How much destruction should be in my mind's eye when I picture a city being "sacked"?

I've been reading some early medieval history lately, and much of the narrative, of course, encompasses warfare, which seems to have been almost ubiquitous in those times. Anyway, in these histories I read, many times I have come upon a city being described as being "sacked" by various personalities. Now, when I picture that state of such a city, I typically think of a town burnt to the ground, alongside good helping of wanton destruction and rape. In any case, the most important part of my mental image is the idea that it it takes a long time to recover from, and that there's a lot of destruction.

In one particular history I'm reading, however, I keep coming across cities being sacked, many times in a row, sometimes within the same year, which leads me to believe that my mental image of a sacking is a bit off. What should it be? Most particularly: Is anything actually destroyed during a sacking, or is it simply a forced transfer of power alongside an occupation?

Solution 1:

When applied to a city a sack is a general term and therefore rather vague. In effect however, the meaning of to sack is closer to that of to plunder than that of to raze to the ground although one has inevitably to account for some material damages to the city.

Oddly enough one has two different but complementary etymologies for two similar words

• To sack seems to come from the Phoenician through Latin and French (See for instance the Hebrew שק IPA/sak/ which means ‘a bag’),
• Whilst to ransack is from Viking origin and means to search (to seek Old Norse soekja) house by house (Old Norse rann "house").

The very reason why sacking is just plundering is that razing is too much work for very little benefit. There are actually only a few famous examples of utter destruction in history.
The only really famous ones I can think of are Thebes destroyed by Alexander and Carthage which was first sacked by its own mercenaries in 240BC before being completely flattened in by the Romans in 146 BC (Scipio Africanus the Younger is even reported to have spread salt in the fields to wipe Carthage off the map definitely, but there's no evidence for this)¹.

One can clearly observe on many examples that the plundering of a city is meant as an incentive and reward to the assailant soldiers (who have no real interest in putting it down) whereas its razing to the ground has to come from a political authority and is intended to make an example or to annihilate definitively the opponent. The former is much more frequent than the latter.

In fact, the larger the city, the most likely it is to survive a sack and stay inhabited (either by its spared original population or by the invaders or a mix of both) – a testimony of the resilience of the human species social brain wiring.

For the record, examples of famous cities who survived many sacks are

• Jerusalem (e.g. 70 Titus massacre, 1099 the first crusade massacre);
• Troy (see Schliemann’s 9 cities);
• Rome ( 410, 455, 1084, 1527 massacre);
• Byzantium (1204 massacre, 1453 massacre);
• Nanjing (589 razed, 1937 massacre).

I’m actually curious about what particular history initially prompted your question. Records of repetitive destruction of cities in western history I can think of include

• The Book of Joshua (disputed);
• The Thirty Years War;
• The Hundred Years' War;
• ?

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  Note 1: There's a curious coincidence regarding the destruction of Carthage in 146. The city of Corinth too was destroyed and razed by the Romans in that same year: 146 BC and both cities where rebuilt nearly exactly 100 years later by Julius Caesar.

Solution 2:

The sacking part is when you take all the valuables.

It's essentially the same as "loot."

People lazily use it to mean "destroyed," "razed," etc. But it simply means to take all the valuables.

Thus, you would destroy, and perhaps then, subsequently, sack, a city. Or you might sack it, and specifically not destroy it ... or you might sack it, and then after sacking it, you might leisurely destroy it. Or you might just (being in a hurry perhaps) destroy it and not even bother sacking it.

(Does pillage means the same as sack or loot? I think so, but I'm not totally sure.)

Solution 3:

The meanings of sack reported by the NOAD are the following:

• (chiefly in historical contexts) plunder and destroy (a captured town, building, or other place)
• the pillaging of a town or city

In both the cases, the word is associated with violence, or wartime.

The word comes from a French word that took the Italian phrase mettere a sacco as model. In Italian, the word sack is also used in phrases such as il sacco di Roma, which is used to refer to a historical event.