John of Austria ordered four hundred women and children slaughtered to stop profiteering

Evidence

Such was the general fury on both sides that when, in the final stages of the fighting, Don John of Austria caught some of his men making off with female prisoners and children (from whom they hoped no doubt to make some profit by selling them into slavery) he ordered his personal escort (escuderos) to slaughter all these prisoners: [T]hey killed more than four hundred women and children, and would have finished off the lot if they had not been moved by the complaints of the soldiers, who were in this way being deprived of the fruits of their victory, and he only agreed when he knew that the place was already in our hands, and even so he would not spare any male over the age of twelve. He got so angry thinking of the damage which those heretics [sic] had inflicted without ever being willing to humiliate themselves by asking for terms. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1044

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the sacrifice article’s themes: mass killing of noncombatants as rage against a resisting group that ‘would not humiliate themselves by asking for terms’ — the refusal to submit as a trigger for atrocity.
• QUESTION: The economics of war profit — soldiers selling prisoners into slavery — is worth chasing: how central was slave-sale revenue to early-modern soldier pay?
• DEEPTHINKING: The logic here inverts the normal atrocity narrative: the commander slaughters prisoners not to terrorize the enemy but specifically to deny his own soldiers their commercial ‘fruits of victory’ — rage at the enemy and at his own troops’ greed intertwine.