Avoid grievances when taking a city?

[contrabored]

Macedon took one of Hungary's cities, so I decided to do the emergency meeting. All of the Civs declared war on Macedon, with the aim of liberating the city. The Netherlands took a Macedon city (not the one they took from Hungary). I took and liberated the other.

We were still at war, so I took the final Macedon city. It gave me two options of keeping or razing it. Both would have brought grievances against me. It was too far away from my cities and with little to no resources, so I razed it. The other Civs (besides Hungary) are now "unfriendly" toward me.

Is it because I took the final Macedon city and therefore eliminated them from the game, or would I have been penalised regardless? Nobody, including me, got any grievances against Netherlands when they took the other city.

Given I started the war to defend Hungary, and someone would have inevitable taken their final city regardless --- it seems weird that I got grievances.

[tempest.of.emptiness]

If you are trying to remain friendly with other civs you should never raze cities* and you should never take a civ's last city.

(* For whatever reason, razing a free city is fine. So, if you are patient and the circumstances are favorable, what you can do it capture a city from a civ, wait for it to become a free city (due to low loyalty), recapture the now free city, and then raze it. I did that to Arabia in my current game, in response to their surprise war. I razed five of their cities, kept their capitol, and left them with only two very poor cities to try to rebuilt - and my three allies are still very happy with me.)

[gimmethegepgun]

As a tip, city states will burn down any city they capture, so if you can manage to get one of THEM to capture them then they'll destroy them for you.