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For those who don't have the book, I suspect a lot of the meat could be found in Pinker's previous essays on the topic of historical violence:
We no longer draw and quarter people, but we imprison far more people.
State repression that was once considered extraordinary is now routine. Before the French Revolutionary Red Terror, the Spanish inquisition, which killed a dozen or so people every year, was the standard evil example of repression, and Queen Bloody Mary, who murdered a couple of hundred and caused a thousand or so to flee, the classic tyrant.
Today, however, Prince Sihanouk, however, who murdered twelve thousand, many of them in ways colorful, dramatic, and extraordinary, is however sainted for his extraordinary peacefulness and tolerance.
Pinker pats progressives on the back because we no longer draw and quarter people, but Aristide murdered his political enemies in grotesque ways as vile as any medieval despot, and yet, like Prince Sihanouk, is sainted for his peacefulness and tolerance. Aristide personally gouged out the eyes of one of his goons, a job that any medieval despot would have given to a masked executioner.
We civilized white people no longer gouge out people's eyes, nor burn people alive, the way we used to, and the way our pet despots like Aristide still do , but we imprison a hell of a lot more people than we used to, in part because of increased underclass criminality, but in part because so many things that respectable white middle class people do have been criminalized.
Over the past hundred years, state and private violence has increased massively - the private crime rate has risen, and the imprisonment rate has risen faster, which arguably constitutes increasing state crime. The World Wars were worse than Napoleonic wars, and modern repression has been spectacularly and enormously more severe than medieval repression. Queen Bloody Mary was a tyrant for killing two hundred, but Tito not a tyrant for killing two hundred thousand.
That's probably attributed to the parochialism of Bretons of the era -- they couldn't know about the Yangzhou massacre in China where 800,000 people were slaughtered, and the Massacre of the Latins in the 12th century in Constantinople wouldn't stick in their minds.
But I'm sure they remembered St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in the 16th century -- and in Central Europe "Vlad Tepes the Impaler" who killed tens of thousands people was known too.
Oh, please, sainting monsters has a long tradition, a tradition atleast as old as Theodosius "The Great", proclaimed the Great, and revered by the Orthodox Church, because of how greatly he butchered thousands of pagans back in the 4th century AD.
Those incidents were war, not repression. You need to compare twelfth century repression with twentieth century repression, and twelfth century war with twentieth century war.
Modern repression is enormously more violent than ancient repression. Modern wars are larger and bloodier than ancient wars. Incidents where the populace of a vanquished city were massacred may be less common in modern wars, but if so this may be because we can accomplish the same effect more efficiently by such means as were employed at Dresden and Hiroshima. If you flatten a city before you take it, this discourages resistance more effectively than slaughtering a city that stubbornly resisted for an unreasonably long time.