivors. At first, this seems to be For the Evulz, but then it turns out that Barclyss, the leader of the faction, can take the souls of his victims and turn them into mindless soldiers, essentially using the victims of his previous raids to be used to start another.
• Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist: An army of mooks get this slightly wrong:
  "Let's stampede the women and rape the cattle!"
• Jade Empire: The school and village where the player begins is burned to the ground and all but a handful of its inhabitants slaughtered. What news of this reaches other villages paints it as purely pirates attacking when it's actually mooks of the Emperor working alongside the pirates.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • While various monsters are implied to ransack villages in the series, it's explicitly shown in the introductory section of Twilight Princess, where Link is initially set on his quest by a band of roving Bulblins who raid his home of Ordon Village and kidnap the children.
  • In Tears of the Kingdom, a band of seafaring monsters have ransacked and settled in Lurelin Village, scattering its inhabitants across Hyrule. One sidequest chain allows Link to drive them out, then assist in rebuilding the village.
• Mass Effect: In the background options for Shepard, Shepard can potentially have faced this twice; first, if the Colonist background is taken, Shepard survived a slaver attack on his/her home colony on Mindoir, but also lost his/her entire family at 16. If the War Hero background is taken, Shepard singlehandedly prevents this from happening to the colony of Elysium.
• Minecraft has the happilly-named Pillagers, who will periodically attack villages and kill all of its inhabitants if the player doesn't intervene.
• Mount & Blade, being a Low Fantasy action-RPG, will allow you to descend upon villages and loot them. Their model changes to a burnt-out husk of its former self and for quite some time afterwards, will not be accessible; all you get upon entering it is a screen succinctly describing its destruction.
• Overlord: The games usually consist of a healthy amount of this, especially if you decided to play in a more Ax-Crazy fashion.
• In Red Dead Redemption II, some of the most brutal gangs in the game do this regularly such as the O'Driscolls and the Skinners brothers. In the first game, Bill Williamson's gang does this regularly. After the decline of the van der Linde gang, Micah Bell leads a gang of psychopaths who kill anyone they meet. The gang committed many crimes over the years such as robbery and murder — some of which involved dismemberment. In fact, Micah Bell alone was estimated to have killed around two dozen people while leading his gang. And unlike the other gangs of the game, they willingly kill children, eventually cementing Micah as a disgusting man without redeeming features.
• Sid Meier's Pirates!: You can sack towns.
• Total War:
  • Sacking towns is the best way to maintain a steady income in most games; once you defeat a settlement, you're typically given a choice as to whether to just occupy it, loot and the occupy it, sack it or raze it to the ground. In Total War: Warhammer, this trope comes into play to a greater degree than before, since due to the Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration, many factions simply have no interest in actually ruling certain territories — Greenskins never really bother to settle and govern lands they conquer, humans don’t live well underground, dwarfs deeply dislike open aboveground spaces, nobody can survive in the Chaos Wastes, etcetera. As a result, many factions will only enter each other’s territory to remove strategic threats or to sack settlements for extra income. This trope is especially intrinsic to the gameplay of a few factions:
    • The Greenskins are a race of Blood Knights that live to fight, and if they don’t get enough battles to satisfy them, they will turn on each other in frustration and take attrition damage. This is alleviated by setting up raiding camps, which allow the troops to reave and pillage the countryside, simultaneously increasing your income and damaging the local enemy’s morale.
    • The Warriors of Chaos and Beastmen have no settlements, carrying their minimal infrastructure with their armies, and as such have no way of maintaining internal income. As a result, they need to constantly defeat other armies and sack and plunder civilized settlements, in order to make money and maintain their dark gods' favor.
    • The Skaven from Total War: Warhammer II are ravenous eaters, and need large quantities of fresh meat to keep the clanrats loyal and support their rapidly-swelling population. You can ensure a healthy supply by defeating enemy armies, sacking towns, and pillaging the countryside.
    • The Dark Elves have an economy sustained almost entirely by slave labour, which is represented in-game by featuring slaves as a separate currency that boosts the players economy based on how many slaves the player possesses. Slaves are gained via raiding enemy regions and sacking their settlements, therefore encouraging the player to indulge in this trope in order to maximise their economic potential. As slave numbers also degrade over time the player is pressured to keep this behaviour up for the entire campaign in order to maintain stable numbers.
  • Total War: Pharaoh: The Canaanite leader Irsu's playstyle encourages you to raze, sack, and pillage as many settlements as you can, rather than build up a kingdom of your own. The Sea Peoples can also take this route, and Iolaus specializes in it.
  • You can also take on a raiding stance when in enemy territory, increasing your income while negating that region's normal production and lowering its public order.
• The Witcher:
  • The Witcher 2: Happens off-screen in the prologue, as King Foltest's army attacks the Castle La Valette. He is happy when his commanders report that rape and looting has "been kept to a minimum." Unusually, the player is on the attacking side as well, although you have the option to stem the worst brutalities that you come across.
  • Since The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt takes place during a war between the Northern Kingdoms and Nilfgaard,, you can come across frequent examples of this, both in progress and already having happened. Geralt has the choice between ignoring it or intervening in it.
• The second level of Xena: Warrior Princess opens with a band of pirates in the middle of burning and ransacking a village. As Xena, you must rescue as many villagers as possible while battling the pirates, and later save the remaining civilians from the Pirate King.

Web Comics

• In Beyond the Veil, Feyd, Elder God of Fear and Pain, claims to have forgotten how to do it right.
  Is it... rape the children, burn the women, and take the loot? No, that's not it... rape the loot, burn the children, take the women? No, that doesn't feel right either.
• Furmentation notes that you must do it in that order.
• Girl Genius: Jägers have a well-earned reputation for looting, burning, slaughter, and abduction due to their centuries riding with the old Heterodynes. Given Da Boyz reaction to a woman who thinks the Jägers are going to have their way with her and their previous interactions with the ladies it seems like they prefer their trysts to be consensual, even if the destruction and death they traditionally leave in their wake is accurate.
• The Noob: Parodied here. The roleplayers debate about who has the most tragic past, every one of them saying their parents were killed by orcs. The final panel has some orcs trying hard to facilitate this Logical Extreme.
  Meanwhile, in the farmlands
  Orc 1: These were the Maxwells. Next it's the Millers and the Nolans, then lunch break.
  Orc 2: I'm exhausted! Can't we skip the raping, at least?
  Orc 3: Come on, that'd be unprofessional.
• In Schlock Mercenary, the first maxim in The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries is "Pillage, then burn."
• Unsounded: Ricker and his Lions of Mercy were chosen for the mission to Litrya specifically to attack and rape the innocents inside while stealing the shrine's valuables and torching the place as the mission is intended as a piece of propaganda painting Queen Sonorie in a bad light for hiding a military installation beneath a holy site.

Web Original

• David Mitchell is none too fond of this idea.
  Add "pillage" to "rape" and suddenly it has an air of knockabout fun. But "pillage" is bad enough by itself. It's theft looting and arson. Being pillaged would be an awful thing to happen to anyone. What it definitely isn't is a spoonful of sugar to help the rape go down. Nonetheless put them together and these two awful crimes apparently cancel each other out. You can almost imagine a jolly uncle saying something like: "Where are you boys off to tonight? Out raping and pillaging I'll be bound!" But you wouldn't want one of them to reply: "Well, not pillaging anyway."
• In the second Cooler movie of Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Cooler and his mechanical army of the Big Gete Star are attacking New Namek for resources, including the native inhabitants. Or, as he puts it...
  Cooler: With [the Big Gete Star], we have entrapped this planet! And now... we are going to f**k it! Both figuratively...
  (Smash Cut to geothermal piston pumping into the magma)
  Cooler: ...and very literally.
  Krillin: You know, just because it can't reject you doesn't imply consent.
• Fallen Kingdom: The Piglin invasion has a lot of this; they seem less about conquering humanity than destroying it.
• In Greek Ninja, that's what happens to the main character's hometown.
• Hellsing Ultimate Abridged has the Major happily send his men to burn London to their hearts' content, like in the original series. He does, however, explicitly order them to leave the Holocaust Museum alone. Whether it's because he actually has standards or simply out of pride is left in the air.
• In There is no GATE; we did not fight there, Kell Rhavenfell's default tactics when dealing with the Rabbit tribes is to raid their villages for slaves while murdering all those who resist before eventually putting them to the torch, as seen in the interlude *The March of the Burning Sky*. Kell even "makes an example" out of the surviving warriors by crucifying them in the remains of their homes. Yikes...

Western Animation

• Il Était Une Fois... l'homme: Episode 13, set in The Late Middle Ages, has Pierre's village pillaged and burned by two sets of bandits (but not raped, obviously, since all the villagers have fled for shelter). This forces Pierre and his family to take shelter in the town.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Gauntlet of Fire", Garble nearly name-drops the last two-thirds of this trope as his plan for Equestria should he become Dragon Lord.
  Garble: We'll take whatever we want from Equestria and burn the rest!

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But save the sheep!

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