>How were a few thousands of them able to beat several empires?
A combination of various factors: Technological (steel, firearms and horses), biological (diseases), political (everybody in the region hated the Aztecs), and luck (arrived just as the Inca Empire was in a civil war)
I think the diseases and the local political divisions were the most important factors
>arrived just as the Inca Empire was in a civil war
Wasn't it that they arrived just AFTER the civil war, so the Aztecs were still weakened but that Montezuma was the only "eligible" head of state they had to capture?
the timing of the European arrivals was really terrible for both the Incans and Aztecs, it's also worth reiterating in both instances the Europeans had huge numbers of native allies. this doesn't detract from the impact cavalry and armor and firearms had on the conflicts, but it wasn't like a handful of elites fighting a swarm of plebs
I think you're mixing up Aztecs and Incans
From what I know, the Aztecs didn't have a civil war before the arrival of the Spanish
As for the Incans, their civil war had just ended with the victory of Atahualpa over his half-brother Huáscar when Pizarro arrived
i believe the aztecs were having succession disputes, rather than an actual war. so they were distracted, and the non-aztec subject peoples threw in with whitey.
>From what I know, the Aztecs didn't have a civil war before the arrival of the Spanish
Aztecs were basically in a constant state of war against their subjects, it's how they managed their blood for the blood god sacrifice industry. So not really a civil war but Spaniards arriving meant that they had a very fertile ground to gaining allies. It's why in the siege of Tenochtitlan, Spaniards had like hundred thousand of native allies.
Doesn't mean that conquistadors weren't badass, they were.
>IT'S ACTUALLY JUST GUNS GERMS N STEEL SEE NOTHING SPECIAL ABOUT EUROPEANS AT ALL EVERYONE IS EQUAL NO ONE IS SUPERIOR YEP JUST A BIT OF LUCK IS ALL THAT'S HOW WE EXPLAIN THE LAST SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS JUST LUCK
this tbh senpai
Daily reminder that the natives acted as canon fodder and took on the bulk of the Aztecs.
Spanish supremacy is a huge meme. It's evident based on the fact that they were probably the richest nation in the world at a point, lost their entire empire in record time, and ended up becoming one of the poorest nations in Western Europe in the 20th century.
>Spanish supremacy is a huge meme. It's evident based on the fact that they were probably the richest nation in the world at a point, lost their entire empire in record time, and ended up becoming one of the poorest nations in Western Europe in the 20th century.
By that metric the mongols weren't shit either, or the Romans, or hell the Brits. Anyone who doesn't stay top dog for ever is a meme!
>Diseases
This is turdie cope. The men who are visitors in the foreign country are far more vulnerable to disease than the people in their own local land.
What you mean to say is medicine. Shitskins had none while europeans did.
Nah, according to PrepHole and /misc/ spaniards aren't white but swarthoids, apparently anyone capable to generate melanine when exposed to the sun is a subhuman, they probably never heard about the Blue Division :shruggs:
The perfidious albion still sheetes today about spanish empire. Nearly everything you read today about that period is tainted by their lies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain)
>No Sangheili ever called me Goyim
not to your face perhaps
the spaniards were not very understanding of mesoamerican traditions and culture in the long run
aliens would be less interested still in whatever we imagine is important or proper
>the spaniards were not very understanding of mesoamerican traditions and culture in the long run >aliens would be less interested still in whatever we imagine is important or proper
What "we" as a culture imagine is proper is pure, concentrated evil.
By a reasonable outside perspective, our culture would revolve around >Degeneracy >Ritual blood sacrifice >Suicide
And anyone disagreeing would be a radical outsider.
>No Sangheili ever called me Goyim.
Isn't that exactly what the Covenant are about? They're the chosen race and humans are the lesser beings to be exterminated?
No, the San’Shyuum wanted humans exterminated asap because the Forerunners revealed that Humanity were the actual Reclaimers (and that the whole Covenant was thus, basically, a LARP)
Sangheili were always upfront with humans, as enemies and allies.
3 months ago
Anonymous
>No Sangheili ever called me Goyim.
Isn't that exactly what the Covenant are about? They're the chosen race and humans are the lesser beings to be exterminated?
No, the San’Shyuum wanted humans exterminated asap because the Forerunners revealed that Humanity were the actual Reclaimers (and that the whole Covenant was thus, basically, a LARP)
>Hope you enjoy being space Catholic
No Sangheili ever called me Goyim.
>and your women in harems
You mean your daughters getting to marry up and elevate the entire race.
how did this start
3 months ago
Anonymous
Sangheili are like space White Americans.
>Success predicated on their invincible carrier centric Navy, deployment speed, and air superiority >Worm men with cold hands have insinuated themselves into their religion, claiming to be sacred, and have taken over their institutions >Constantly burdened with holding up various manlet races that can barely function without their supervision >Beset by Apes
Ooooo, maybe they will intermix 10% of their genetics with us and then 500 years later their descendants will go insane from living lives with abundant resources and few existential threats and allow us to illegally migrate to their country in such numbers that we outbreed them and eventually violently exterminate them while they do nothing to defend themselves out of a misplaced sense of racial guilt fomented by shadowy elites hellbent on their self-destruction
>500 years later their descendants will go insane
Lol, the indians were insane, the slight amount they're less insane comes purely from their euro ancestry. Sadly, it just wasn't enough.
No.
/misc/ will say that suporting Aliens is based and trad and against the globohomosexual and then whole nonwhite internet will rally behind them just like the lesser tribes rallied against Aztecs
If they can get here, it wouldn't even be a fight man. People like to imagine alien invasions because they're fun, but if they were determined to kill us and not wreck the planet in the process, they'd just deploy a tailored bioweapon or worse, a nanotech one, and wait for everyone to drop dead.
There wouldn't be any shots fired because the weapon in use would be one we've only very distantly conceived of.
Steel armor and weapons was the big advantage. Firearms were just the cherry on top. Their main advantage was playing local politics which multiplied their forces massively.
There are no historical records discussing Hernan Cortes' height, which if he was 6'7", there sure fricking would be.
He was likely average or slightly above average for a nobleman, which is still below average by modern standards. Probably 5'5" to 5'8".
Thanks idk where I read that. Maybe I was thinking of Alvarado. That guy fricking creeps me the hell out. Cortez seemed pretty normal compared to Alvarado
>In 1861, Charlemagne's tomb was opened by scientists who reconstructed his skeleton and estimated it to be measured 1.95 metres (6 ft 5 in)
That is a BIG motherfricker for the 8th century, goddamn
Many of the commoners did. The lords only went along with it for political power. They did whatever behind closed doors and kept their stories alive in private.
Either way, replace Notre Dame with a shrine or temple similar to the ones dedicated to Jupiter or Caelus and dedicate it to European gods from all corners.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Religion is a mutable and living thing anon, it adapts through time and space to new paradigms, "going back to our pagan roots" is as much of a human construct as wahhabism and haredi, people attemtping to impose a flawed false memory of a specific section of the past in the hopes of finding some original "purity". Even if the theistic view was right the factual evidence would show the divinity too works adaptations and mutability, so the faith and customs demanded 1000, 2000 or 3000 years ago is never the same, you can even see this in the holy books and the endless plethora of interpretations done through history, with claims of purity being arbitrarily declared and anathematization of those who don't agree.
3 months ago
Anonymous
I think it's biggest problem isn't even its flawed understanding of human biological behaviour, but being a religion in denial. They are the equivalent to abrahamics attempting to proof the existence of God not through the article of faith (emotional conviction from life experiences) but "scientific experiments" and circular logic.
To ground this on the current discussion I think misionaries did their part, consider the sort of deities and social order the mesoamericans had, upon being offered a breakaway from the native cosmology an alternative will present iselft, sure, at sword point, but still a rather attractive worldview, I know modern historians who are often crypto or openly marxists disregard this aspect but it's clear that between the cosmic order being a predatory elite with a thumbs up from bloodthirsty deities to enforce their opression (and let us not pretend mesoamericans didn't have very stratified classes) and a worldview where whenever the elites did something oppresive it was clearly evil in the eyes of the divinity and the transgressor would be punished even if he spmehow gets away in this life the choice becomes evident. Mesoamericans and their latinoamerican decendants would still maintain "supersticious beliefs", that's it a ritualistic way to manipulate the cosmos, but their morality will shift to grecochristian views, hence way they will be after the europeans among the first human groups to start working toward the ideals of the Enlightenment, with far less success, but still far in advance to many other non-white peoples.
It’s so weird as a giant lanklet going to history museums and seeing full suits of knight or samurai armour and realising I’m sometimes more than a foot taller than the guys back in those times
Strength and size too. I'm fairly tall at6'1 but nothing unusual; what struck me when I go to museums and see the same things you do anon is how much wider and bigger I am. I'm also big and broad by today's standards, but back then I'd probably be looked at like a giant with super human strength if I landed in New Spain with the conquistadors.
Peter the Great was like 6'8 but had extremely tiny shoes and it's mentioned in all accounts when people describe.him kek
I’m 6’3 I’m not really any wider than them, but my height comes from an extra X chromosome so not really an ubermensch. It’s fun walking round ancient castles and stuff imagining emerging through a tiny door and spooking everyone. I’m not sure if it’s true, but I heard people being short in the past mostly was down to early agriculture being shittier than the hunter gatherer diets which were more varied
>was down to early agriculture being shittier than the hunter gatherer diets which were more varied
Had more to do with protein availability than variation
>Peter the Great was like 6'8 but had extremely tiny shoes and it's mentioned in all accounts when people describe.him kek
He was also described to have large hands proper for his height. See feet maybe consequences of small tight boots fashion, just like Chinese children with deformed wrapped feet.
Imagine if they'd somehow won. It'd have been a wild ride in South America from then on out.
Swords and plate armour were more important. Also cavalry.
And being the best damn soldiers on the planet at the time. The centuries of the reconquista has turned the Iberians into incredible death machines. Note that Spain didn't just conquer empires in the Americas, it also conquered the Philippines, which did have iron and a bit of gunpowder (and did it with half the invasion force consisting of Tlaxcallan mercenaries using Spanish weapons. The reason > 2% of modern Filipino DNA is native American? Tlaxcallans).
Portugal wrecked the shit out of every muslim power adjacent to the Indian ocean. Diseases weren't a factory yet they still accomplished basically the same shit Spain didy against states full of armour and (admittedly mostly shit, ottoman exports excepted) firearms.
The Iberians were just that good.
Gunpowder and steel barely factored into it any point. The Conquistador format of conquest was pretty cut and dry in its effectiveness because of the inherent weakness of having only loose connections and alliances between major factions within and between regional powers. The supposedly vast trade network around the Americas took literal years to move goods for profit and the form that profit took could change and devalue from decade to decade. Meanwhile Europeans could connect distant regions and facilitate stable, constant wealth acquisition. Once they did their Conquistador thing and took advantage of local traditions to take over bloodlessly or force massive slaughters at the hands of traditional rivals, the surviving elite very quickly signed on for Spanish gold.
In my opinion, ledgers and sails conquered more of the Americas than swords and guns.
I read this book in college called The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. It's written from the legit Aztec perspective, but also has some translation from other indigenous groups' writings who hated the Aztecs. When you read it, it's like the Aztecs were writing propaganda for the Spaniards. Obviously, that wasn't the intention, but shit was so bad for the Aztecs they could really only write about the Spaniards if that makes sense. The conquistadors were more badass than what is perceived & taught on the basic level. A modern accurate representation looks like this: it was well equipped Army Rangers fighting against unarmed Oompa Loompa's with an IQ of 50. That is how lopsided the war was for the Aztecs. The book is a serious eye opener. If you read it, you will be saying 'oh frick' probably a couple 1000 times.
It wasn't a few thousand. It was a few hundred thousand. The Tlaxcalans joined the Spanish. This information was one Google search away.
nope
https://i.imgur.com/R6lOnZ5.png
No, it wasnt. You people are too incompetent to literally google wikipedia articles.
I remember hearing that Aztecs thought that Spaniards were somekind of gods and harbingers of apocalypse, is there any truth to that? If there is, then it would make sense that Aztecs would write about Spaniards like that, kinda like israelites talked about Yahweh as this evil badass being genociding all around...
It's total bullshit that was perpetuated by Cortez as the basis for his legal claim to spoils. At no point ever did the natives treat them with any more reverence than was due a guest or visiting foreign dignitary. Moctezuma specifically met him in such a way as to prove neither of them were perceived as gods, so that Cortez wouldn't get the wrong idea about their relationship.
>Nope again. Read the book. Wiki is BS.
Ive been to the museum of anthropology and native american culture in Mexico City. Take the L and educate yourself.
Also don't forget Montezuma thought Cortez was an ancient sky god or some shit because they had a story about that god returning as a white dude, or it was so vaguely interpreted that a white dude was "good enough" in his eyes.
You sure about that? Because looking at everything from the tip of Argentina to the northern border of Mexico, everything is still pretty shit. And they have even brought back ritual killings!
That's most probably not true though. There is like one Spanish guy saying this was the case. It's mostly based on the fact that Montezuma was very hospitable towards Cortez, giving him gifts, best place in town to stay at and generally sucked his dick but that has more to do with him being unsure of Cortez intentions and the stories of Emperor, Pope and God back in Europe being extremely powerful gave him pause especially since Cortez has already started to beat the natives in fights left and right and the word of firearms, horses and armor spread around.
I mean Montezuma himself was technically a "God" by Aztec standards, he should know best that it was bullshit.
A big reason why I also think it wasn't true is that Cortes wasn't the first white man to make contact.
Cortes retinue itself included Gerónimo de Aguilar, a monk who got shipwrecked and was a Maya slave for almost a decade. He was picked up by Cortes because he needed a translator and Aguilar knew the language.
There was another guy who was got shipwrecked with Aguilar, Gonzalo Guerrero, actually liked that shit so he adopted the local customs, got a hot Maya wife and became a war chief. He spent the rest of his life waging guerilla warfare against the Spanish.
>Only nords and anglo-saxons are le white, spaniards are arab rapebabies!!!11
Even if were "med brown", cortez was definitely white in the eyes of the locals
I wont deny there was white Spaniards but after a thousand years of incursions and waves of nonwhite immigrants and invaders into Spain, the conquistadors were pretty much multiculti. Few years before they discovered America, they were b***hes of the moors and arabs. israelites were all roaming around the peninsula and eight hundred years before all of this happened they were conquered by the Romans, and then by the Visigoths. So the Spaniards that set sail into America were very mixed or at least different from one another. There was visigothic aryans, cryptoisraelite basques (rarely at the beginning, since they focused more on commerce than conquering), (christianized) arabs and sephardi israelites, moors, classic iberians and mixed people. But most importantly, I remember some people have mentioned that many of the most prominent conquistadors were christianized israelites, includying Cortes and Colón. There's some evidence to reinforce those claims. The Spanish Crown actually offered the israelites to move onto the New World, or they just were expelled and relocated there, specially during the inquisition. Also, you gotta consider Cortes and Colon's looks. They look a bit israeli if you take a closer look at their depictions, and they're greedy fricks too.
>There was another guy who was got shipwrecked with Aguilar, Gonzalo Guerrero, actually liked that shit so he adopted the local customs, got a hot Maya wife and became a war chief. He spent the rest of his life waging guerilla warfare against the Spanish.
Which brings us back to
Swords and plate armour were more important. Also cavalry.
And being the best damn soldiers on the planet at the time. The centuries of the reconquista has turned the Iberians into incredible death machines. Note that Spain didn't just conquer empires in the Americas, it also conquered the Philippines, which did have iron and a bit of gunpowder (and did it with half the invasion force consisting of Tlaxcallan mercenaries using Spanish weapons. The reason > 2% of modern Filipino DNA is native American? Tlaxcallans).
Portugal wrecked the shit out of every muslim power adjacent to the Indian ocean. Diseases weren't a factory yet they still accomplished basically the same shit Spain didy against states full of armour and (admittedly mostly shit, ottoman exports excepted) firearms.
The Iberians were just that good.
The moment the natives got a little bit of time to adjust to the new arrivals, be it Guerrero teaching the Maya about Spanish weapons and tactics, or the Mapuche sitting at the edge of Spain's force projection capabilities, conquering them suddenly became a great deal harder. The Inca remnant did the same thing, of course.
From what I've read the relevance of guns gets overblown since the major advantage of firearms at the time (besides lower training requirements compared to archers) was their ability to reliably pierce steel armor which the Aztecs didn't have. What really fricked the Aztecs up was the Spanish cavalry which they basically had no counter to unlike the peoples of Eurasia who had been refining anti-cavalry tactics for millennia.
Tens of thousands of native allies who REALLY DID hate the Aztecs enough that even those weirdly-dressed strangers with their "God" and their "Bibles" seemed like a better option.
in the case of the Incans they eventually learned to partially offset the advantage of firearms by attacking with huge numbers from many sides at the same time and using cover as long as possible but they really struggled with cavalry and were forced to rely on rocky, mountainous terrain (which really only helped them escape the Spanish and frustrate attempts to dislodge them from the Andes, not take the fight to them). steel armor was also a big problem though it didn't cover the entire body and the Spanish themselves commented that the woven fabric armor of the Incans was deceptively durable
cannons were pretty routinely valuable for the sheer shock and panic value though
Btw the Neo-Inca State is interesting to read about
It was a rump state controlled by the last remnants of the Inca empire refusing to bow to the Spanish. They tried to adopt Spanish warfare, using Spanish helmets, shields, armor, swords, arquebuses and horses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Inca_State#Adoption_of_Spanish_warfare >In marked contrast to some other Native American cultures, such as the Aztecs, the Incas were also eager to master weaponry which was wholly "alien" to them. >Manco Inca even forced captured Europeans to refine gunpowder for his army. >The Incas also tried to adopt some European battle tactics: On at least one occasion, a group of Inca warriors formed a tight unit in combat, based on the teachings of a captured Spaniard >verall, it took the Incas approximately two decades to bridge the technological gap with the Spanish. By the 1560s, it was recorded that many Incans had developed considerable skill in utilizing arquebuses and riding horses.
Reminds of one of the campaigns in Empire Earth 2. It's an alternate History scenario where the Aztec and Inca Empires survive and become a US ally and a fascist state respectively. They end up fighting each other in WW2 with nukes iirc
>From what I've read the relevance of guns gets overblown
It's completely overblown, especially by third rate historians who have no technical knowledge of early arquebus. The expedition of Cortez never brought enough firearms to make a material impact on the battlefield, and the Mesoamerican groups they encountered learned very quickly how the weapon worked and developed all kinds of ways to counter the weapon.
>It's completely overblown, especially by third rate historians who have no technical knowledge of early arquebus.
It's Marxist ideology pushes gun angle. See it's Marxist way of thinking, brown people are only down because they have no means of production like white people. You give brown people same factories and they would be like white people.
Oppression!
Same line of thought with the guns.
Marixts are very deeply entrenched in academic and especially history academec circles.
Marxism is absolutely allergic to thought that people may be different (expect difference in wieners size, everyone knows black men have large wieners and asian men have tiny wieners, its the science).
>Marxism is absolutely allergic to thought that people may be different (expect difference in wieners size, everyone knows black men have large wieners and asian men have tiny wieners, its the science).
I don't think you understand Marxist theory. The whole thing with superstructure is that different cultures have different relations to material conditions/base. Like the difference in Marxist view is that the base has more effect to superstructure (as opposed to older cultural centric views that saw advancement stemming solely from culture) but marxists don't think that it is one way street. Base affects superstructure but that in turn reflects back to base. Material conditions and modes of production may be more dominant in this relationship but cultural differences are in reflective relationship with them, and there totally are such differences. Marxism isn't "allergic" to the thought that people are different, it is clearly taken into account in theory!
Like how does Chinese marxists ideas of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" make sense in anyway if that weren't so in marxist theory?
>I don't think you understand Marxist theory.
All that anyone needs to know about Marx or any thought he ever had was that he allowed three of his children to starve to death while smoking a daily cigar and paying a maid (who he also knocked up, and abandoned).
Yeah sure you can do that, it is better to just not care about theory one bit because the man behind it was a c**t. That is respectable POV. Unlike just inventing stupid BS about established theory that makes no sense if you even have a cursory knowledge of subject like that moronic OP was doing.
3 months ago
Anonymous
>Yeah sure you can do that, it is better to just not care about theory one bit because the man behind it was a c**t. >You will know them by their fruits
Yes.
Physics and random happenstance dictates base, not the superstructure at all. Marx was moronic, and commies will say anything to control the means of production. Marxists do not believe in anything but their own individual, personal superiority over others, which is delusional and allows for the severe atrocities committed under their rule, as well as their disingenuous rhetoric towards their political constituents. Marxism is retrospective justification of their ideal state of power consolidation using circular logic, and nothing more.
>Physics and random happenstance dictates base, not the superstructure at all. Marx was moronic, and commies will say anything to control the means of production.
Yeah, sure. I was just pointing out that OP who I was replying to was moronic who clearly didn't know anything about marxist theory but still made moronic as frick claims about it that everyone who can read can easily see as bullshit. When you need to attack some theory, you need to attack what it claims, not make up moronic BS about it and then attack that BS you imagined.
https://i.imgur.com/DCpjHay.jpg
The problem with Marxist theory is that it has the pyramid upside down. Culture is the "base" - the central component - and everything else revolves around it and interacts through it. This is inconvenient if your goal is to quantify and analyze the world, since culture is so immaterial and poorly understood, so ardently materialist thinkers like Marx have a tendency to gloss over and forget about it.
Modern descendants of Marxism like critical theory have tried and failed to address this shortcoming, because while accounting for "basic" non-production factors that are still quantifiable, they've still failed to consider culture as more than "what people physically do when theyre not working," again because they are either incapable of quantifying it or refuse to.
Not considering race or genetics falls under the latter category. By shifting the culture of research and thought away from racial topics, they've allowed the field to grow without an understanding of them. Then when they look at the state of the art and see no mention of it, it gives the impression that it isn't important.
Ironic how cultural factors have impacted the field itself without them being able to realize it.
>The problem with Marxist theory is that it has the pyramid upside down. Culture is the "base" - the central component - and everything else revolves around it and interacts through it. This is inconvenient if your goal is to quantify and analyze the world, since culture is so immaterial and poorly understood, so ardently materialist thinkers like Marx have a tendency to gloss over and forget about it.
Agree 100 %, marxist materialist outlook is inhuman in that it fails to consider human reality being extremely subjective through and through. Marx just shrugged at muttered about lumpen proletariat and class consicousness and continued on jerking off about material conditions. It is totally insufficient and when you base your actual politics around insufficient understanding of human condition, tragedy will ensue. >Modern descendants of Marxism like critical theory
But now you lost me, because critical theory and post modernism as a whole were exactly reaction to this. How intangible but powerful culture is, how existence is subjective and how impossible it is to quantify or do science about. It is the very reason marxists and materialists fricking loathe post modernism and critical theory. So, how can critical theory fail to address this shortcoming when the whole point of it was to address it? Now it doesn't give solutions to it, such is the way with most post modernistic thought. But address it it does.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Post your gun real quick so we all can see you're one of us.
The problem with Marxist theory is that it has the pyramid upside down. Culture is the "base" - the central component - and everything else revolves around it and interacts through it. This is inconvenient if your goal is to quantify and analyze the world, since culture is so immaterial and poorly understood, so ardently materialist thinkers like Marx have a tendency to gloss over and forget about it.
Modern descendants of Marxism like critical theory have tried and failed to address this shortcoming, because while accounting for "basic" non-production factors that are still quantifiable, they've still failed to consider culture as more than "what people physically do when theyre not working," again because they are either incapable of quantifying it or refuse to.
Not considering race or genetics falls under the latter category. By shifting the culture of research and thought away from racial topics, they've allowed the field to grow without an understanding of them. Then when they look at the state of the art and see no mention of it, it gives the impression that it isn't important.
Ironic how cultural factors have impacted the field itself without them being able to realize it.
I think it's biggest problem isn't even its flawed understanding of human biological behaviour, but being a religion in denial. They are the equivalent to abrahamics attempting to proof the existence of God not through the article of faith (emotional conviction from life experiences) but "scientific experiments" and circular logic.
Marxism always seemed to be so strange to me. Everything is reduced to the workings of economics, even love and virtue. By what right does a communist call something immoral without first simply assuming the truth of his own worldview? Marx claimed that his theory was to the social sciences what darwinism was to biology. Well, darwinism tells us that it's the survival of the fittest, while Marxism seems to be a pseudo-christian heresy which makes charity compulsory and is more or less the epitome of what Nietzsche would call secular slave-morality, but with a pathological murderous envy at its core. Something which Christianity at least turned inward with the notion of original sin and redemption in the afterlife. Marxists think that this world is all there is, so they have to murder as many as it takes to achieve that classless and stateless commie utopia.
Its explanation is just too simple to be able to explain the sheer variety which characterises the human condition. But I guess that reductionism is seductive like that. It ends arguments, in theory anyway, by simply dismissing with an airy wave of the hand what it cannot account for as either an epiphenomena from something more primal, or by simply denying its very existence. No wonder adolescents like communism, it's simply a matter of killing or at least re-educating all the "bad" people.
lol, everybody hated the Incas. >Alien with fire spewing iron pipe: wanna join up and wreck the Inca empire? >Native in jaguar furry suit: sure, let's us bash some Incas skulls
>lol, everybody hated the Incas
Don't you mean the Aztecs?
Cortés conquered the Aztecs in big part thanks to the fact they were hated by everybody
Pizarro conquered the Incas thanks to a recent civil war that weakened them
>asshurt Mestizo b***hing about Americans in a Spainish conquistador thread
Absolutely buck broken Jimenez raul-mendoza de la pena. Ps, your native blood has been bred out of your genepool, you're just brown, not an Aztec or Incan ;^)
go to wikipedia you Black person. They had the help of tons of natives who hated the empire. Believe it or not, these giant empires were buttholes to everyone around them
>Believe it or not, these giant empires were buttholes to everyone around them
About that, I recently read stuff about the Purépecha Empire (or Tarascan Empire), the second biggest native state in Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquest
Basically nobody knows about them, but unlike other native states in the region, they managed to keep the Aztecs at bay despite regular attacks. This almost constant state of war with their neighbor made centralization necessary, and they became one of the most centralized states in the region
They ended up blocking northward Aztec expansion. Pretty cool imo
I'm also curious about the relations between the Aztecs and the Mayas to the South. Did the former ever try to conquer the latter, and if not, why?
don't forget the "frick you, your mother and what ever gods you pray to" attitude that the Spanish brought to it.
These are guys fresh off the end of the reconquista religious fanaticism and violence where the norm for them.
Honestly you'd be best off comparing them to the first crusade.
Pissed of people in a world they don't know but with a clear goal and a do or die attitude because it is do or die.
Swords and plate armour were more important. Also cavalry.
And being the best damn soldiers on the planet at the time. The centuries of the reconquista has turned the Iberians into incredible death machines. Note that Spain didn't just conquer empires in the Americas, it also conquered the Philippines, which did have iron and a bit of gunpowder (and did it with half the invasion force consisting of Tlaxcallan mercenaries using Spanish weapons. The reason > 2% of modern Filipino DNA is native American? Tlaxcallans).
Portugal wrecked the shit out of every muslim power adjacent to the Indian ocean. Diseases weren't a factory yet they still accomplished basically the same shit Spain didy against states full of armour and (admittedly mostly shit, ottoman exports excepted) firearms.
The Iberians were just that good.
Gunpowder and steel barely factored into it any point. The Conquistador format of conquest was pretty cut and dry in its effectiveness because of the inherent weakness of having only loose connections and alliances between major factions within and between regional powers. The supposedly vast trade network around the Americas took literal years to move goods for profit and the form that profit took could change and devalue from decade to decade. Meanwhile Europeans could connect distant regions and facilitate stable, constant wealth acquisition. Once they did their Conquistador thing and took advantage of local traditions to take over bloodlessly or force massive slaughters at the hands of traditional rivals, the surviving elite very quickly signed on for Spanish gold.
In my opinion, ledgers and sails conquered more of the Americas than swords and guns.
>ledgers and sails conquered more of the Americas than swords and guns.
Such was their long term mistake along with too much native interbreeding. A tale of two new worlds.
Its already been stated but the spanish exploited division among the natives tribes and had allies. Wasnt just a couple Spaniards vs the whole of the native population.
It also seemed like Moctezuma was apprehensive about war at the beginning so perhaps he fricked himself over.
>How were a few thousands of them able to beat several empires?
Aztecs managed to piss of every single one of its neighbors by constantly raiding them for slaves to use as human sacrifices. Conquistadors just rallied and led them.
Everything afterwards was practically biological warfare - the diseases they unknowingly brought had a great time with native American immune systems, which were never hardened by constant plagues that Europe had.
By the time they arrived to the Inca empire, it was very weak from a civil war and plagues that wiped out the majority of the population.
>the diseases they unknowingly brought had a great time with native American immune systems
time to review some of these claims
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06965-x
You have pointed at a sexually transmitted disease. Even if you take away syphilis we are still talking potentially dozens of pathogens which could have done massive amounts of damage.
>Aztecs managed to piss of every single one of its neighbors by constantly raiding them for slaves to use as human sacrifices. Conquistadors just rallied and led them.
Basically all of the Aztecs' vassals either fought with them or remained neutral. The only meaningful native support came for the Tlaxcallans.
As for diseases, see https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Germs-Depopulation-America-Archaeology/dp/081653554X
I checked the author's background, I think she has clear political inclinations toward certain narratives.
Strength and size too. I'm fairly tall at6'1 but nothing unusual; what struck me when I go to museums and see the same things you do anon is how much wider and bigger I am. I'm also big and broad by today's standards, but back then I'd probably be looked at like a giant with super human strength if I landed in New Spain with the conquistadors.
Peter the Great was like 6'8 but had extremely tiny shoes and it's mentioned in all accounts when people describe.him kek
Most of the people who thought in La Conquista weren't that large when compared with the natives, particularly when you consider they often came from impoverished families.
Now, the main problem with this event is that there is too often a political interest to appeal to certain narrative towards the spectrum and I don't think anyone, including myself, can avoid this, even what we call facts is often inconclusive data, ultimately La Conquista's interpretation will always depend on the worldview of the people who see the events towards their own biased morality.
With that being said I highly recommend Peach series about La Conquista de Mexico, he, indeed applies a certain liberal optic towards their conclussions, but still makes quite an effort to present many interesting information you may not know:
Have you read the conquest of new Spain be Bernal Diaz anon? It's excellent; a first hand account of it all by one of the men who sailed fought and conquered with Cortez.
Yeah, I actually like most of the job he and the mexican buddy he worked with did, although ultimately by the end he basically applied western morality to the whole thing making the video a bit ironic, don't get me wrong, he made very good points which are clearly applied up to this day, but I guess you need to require a certain set of values in order to make a compelling narrative.
>Aztecs managed to piss of every single one of its neighbors by constantly raiding them for slaves to use as human sacrifices. Conquistadors just rallied and led them.
Basically all of the Aztecs' vassals either fought with them or remained neutral. The only meaningful native support came for the Tlaxcallans.
As for diseases, see https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Germs-Depopulation-America-Archaeology/dp/081653554X
tips your hand. I also looked up that author and I don’t see any indication of horrendous bent to her. She seems kind of autistic in her anthropology work. In other words, your dark brown (physically & mentally) it’s about time for you to go dilate.
>Aztecs managed to piss of every single one of its neighbors by constantly raiding them for slaves to use as human sacrifices. Conquistadors just rallied and led them.
Basically all of the Aztecs' vassals either fought with them or remained neutral. The only meaningful native support came for the Tlaxcallans.
As for diseases, see https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Germs-Depopulation-America-Archaeology/dp/081653554X
> The Samurai did not stand a chance. The Conquistadors had stronger armor that they could not penetrate, and the Musketeers backing them up were better shots, with more reliable weapons. Not only did they beat the Samurai, but the 40 men went on to fight off a fleet of ten Japanese ships commanding thousands of men.
> When it ended, the Spanish leader, Juan Pablo de Carrion, threatened to bring over 600 more men if the Japanese did not leave the Filipinos alone. The Japanese, without firing another shot, ran for their lives and stayed as far away from the Philippines as they could.
40 conquistadors massacre thousands of samurai, yeah i get it that the samurai were literally 4'11" 80lb nips but still impressive, seems the conquistadors had an even easier time with the japs than they did with the sudaca natives
I search the name Juan Pablo de Carrion and it seems in general terms the anecdote is real, not sure about the ronin, but actual tests show katanas would be extremely fragile against steel armor and european swords, there is a video where one breaks when trying to anime cut a broadsword.
>there is a video where one breaks when trying to anime cut a broadsword. >Don't know how either sword was made >But I saw a cool webm so it must be the truth
Lurk two more years.
The Aztecs could have unironically crushed them due to sheer numbers but Montezuma was a massive coward and basically did nothing until it was too late and then once he naively invited their army into the heart of Tenochitlan (prob did not spell that right) they of course immediately betrayed him and took control of the capital and their leadership which left the entire empire in disarray. This combined with all the other native empires hating the Aztecs + the disease later on sealed the deal and dealt a blow they could never recover from.
Montezuma wasn't a coward as much as he was unaware of how Europeans operate (as with other natives). Europeans had 100s of years of major cultures colliding, siege warfare, naval warfare, massive plagues, complex multi ethnic economies, and really endless infighting. This created a type of ment famework that was able to easily out-wit natives.
Read books on first contact or early contact with any Europeans and natives anywhere in the Americas. Colonists could get attacked and literally ask the natives to wait to attack until tomorrow, and slaughter them in the middle of the night while the natives honored their pledge. That's the level of difference we're talking here... Native warfare was very different.
As someone far too interested in the subject... In order:
- Infighting between tribes in the area, and a multi generational hatred for the Aztecs.
- Tactical, negotiation skills of the Spanish. Natives were very much unaware of complex battle tactics and even general negotiation skills that Europeans learned at a young age at the time.
- Disease, both introduced by Europeans and otherwise.
- Technological advantage.
It really was the perfect storm for both sides, and the meeting of two very unique peoples in their apex.
They may not have been as tall but every single one would've had navy seal/SAS operator level endurance and grit. I read Bernal Diaz's first person account (He never mentions Cortes being tall, fwiw)
The Spanish tercios dominated european warfare for several hundred years, so it's likely Cortes' men had a similar edge as a small cohesive force, the horses were few but probably unstoppable (Though one gets decapitated by an obsidian axe). Also the wars fought by the Aztecs were very ritualized and with a heavy focus on capturing prisoners for sacrifice.
They didn't practice night warfare at all - at one point the Tlaxcalans decided to innovate and attack the Spanish at night but since for them it wasn't unexpected at all to be attacked at night it didn't surprise them.
The Tlaxcalans fought Cortes initially when he crossed their territory, eventually when they couldn't destroy him they started to negotiate and became allies.
While the native auxiliaries gave a lot of assistance it's also true that the Spanish were alone on multiple instances - their allies would get spooked and leave them, or during the noche triste when they had to escape Tenochtitlan and were intercepted by an army outside the city.
Disease only became a factor after the Aztecs had been defeated, a slave with the plague infected the whole region.
It was basically, and sorry for my autism, a space marines + imperial guard scenario, where conquistadors basically acted as marines with superior armor and weapons as well as better mobility and ballistics while the natives provided that much needed bulk of bodies and supplies which ultimately turned the balance in their favour. The accounts made clear in many instances collaborationism was the norm and conquistadores even married what natives were available to ensure political alliances, it doesn't remove any of the biggotry and genocide, but pretending many natives didn't took the opportunity to get a better shot at life and they didn't end up running parts of the colonies is inane.
I feel a lot of europeans always extrapolate their own experiences and narratives with that of the Spaniards, if you wanted an idea of what this was all about imagine british investors moving to India, killing a large chunk of the locals and then marrying the brahmin who sided with them and running the country while still keeping most of the local structures, then imagine more and more british moving to permanently live in India and mixing with the locals while forcing them to abandon most of their worst (by western standards) practices and enforcing christianity at sword point. In the end you have a population mostly of mestizos who can actually trace back some of their roots to modern age Europe yet are still clearly brown. That is Latinoamerica in a nutshell.
>the wars fought by the Aztecs were very ritualized >They didn't practice night warfare at all
Anon is correct. The way that natives conducted warfare, negotiated, traded, marked boundaries, etc. was totally unprepared for conflict with the battle hardened Europeans. Especially the Spanish at that time. Especially Cortes and his peers. Understand that natives could be subverted extremely easily, and largely fought ritualistic wars or simply did the warfare equivalent of "chest bumping" and yelling "hold me back"!
Not that they didn't kill or fight, but nothing on the scale of European warfare.
>Disease only became a factor after the Aztecs had been defeated
No, small pox absolutely ravaged the besieged Aztecs during the siege of Tenochtitlan.
It's been a while since I read Bernal Diaz but I recall it being after the siege, and it affected the Tlaxcalans particularly badly.
In the final battle between Cortes and the Aztecs, Cortes had well over 100,000 natives fighting on his side (compared to the 1200 conquistadors). Cortes was a hustler and a player; he saw that the Aztec Empire was the continental bully and he exploited that fact. European tech and tactics helped as well, but mostly it was his alliances and political acumen that allowed him success.
Speaking of Cortes specifically, it's a fascinating story. He had a rivalry with another Spanish governor who aimed to have Cortes arrested; Cortes refused to lay down arms and at some points the Spanish fought each other. Ultimately, Cortes conquered the Aztecs so that he could claim governorship over their territories, and thus becomes immune to prosecution by a fellow governor.
Would make a kick ass miniseries but you just know they wouldn't do it right.
>Would make a kick ass miniseries but you just know they wouldn't do it right.
I haven't watched it in full but there's this recent one. Back in the 90s they made a couple movies and TV series too.
[...]
[...]
Would you say overall LATAM is, in genetic and cultural terms, the descent of conquistadores and spaniards as much as natives?
What would have happened if US used the same tactics as the spanish in the context of the last 50 years of wars?
>Would you say overall LATAM is, in genetic and cultural terms, the descent of conquistadores and spaniards as much as natives?
One funny thing I notice often is Indians with Spanish names (Place and people) and Americans thinking these are Indian names. It's like a Chinese interacting with an Indian called Smith and thinking "Smith" is some ancient Sanskrit term.
One factor no one has noticed but that Bernal Diaz mentions is that Indians were impressed by the similarities between their religion and the Christian one, and stuff like making a symbolic human sacrifice out of your god was an idea that struck 'em. Then again a Catholic would think that.
But while the Conquistadores did disregard the local culture when taking over, it has to be admitted that the locals also discarded their own ancient ways actively.
>It's been a while since I read Bernal Diaz but I recall it being after the siege, and it affected the Tlaxcalans particularly badly.
The epidemic had actually ended within Tenochtitlan before its fall but it had absolutely ravaged the Aztec society, for example crops could not be harvested because so many able bodied people were sick or dead. Florentine Codex portrays the situation as >many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get up and search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds. By the time the danger was recognized, the plague was well established that nothing could halt it.
It's a bad thing for besieged if their food storages are minimal and your population is just recovering from outbreak. Spaniards were dealing with similar problems too naturally, and their allies were suffering from disease too, but at least they had wider range to gather supplies.
>How were a few thousands of them able to beat several empires?
They were fighting literal rock chucking cavemen who were too stupid to even invent the wheel, too stupid to develop written languages, 95% of whom only managed to domesticate dogs (which are basically self-domesticating), who constantly fought each other over wild food resources because their agricultural practices were 10,000 years behind the rest of the world. Their religious beliefs were basically "we're incredibly, irreversibly stupid so everything is magical". Indians were just so monumentally moronic, a handful of Spanish homosexuals enslaved millions of them. Visit a reservation and talk to anyone - they all sound, talk and move like they have severe brain damage. The tiny Spanish forces took over half the Americas because they had invaded the short bus continents.
Not just because huge armies from local states they were allied with did most of the work/gave supplies (Mesoamerican soldiers and/or Spanish with Meso. armor even fought in Spanish campaigns the Philippines, up in Colorado, etc), and not just because diseases ravaged the population, but as there were more Conquistadors then people realize
EX: Cortes only had hundreds of Conquistadors at any one time, but got more at multiple points (like by convincing Narvaez' men to join), so JUST in Cortes's expedition, there were a few thousand Conquistadors, plus another few thousand Cooks, porters, slaves (who also all fought at times), PLUS disease, much larger allied Meso. armies, etc
As for why it succeeded: It was a combination of things that snowballed in Spain's favor
Cortes happened to go rogue at the perfect time to where Tlaxcala was desperate enough to be a key ally in Central Mexico, but before it was totally conquered; and also happened to come across translators. The way Mesoamerican diplomacy worked meant Moctezuma had an incentive to let them into Tenochtitlan, horses and cannons helped them act as a force multiplier alongside allied Tlaxcalteca infantry once hostilities DID break out to escape back to Tlaxcala, then as they rested, smallpox (which one of Narvaez's men happened to be infected with) struck Tenochtitlan, by which point the way Mesoamerican politics worked meant a bunch of actually-core-states-inside-the-empire (unlike Tlaxcala, which was an enemy state) switched sides since Tenochtitlan was so fricked it's influence they normally benefitted from was damaged, so they had more to gain by turning on it then by staying with it
After that point, Tenochtitlan was sacked, many former Aztec subjects recognized Spanish rule, and now Spain had a base of operations, a huge amount of existing infrastructure and armies to launch further campaign from, AND diseases were ravaging everybody, so again, things snowballed
I'm not sure I can answer either question, my area of interest is Mesoamerica, the Conquistadors are just tangential to that due to the Conquest, and I know even less about modern Latin American stuff
Very nice effortposting Anon, love it when someone who actually know his stuff decides to bless this godforsaken site.
[...]
From my experience as Latino myself, I'd say that the only thing many Latinoamerican cultures keep from the Indians is perhaps the natuve foods and a strong rhythmical emphasis in traditional music. Almost everything else is the result of Spanish culture filtered down and adapted by the local s into differeng styles and identities.
Genetically? I'm pale as frick but my dad is half black, his great grandfather was from Jamaica. My mother had a Spanish last name and apparently were landowners. Nothing that remains now unfortunately. But as you can see, Latinos are a combination of practically everything you could get your hands on, but the natives that have remained identified as such are almost always isolated from society itself.
I suppose context is different to modern times, but I believe spaniards specific social and economic conditions played a great role in how they approached the entire situation, while initially a mixture of trade and pirate expeditions more akin to the vikings than, say the pilgrim fathers looking for a place to flee religious oppression, the conquistadores shifted their perspective into, well, conquerors, as people have pointed out, they weren't originally a state sponsored army but an expedition cobbled together from the lesser elements of spanish society with a thumbs up from the crown who may or not profit from these private initiatives, the conquistadores were looking for a way to make both a name and a fortune for themselves and then return to the homeland, many have pointed out they could have just left with bags filled with gold and then maybe do like the british and establish some trade networks.
When is that they truly decided the future was in America and not in Spain is anyone's guess, perhaps by the point the siege was under way they realized this was a one time in History chance for people like them.
Most of them were young upstarts who even with all the gathered plunder won't stand a chance when dealing with their betters at the homeland, instead, in these new lands they were the object of awe, powerful warriors with new and strange knowledge whose alliance may be seen as something to be coveted, and by the point when they were distributing lands from the vanquished aztecs and taking wives from the natives their path was sealed.
In the final battle between Cortes and the Aztecs, Cortes had well over 100,000 natives fighting on his side (compared to the 1200 conquistadors). Cortes was a hustler and a player; he saw that the Aztec Empire was the continental bully and he exploited that fact. European tech and tactics helped as well, but mostly it was his alliances and political acumen that allowed him success.
Speaking of Cortes specifically, it's a fascinating story. He had a rivalry with another Spanish governor who aimed to have Cortes arrested; Cortes refused to lay down arms and at some points the Spanish fought each other. Ultimately, Cortes conquered the Aztecs so that he could claim governorship over their territories, and thus becomes immune to prosecution by a fellow governor.
Would make a kick ass miniseries but you just know they wouldn't do it right.
Not just because huge armies from local states they were allied with did most of the work/gave supplies (Mesoamerican soldiers and/or Spanish with Meso. armor even fought in Spanish campaigns the Philippines, up in Colorado, etc), and not just because diseases ravaged the population, but as there were more Conquistadors then people realize
EX: Cortes only had hundreds of Conquistadors at any one time, but got more at multiple points (like by convincing Narvaez' men to join), so JUST in Cortes's expedition, there were a few thousand Conquistadors, plus another few thousand Cooks, porters, slaves (who also all fought at times), PLUS disease, much larger allied Meso. armies, etc
As for why it succeeded: It was a combination of things that snowballed in Spain's favor
Cortes happened to go rogue at the perfect time to where Tlaxcala was desperate enough to be a key ally in Central Mexico, but before it was totally conquered; and also happened to come across translators. The way Mesoamerican diplomacy worked meant Moctezuma had an incentive to let them into Tenochtitlan, horses and cannons helped them act as a force multiplier alongside allied Tlaxcalteca infantry once hostilities DID break out to escape back to Tlaxcala, then as they rested, smallpox (which one of Narvaez's men happened to be infected with) struck Tenochtitlan, by which point the way Mesoamerican politics worked meant a bunch of actually-core-states-inside-the-empire (unlike Tlaxcala, which was an enemy state) switched sides since Tenochtitlan was so fricked it's influence they normally benefitted from was damaged, so they had more to gain by turning on it then by staying with it
After that point, Tenochtitlan was sacked, many former Aztec subjects recognized Spanish rule, and now Spain had a base of operations, a huge amount of existing infrastructure and armies to launch further campaign from, AND diseases were ravaging everybody, so again, things snowballed
1/?
Very nice effortposting Anon, love it when someone who actually know his stuff decides to bless this godforsaken site.
[...]
[...]
Would you say overall LATAM is, in genetic and cultural terms, the descent of conquistadores and spaniards as much as natives?
What would have happened if US used the same tactics as the spanish in the context of the last 50 years of wars?
From my experience as Latino myself, I'd say that the only thing many Latinoamerican cultures keep from the Indians is perhaps the natuve foods and a strong rhythmical emphasis in traditional music. Almost everything else is the result of Spanish culture filtered down and adapted by the local s into differeng styles and identities.
Genetically? I'm pale as frick but my dad is half black, his great grandfather was from Jamaica. My mother had a Spanish last name and apparently were landowners. Nothing that remains now unfortunately. But as you can see, Latinos are a combination of practically everything you could get your hands on, but the natives that have remained identified as such are almost always isolated from society itself.
>Was it just having firearms?
It was having sword and art of the fencing.
Conquistadors were like these Kung Fu movies when couple heroes defeat armies only it was real. >inb4 marxist seething
They used middle ages weaponry more than firearms. The English in the US colonies were the first mainly firearm users. Spanish and porteguese still used plate and pole arms, just lighter versions than knights of europe.
They mainly conquered by turning them against eachother. Aztecs had a lot of enemy tribes nearby not happy with being oppressed or captured and sacrificed to the sun. Many were mobilized against them.
This gave the conquistadors far larger forces than just their own to conquer with.
Prolly has got something to do with the 200k Tlaxcalans and others who showed up to frick up the Aztecs.
In exchange they got a load of privileges in the new Spanish Empire.
They got help from locals who were tired of getting raided and enslaved by the indigenous empires. Such locals thought they could get revenge for years of oppression and also thought they would become vassals for the new empire.
basically the Spaniards were superior plus also their chief opponents everywhere they went were such colossal twats that no one wanted to help them instead chosing to side with the clearly foreign invader
The problem with the "local auxiliaries did everything" interpretation is that, as I said before, the Tlaxcalans tried to kill Cortes and his men when they were alone, they tried multiple times, very hard even resorting to unusual tactics like night attacks and couldn't do it, so then resorted to "If you can't beat 'em, join them"
It was more like they sparked a civil war and encouraged riots while sitting on the side lines typically. It was more of a civil revolt and they happened to be right there on the sidelines to step in and fill the power vaccuum and bribe enough officials to side with them. Bribery back then might have been a real step up from donating having so many of your people for conscription or sacraficial rights on top of regular terrifs and taxes. Then they had hundreds of years of trying to build western style ranches before they decided it was their own culture and not imported.
>How were a few thousands of them able to beat several empires?
A combination of various factors: Technological (steel, firearms and horses), biological (diseases), political (everybody in the region hated the Aztecs), and luck (arrived just as the Inca Empire was in a civil war)
I think the diseases and the local political divisions were the most important factors
>arrived just as the Inca Empire was in a civil war
Wasn't it that they arrived just AFTER the civil war, so the Aztecs were still weakened but that Montezuma was the only "eligible" head of state they had to capture?
the timing of the European arrivals was really terrible for both the Incans and Aztecs, it's also worth reiterating in both instances the Europeans had huge numbers of native allies. this doesn't detract from the impact cavalry and armor and firearms had on the conflicts, but it wasn't like a handful of elites fighting a swarm of plebs
I think you're mixing up Aztecs and Incans
From what I know, the Aztecs didn't have a civil war before the arrival of the Spanish
As for the Incans, their civil war had just ended with the victory of Atahualpa over his half-brother Huáscar when Pizarro arrived
i believe the aztecs were having succession disputes, rather than an actual war. so they were distracted, and the non-aztec subject peoples threw in with whitey.
Montezuma lost his Coronation War before they got there
>From what I know, the Aztecs didn't have a civil war before the arrival of the Spanish
Aztecs were basically in a constant state of war against their subjects, it's how they managed their blood for the blood god sacrifice industry. So not really a civil war but Spaniards arriving meant that they had a very fertile ground to gaining allies. It's why in the siege of Tenochtitlan, Spaniards had like hundred thousand of native allies.
Doesn't mean that conquistadors weren't badass, they were.
subtle Jared Diamond troll is subtle kek
>IT'S ACTUALLY JUST GUNS GERMS N STEEL SEE NOTHING SPECIAL ABOUT EUROPEANS AT ALL EVERYONE IS EQUAL NO ONE IS SUPERIOR YEP JUST A BIT OF LUCK IS ALL THAT'S HOW WE EXPLAIN THE LAST SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS JUST LUCK
>, political (everybody in the region hated the Aztecs),
this. they managed to convince thousands of locals to rise up against the aztecs
this tbh senpai
Daily reminder that the natives acted as canon fodder and took on the bulk of the Aztecs.
Spanish supremacy is a huge meme. It's evident based on the fact that they were probably the richest nation in the world at a point, lost their entire empire in record time, and ended up becoming one of the poorest nations in Western Europe in the 20th century.
>Spanish supremacy is a huge meme. It's evident based on the fact that they were probably the richest nation in the world at a point, lost their entire empire in record time, and ended up becoming one of the poorest nations in Western Europe in the 20th century.
By that metric the mongols weren't shit either, or the Romans, or hell the Brits. Anyone who doesn't stay top dog for ever is a meme!
Yeah. Anyone that's not US of A is, always has been and will forever be exactly that, a meme.
>Diseases
This is turdie cope. The men who are visitors in the foreign country are far more vulnerable to disease than the people in their own local land.
What you mean to say is medicine. Shitskins had none while europeans did.
>What you mean to say is medicine. Shitskins had none while europeans did.
good joke anon
>that drawin
the spanish drew themselves as brown? that' really funny to me for some reason
>the spanish drew themselves as brown? that' really funny to me for some reason
http://www.jamesfieldillustrations.co.uk/cortestakestenochtitlan.html
some brit, what made you think it's art by a Spanish artist?
Nah, according to PrepHole and /misc/ spaniards aren't white but swarthoids, apparently anyone capable to generate melanine when exposed to the sun is a subhuman, they probably never heard about the Blue Division :shruggs:
The perfidious albion still sheetes today about spanish empire. Nearly everything you read today about that period is tainted by their lies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain)
>few thousand Alien explorers will one day easily conquer Earth
Fug...
They'll kill the leaders and ~~*(wise men*~~), rally the people to their cause, and put an end to our government sponsored human sacrifices?
Hope you enjoy being space Catholic and your women in harems
>Hope you enjoy being space Catholic
No Sangheili ever called me Goyim.
>and your women in harems
You mean your daughters getting to marry up and elevate the entire race.
>No Sangheili ever called me Goyim
not to your face perhaps
the spaniards were not very understanding of mesoamerican traditions and culture in the long run
aliens would be less interested still in whatever we imagine is important or proper
>the spaniards were not very understanding of mesoamerican traditions and culture in the long run
>aliens would be less interested still in whatever we imagine is important or proper
What "we" as a culture imagine is proper is pure, concentrated evil.
By a reasonable outside perspective, our culture would revolve around
>Degeneracy
>Ritual blood sacrifice
>Suicide
And anyone disagreeing would be a radical outsider.
>No Sangheili ever called me Goyim.
Isn't that exactly what the Covenant are about? They're the chosen race and humans are the lesser beings to be exterminated?
No, the San’Shyuum wanted humans exterminated asap because the Forerunners revealed that Humanity were the actual Reclaimers (and that the whole Covenant was thus, basically, a LARP)
Sangheili were always upfront with humans, as enemies and allies.
how did this start
Sangheili are like space White Americans.
>Success predicated on their invincible carrier centric Navy, deployment speed, and air superiority
>Worm men with cold hands have insinuated themselves into their religion, claiming to be sacred, and have taken over their institutions
>Constantly burdened with holding up various manlet races that can barely function without their supervision
>Beset by Apes
They also practice cuckoldry.
>your women in harems
Oh they're my women now? Since when?
don't know but it sounds like an improvement over what we have now
Ooooo, maybe they will intermix 10% of their genetics with us and then 500 years later their descendants will go insane from living lives with abundant resources and few existential threats and allow us to illegally migrate to their country in such numbers that we outbreed them and eventually violently exterminate them while they do nothing to defend themselves out of a misplaced sense of racial guilt fomented by shadowy elites hellbent on their self-destruction
>500 years later their descendants will go insane
Lol, the indians were insane, the slight amount they're less insane comes purely from their euro ancestry. Sadly, it just wasn't enough.
Too real.
have a nice day
>comparing all of humanity to the eternal D tier culture and heritage that is mesoamerica (barely higher than injuns up north)
Apologize.
No.
/misc/ will say that suporting Aliens is based and trad and against the globohomosexual and then whole nonwhite internet will rally behind them just like the lesser tribes rallied against Aztecs
>that suporting Aliens is based and trad and against the globohomo
As long as they have tiddy sneks and 12/10 burgers - yes.
Sorry humans, but the Abortions will stop.
If they can get here, it wouldn't even be a fight man. People like to imagine alien invasions because they're fun, but if they were determined to kill us and not wreck the planet in the process, they'd just deploy a tailored bioweapon or worse, a nanotech one, and wait for everyone to drop dead.
There wouldn't be any shots fired because the weapon in use would be one we've only very distantly conceived of.
god I wish
Steel armor and weapons was the big advantage. Firearms were just the cherry on top. Their main advantage was playing local politics which multiplied their forces massively.
How did they communicate with the natives? How fast can you pick up a language to the point that you can get into regional politics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Malinche
Cortez was like 6'7" irl apparently. And all those dudes were reconquista veterans which was some pretty hardcore shit on its own.
>6'7
You're probably thinking of Charlemagne.
There are no historical records discussing Hernan Cortes' height, which if he was 6'7", there sure fricking would be.
He was likely average or slightly above average for a nobleman, which is still below average by modern standards. Probably 5'5" to 5'8".
Thanks idk where I read that. Maybe I was thinking of Alvarado. That guy fricking creeps me the hell out. Cortez seemed pretty normal compared to Alvarado
>In 1861, Charlemagne's tomb was opened by scientists who reconstructed his skeleton and estimated it to be measured 1.95 metres (6 ft 5 in)
That is a BIG motherfricker for the 8th century, goddamn
Dude made pagans so mad by little genocide that he basically jump started the Viking Age. Well I guess Normans got the last laugh.
>Well I guess Normans got the last laugh.
Hardly. They had fun for a bit, but in the end they all became Christians
Many of the commoners did. The lords only went along with it for political power. They did whatever behind closed doors and kept their stories alive in private.
Either way, replace Notre Dame with a shrine or temple similar to the ones dedicated to Jupiter or Caelus and dedicate it to European gods from all corners.
Religion is a mutable and living thing anon, it adapts through time and space to new paradigms, "going back to our pagan roots" is as much of a human construct as wahhabism and haredi, people attemtping to impose a flawed false memory of a specific section of the past in the hopes of finding some original "purity". Even if the theistic view was right the factual evidence would show the divinity too works adaptations and mutability, so the faith and customs demanded 1000, 2000 or 3000 years ago is never the same, you can even see this in the holy books and the endless plethora of interpretations done through history, with claims of purity being arbitrarily declared and anathematization of those who don't agree.
To ground this on the current discussion I think misionaries did their part, consider the sort of deities and social order the mesoamericans had, upon being offered a breakaway from the native cosmology an alternative will present iselft, sure, at sword point, but still a rather attractive worldview, I know modern historians who are often crypto or openly marxists disregard this aspect but it's clear that between the cosmic order being a predatory elite with a thumbs up from bloodthirsty deities to enforce their opression (and let us not pretend mesoamericans didn't have very stratified classes) and a worldview where whenever the elites did something oppresive it was clearly evil in the eyes of the divinity and the transgressor would be punished even if he spmehow gets away in this life the choice becomes evident. Mesoamericans and their latinoamerican decendants would still maintain "supersticious beliefs", that's it a ritualistic way to manipulate the cosmos, but their morality will shift to grecochristian views, hence way they will be after the europeans among the first human groups to start working toward the ideals of the Enlightenment, with far less success, but still far in advance to many other non-white peoples.
It’s so weird as a giant lanklet going to history museums and seeing full suits of knight or samurai armour and realising I’m sometimes more than a foot taller than the guys back in those times
Strength and size too. I'm fairly tall at6'1 but nothing unusual; what struck me when I go to museums and see the same things you do anon is how much wider and bigger I am. I'm also big and broad by today's standards, but back then I'd probably be looked at like a giant with super human strength if I landed in New Spain with the conquistadors.
Peter the Great was like 6'8 but had extremely tiny shoes and it's mentioned in all accounts when people describe.him kek
I’m 6’3 I’m not really any wider than them, but my height comes from an extra X chromosome so not really an ubermensch. It’s fun walking round ancient castles and stuff imagining emerging through a tiny door and spooking everyone. I’m not sure if it’s true, but I heard people being short in the past mostly was down to early agriculture being shittier than the hunter gatherer diets which were more varied
>was down to early agriculture being shittier than the hunter gatherer diets which were more varied
Had more to do with protein availability than variation
>Peter the Great was like 6'8 but had extremely tiny shoes and it's mentioned in all accounts when people describe.him kek
He was also described to have large hands proper for his height. See feet maybe consequences of small tight boots fashion, just like Chinese children with deformed wrapped feet.
I read this book in college called The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. It's written from the legit Aztec perspective, but also has some translation from other indigenous groups' writings who hated the Aztecs. When you read it, it's like the Aztecs were writing propaganda for the Spaniards. Obviously, that wasn't the intention, but shit was so bad for the Aztecs they could really only write about the Spaniards if that makes sense. The conquistadors were more badass than what is perceived & taught on the basic level. A modern accurate representation looks like this: it was well equipped Army Rangers fighting against unarmed Oompa Loompa's with an IQ of 50. That is how lopsided the war was for the Aztecs. The book is a serious eye opener. If you read it, you will be saying 'oh frick' probably a couple 1000 times.
nope
Nope again. Read the book. Wiki is BS.
I remember hearing that Aztecs thought that Spaniards were somekind of gods and harbingers of apocalypse, is there any truth to that? If there is, then it would make sense that Aztecs would write about Spaniards like that, kinda like israelites talked about Yahweh as this evil badass being genociding all around...
It's total bullshit that was perpetuated by Cortez as the basis for his legal claim to spoils. At no point ever did the natives treat them with any more reverence than was due a guest or visiting foreign dignitary. Moctezuma specifically met him in such a way as to prove neither of them were perceived as gods, so that Cortez wouldn't get the wrong idea about their relationship.
>Nope again. Read the book. Wiki is BS.
Ive been to the museum of anthropology and native american culture in Mexico City. Take the L and educate yourself.
Also don't forget Montezuma thought Cortez was an ancient sky god or some shit because they had a story about that god returning as a white dude, or it was so vaguely interpreted that a white dude was "good enough" in his eyes.
An invincible white dude did arrive and save their world, he just saved it from THEM.
You sure about that? Because looking at everything from the tip of Argentina to the northern border of Mexico, everything is still pretty shit. And they have even brought back ritual killings!
That's most probably not true though. There is like one Spanish guy saying this was the case. It's mostly based on the fact that Montezuma was very hospitable towards Cortez, giving him gifts, best place in town to stay at and generally sucked his dick but that has more to do with him being unsure of Cortez intentions and the stories of Emperor, Pope and God back in Europe being extremely powerful gave him pause especially since Cortez has already started to beat the natives in fights left and right and the word of firearms, horses and armor spread around.
I mean Montezuma himself was technically a "God" by Aztec standards, he should know best that it was bullshit.
A big reason why I also think it wasn't true is that Cortes wasn't the first white man to make contact.
Cortes retinue itself included Gerónimo de Aguilar, a monk who got shipwrecked and was a Maya slave for almost a decade. He was picked up by Cortes because he needed a translator and Aguilar knew the language.
There was another guy who was got shipwrecked with Aguilar, Gonzalo Guerrero, actually liked that shit so he adopted the local customs, got a hot Maya wife and became a war chief. He spent the rest of his life waging guerilla warfare against the Spanish.
>Cortes wasn't the first white man to make contact.
>white man
>Only nords and anglo-saxons are le white, spaniards are arab rapebabies!!!11
Even if were "med brown", cortez was definitely white in the eyes of the locals
Wrong.
I wont deny there was white Spaniards but after a thousand years of incursions and waves of nonwhite immigrants and invaders into Spain, the conquistadors were pretty much multiculti. Few years before they discovered America, they were b***hes of the moors and arabs. israelites were all roaming around the peninsula and eight hundred years before all of this happened they were conquered by the Romans, and then by the Visigoths. So the Spaniards that set sail into America were very mixed or at least different from one another. There was visigothic aryans, cryptoisraelite basques (rarely at the beginning, since they focused more on commerce than conquering), (christianized) arabs and sephardi israelites, moors, classic iberians and mixed people. But most importantly, I remember some people have mentioned that many of the most prominent conquistadors were christianized israelites, includying Cortes and Colón. There's some evidence to reinforce those claims. The Spanish Crown actually offered the israelites to move onto the New World, or they just were expelled and relocated there, specially during the inquisition. Also, you gotta consider Cortes and Colon's looks. They look a bit israeli if you take a closer look at their depictions, and they're greedy fricks too.
>There was another guy who was got shipwrecked with Aguilar, Gonzalo Guerrero, actually liked that shit so he adopted the local customs, got a hot Maya wife and became a war chief. He spent the rest of his life waging guerilla warfare against the Spanish.
Which brings us back to
The moment the natives got a little bit of time to adjust to the new arrivals, be it Guerrero teaching the Maya about Spanish weapons and tactics, or the Mapuche sitting at the edge of Spain's force projection capabilities, conquering them suddenly became a great deal harder. The Inca remnant did the same thing, of course.
?si=gvMGsNxSRNIDFgJ9
This is who really conquered Mexico, South America, the great planes. By Stepping on Their gods and leaving proofs
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What's the tl;Dr that b***h is annoying as frick
From what I've read the relevance of guns gets overblown since the major advantage of firearms at the time (besides lower training requirements compared to archers) was their ability to reliably pierce steel armor which the Aztecs didn't have. What really fricked the Aztecs up was the Spanish cavalry which they basically had no counter to unlike the peoples of Eurasia who had been refining anti-cavalry tactics for millennia.
Tens of thousands of native allies who REALLY DID hate the Aztecs enough that even those weirdly-dressed strangers with their "God" and their "Bibles" seemed like a better option.
in the case of the Incans they eventually learned to partially offset the advantage of firearms by attacking with huge numbers from many sides at the same time and using cover as long as possible but they really struggled with cavalry and were forced to rely on rocky, mountainous terrain (which really only helped them escape the Spanish and frustrate attempts to dislodge them from the Andes, not take the fight to them). steel armor was also a big problem though it didn't cover the entire body and the Spanish themselves commented that the woven fabric armor of the Incans was deceptively durable
cannons were pretty routinely valuable for the sheer shock and panic value though
Btw the Neo-Inca State is interesting to read about
It was a rump state controlled by the last remnants of the Inca empire refusing to bow to the Spanish. They tried to adopt Spanish warfare, using Spanish helmets, shields, armor, swords, arquebuses and horses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Inca_State#Adoption_of_Spanish_warfare
>In marked contrast to some other Native American cultures, such as the Aztecs, the Incas were also eager to master weaponry which was wholly "alien" to them.
>Manco Inca even forced captured Europeans to refine gunpowder for his army.
>The Incas also tried to adopt some European battle tactics: On at least one occasion, a group of Inca warriors formed a tight unit in combat, based on the teachings of a captured Spaniard
>verall, it took the Incas approximately two decades to bridge the technological gap with the Spanish. By the 1560s, it was recorded that many Incans had developed considerable skill in utilizing arquebuses and riding horses.
Imagine if they'd somehow won. It'd have been a wild ride in South America from then on out.
Reminds of one of the campaigns in Empire Earth 2. It's an alternate History scenario where the Aztec and Inca Empires survive and become a US ally and a fascist state respectively. They end up fighting each other in WW2 with nukes iirc
i did not know that.
>From what I've read the relevance of guns gets overblown
It's completely overblown, especially by third rate historians who have no technical knowledge of early arquebus. The expedition of Cortez never brought enough firearms to make a material impact on the battlefield, and the Mesoamerican groups they encountered learned very quickly how the weapon worked and developed all kinds of ways to counter the weapon.
>It's completely overblown, especially by third rate historians who have no technical knowledge of early arquebus.
It's Marxist ideology pushes gun angle. See it's Marxist way of thinking, brown people are only down because they have no means of production like white people. You give brown people same factories and they would be like white people.
Oppression!
Same line of thought with the guns.
Marixts are very deeply entrenched in academic and especially history academec circles.
Marxism is absolutely allergic to thought that people may be different (expect difference in wieners size, everyone knows black men have large wieners and asian men have tiny wieners, its the science).
>Marxism is absolutely allergic to thought that people may be different (expect difference in wieners size, everyone knows black men have large wieners and asian men have tiny wieners, its the science).
I don't think you understand Marxist theory. The whole thing with superstructure is that different cultures have different relations to material conditions/base. Like the difference in Marxist view is that the base has more effect to superstructure (as opposed to older cultural centric views that saw advancement stemming solely from culture) but marxists don't think that it is one way street. Base affects superstructure but that in turn reflects back to base. Material conditions and modes of production may be more dominant in this relationship but cultural differences are in reflective relationship with them, and there totally are such differences. Marxism isn't "allergic" to the thought that people are different, it is clearly taken into account in theory!
Like how does Chinese marxists ideas of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" make sense in anyway if that weren't so in marxist theory?
>I don't think you understand Marxist theory.
All that anyone needs to know about Marx or any thought he ever had was that he allowed three of his children to starve to death while smoking a daily cigar and paying a maid (who he also knocked up, and abandoned).
Yeah sure you can do that, it is better to just not care about theory one bit because the man behind it was a c**t. That is respectable POV. Unlike just inventing stupid BS about established theory that makes no sense if you even have a cursory knowledge of subject like that moronic OP was doing.
>Yeah sure you can do that, it is better to just not care about theory one bit because the man behind it was a c**t.
>You will know them by their fruits
Yes.
>Marxist
>theory
The word you are looking for is "hogwash"
Physics and random happenstance dictates base, not the superstructure at all. Marx was moronic, and commies will say anything to control the means of production. Marxists do not believe in anything but their own individual, personal superiority over others, which is delusional and allows for the severe atrocities committed under their rule, as well as their disingenuous rhetoric towards their political constituents. Marxism is retrospective justification of their ideal state of power consolidation using circular logic, and nothing more.
>Physics and random happenstance dictates base, not the superstructure at all. Marx was moronic, and commies will say anything to control the means of production.
Yeah, sure. I was just pointing out that OP who I was replying to was moronic who clearly didn't know anything about marxist theory but still made moronic as frick claims about it that everyone who can read can easily see as bullshit. When you need to attack some theory, you need to attack what it claims, not make up moronic BS about it and then attack that BS you imagined.
>The problem with Marxist theory is that it has the pyramid upside down. Culture is the "base" - the central component - and everything else revolves around it and interacts through it. This is inconvenient if your goal is to quantify and analyze the world, since culture is so immaterial and poorly understood, so ardently materialist thinkers like Marx have a tendency to gloss over and forget about it.
Agree 100 %, marxist materialist outlook is inhuman in that it fails to consider human reality being extremely subjective through and through. Marx just shrugged at muttered about lumpen proletariat and class consicousness and continued on jerking off about material conditions. It is totally insufficient and when you base your actual politics around insufficient understanding of human condition, tragedy will ensue.
>Modern descendants of Marxism like critical theory
But now you lost me, because critical theory and post modernism as a whole were exactly reaction to this. How intangible but powerful culture is, how existence is subjective and how impossible it is to quantify or do science about. It is the very reason marxists and materialists fricking loathe post modernism and critical theory. So, how can critical theory fail to address this shortcoming when the whole point of it was to address it? Now it doesn't give solutions to it, such is the way with most post modernistic thought. But address it it does.
Post your gun real quick so we all can see you're one of us.
The problem with Marxist theory is that it has the pyramid upside down. Culture is the "base" - the central component - and everything else revolves around it and interacts through it. This is inconvenient if your goal is to quantify and analyze the world, since culture is so immaterial and poorly understood, so ardently materialist thinkers like Marx have a tendency to gloss over and forget about it.
Modern descendants of Marxism like critical theory have tried and failed to address this shortcoming, because while accounting for "basic" non-production factors that are still quantifiable, they've still failed to consider culture as more than "what people physically do when theyre not working," again because they are either incapable of quantifying it or refuse to.
Not considering race or genetics falls under the latter category. By shifting the culture of research and thought away from racial topics, they've allowed the field to grow without an understanding of them. Then when they look at the state of the art and see no mention of it, it gives the impression that it isn't important.
Ironic how cultural factors have impacted the field itself without them being able to realize it.
I think it's biggest problem isn't even its flawed understanding of human biological behaviour, but being a religion in denial. They are the equivalent to abrahamics attempting to proof the existence of God not through the article of faith (emotional conviction from life experiences) but "scientific experiments" and circular logic.
Marxism always seemed to be so strange to me. Everything is reduced to the workings of economics, even love and virtue. By what right does a communist call something immoral without first simply assuming the truth of his own worldview? Marx claimed that his theory was to the social sciences what darwinism was to biology. Well, darwinism tells us that it's the survival of the fittest, while Marxism seems to be a pseudo-christian heresy which makes charity compulsory and is more or less the epitome of what Nietzsche would call secular slave-morality, but with a pathological murderous envy at its core. Something which Christianity at least turned inward with the notion of original sin and redemption in the afterlife. Marxists think that this world is all there is, so they have to murder as many as it takes to achieve that classless and stateless commie utopia.
Its explanation is just too simple to be able to explain the sheer variety which characterises the human condition. But I guess that reductionism is seductive like that. It ends arguments, in theory anyway, by simply dismissing with an airy wave of the hand what it cannot account for as either an epiphenomena from something more primal, or by simply denying its very existence. No wonder adolescents like communism, it's simply a matter of killing or at least re-educating all the "bad" people.
>goes on a rant and brings up black wieners out of nowhere
deranged
lol, everybody hated the Incas.
>Alien with fire spewing iron pipe: wanna join up and wreck the Inca empire?
>Native in jaguar furry suit: sure, let's us bash some Incas skulls
>lol, everybody hated the Incas
Don't you mean the Aztecs?
Cortés conquered the Aztecs in big part thanks to the fact they were hated by everybody
Pizarro conquered the Incas thanks to a recent civil war that weakened them
The Incas also possibly generated a fair amount of seethe among their vassals with the corvee system.
>Native in jaguar furry suit
>Incas
American education everybody, don't you just love it
>asshurt Mestizo b***hing about Americans in a Spainish conquistador thread
Absolutely buck broken Jimenez raul-mendoza de la pena. Ps, your native blood has been bred out of your genepool, you're just brown, not an Aztec or Incan ;^)
>Mestizo
Coping isn't gonna make you any less of a moron
You're a moron. Incas and Aztecs aren't even close to each other.
Idaho cowboys fighting Pancho Villa montoneros in the swamps of Manhattan.
t. not the anon you're answering
Mirin the quads on this c**t but you and I both know the stringy 4' pygmies in the incan empire looked nothing like that lol
Cortez was adept at playing politics and convinced the local tribes to rebel against the aztecs along with beating the governor of Cuba.
Just watch these
go to wikipedia you Black person. They had the help of tons of natives who hated the empire. Believe it or not, these giant empires were buttholes to everyone around them
>Believe it or not, these giant empires were buttholes to everyone around them
About that, I recently read stuff about the Purépecha Empire (or Tarascan Empire), the second biggest native state in Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquest
Basically nobody knows about them, but unlike other native states in the region, they managed to keep the Aztecs at bay despite regular attacks. This almost constant state of war with their neighbor made centralization necessary, and they became one of the most centralized states in the region
They ended up blocking northward Aztec expansion. Pretty cool imo
I'm also curious about the relations between the Aztecs and the Mayas to the South. Did the former ever try to conquer the latter, and if not, why?
The mayas die out long before the aztecs become an empire.
don't forget the "frick you, your mother and what ever gods you pray to" attitude that the Spanish brought to it.
These are guys fresh off the end of the reconquista religious fanaticism and violence where the norm for them.
Honestly you'd be best off comparing them to the first crusade.
Pissed of people in a world they don't know but with a clear goal and a do or die attitude because it is do or die.
It wasn't a few thousand. It was a few hundred thousand. The Tlaxcalans joined the Spanish. This information was one Google search away.
Well it was a few thousand Spaniards
No, it wasnt. You people are too incompetent to literally google wikipedia articles.
200,000 native allies are not spaniards and they were not the ones holding the whips when the dust settled
>1300 Spanish Infantry
yeah thats about a thousand Spaniards
Swords and plate armour were more important. Also cavalry.
And being the best damn soldiers on the planet at the time. The centuries of the reconquista has turned the Iberians into incredible death machines. Note that Spain didn't just conquer empires in the Americas, it also conquered the Philippines, which did have iron and a bit of gunpowder (and did it with half the invasion force consisting of Tlaxcallan mercenaries using Spanish weapons. The reason > 2% of modern Filipino DNA is native American? Tlaxcallans).
Portugal wrecked the shit out of every muslim power adjacent to the Indian ocean. Diseases weren't a factory yet they still accomplished basically the same shit Spain didy against states full of armour and (admittedly mostly shit, ottoman exports excepted) firearms.
The Iberians were just that good.
They had steel balls, something unheard off today
The most important material factor was the horse.
Mules and burros also. How you transport those guns?
Gunpowder and steel barely factored into it any point. The Conquistador format of conquest was pretty cut and dry in its effectiveness because of the inherent weakness of having only loose connections and alliances between major factions within and between regional powers. The supposedly vast trade network around the Americas took literal years to move goods for profit and the form that profit took could change and devalue from decade to decade. Meanwhile Europeans could connect distant regions and facilitate stable, constant wealth acquisition. Once they did their Conquistador thing and took advantage of local traditions to take over bloodlessly or force massive slaughters at the hands of traditional rivals, the surviving elite very quickly signed on for Spanish gold.
In my opinion, ledgers and sails conquered more of the Americas than swords and guns.
>ledgers and sails conquered more of the Americas than swords and guns.
Such was their long term mistake along with too much native interbreeding. A tale of two new worlds.
Its already been stated but the spanish exploited division among the natives tribes and had allies. Wasnt just a couple Spaniards vs the whole of the native population.
It also seemed like Moctezuma was apprehensive about war at the beginning so perhaps he fricked himself over.
They had help.
What the frick is a war canoe LOL?
Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of native Allies who really, really hated the Aztecs
>How were a few thousands of them able to beat several empires?
Aztecs managed to piss of every single one of its neighbors by constantly raiding them for slaves to use as human sacrifices. Conquistadors just rallied and led them.
Everything afterwards was practically biological warfare - the diseases they unknowingly brought had a great time with native American immune systems, which were never hardened by constant plagues that Europe had.
By the time they arrived to the Inca empire, it was very weak from a civil war and plagues that wiped out the majority of the population.
>the diseases they unknowingly brought had a great time with native American immune systems
time to review some of these claims
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06965-x
You have pointed at a sexually transmitted disease. Even if you take away syphilis we are still talking potentially dozens of pathogens which could have done massive amounts of damage.
I checked the author's background, I think she has clear political inclinations toward certain narratives.
Most of the people who thought in La Conquista weren't that large when compared with the natives, particularly when you consider they often came from impoverished families.
Now, the main problem with this event is that there is too often a political interest to appeal to certain narrative towards the spectrum and I don't think anyone, including myself, can avoid this, even what we call facts is often inconclusive data, ultimately La Conquista's interpretation will always depend on the worldview of the people who see the events towards their own biased morality.
With that being said I highly recommend Peach series about La Conquista de Mexico, he, indeed applies a certain liberal optic towards their conclussions, but still makes quite an effort to present many interesting information you may not know:
Have you read the conquest of new Spain be Bernal Diaz anon? It's excellent; a first hand account of it all by one of the men who sailed fought and conquered with Cortez.
Peach Cobbler did an amazing job on this topic.
Yeah, I actually like most of the job he and the mexican buddy he worked with did, although ultimately by the end he basically applied western morality to the whole thing making the video a bit ironic, don't get me wrong, he made very good points which are clearly applied up to this day, but I guess you need to require a certain set of values in order to make a compelling narrative.
Unleast he didn't go for the either of the extremes that Americans tend to push.
I always considered him as an opinionated yt-er.
Your response to
tips your hand. I also looked up that author and I don’t see any indication of horrendous bent to her. She seems kind of autistic in her anthropology work. In other words, your dark brown (physically & mentally) it’s about time for you to go dilate.
>Aztecs managed to piss of every single one of its neighbors by constantly raiding them for slaves to use as human sacrifices. Conquistadors just rallied and led them.
Basically all of the Aztecs' vassals either fought with them or remained neutral. The only meaningful native support came for the Tlaxcallans.
As for diseases, see https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Germs-Depopulation-America-Archaeology/dp/081653554X
> The Samurai did not stand a chance. The Conquistadors had stronger armor that they could not penetrate, and the Musketeers backing them up were better shots, with more reliable weapons. Not only did they beat the Samurai, but the 40 men went on to fight off a fleet of ten Japanese ships commanding thousands of men.
> When it ended, the Spanish leader, Juan Pablo de Carrion, threatened to bring over 600 more men if the Japanese did not leave the Filipinos alone. The Japanese, without firing another shot, ran for their lives and stayed as far away from the Philippines as they could.
40 conquistadors massacre thousands of samurai, yeah i get it that the samurai were literally 4'11" 80lb nips but still impressive, seems the conquistadors had an even easier time with the japs than they did with the sudaca natives
https://listverse.com/2017/04/08/top-10-who-would-win-battles-that-played-out-in-real-life/
Love this kind of "two alien worlds suddenly collide" stories
NOOOO NOT MUH HECKING INVINCIBLE ANIME SAMURAIS
Oh, shit if Listverse said it, it must be true.
It is true, the trick is that they were pirates, not exactly the best Japan could send.
I search the name Juan Pablo de Carrion and it seems in general terms the anecdote is real, not sure about the ronin, but actual tests show katanas would be extremely fragile against steel armor and european swords, there is a video where one breaks when trying to anime cut a broadsword.
>there is a video where one breaks when trying to anime cut a broadsword.
>Don't know how either sword was made
>But I saw a cool webm so it must be the truth
Lurk two more years.
Wrong board
Go back, noguns HEMAtuber.
The Aztecs could have unironically crushed them due to sheer numbers but Montezuma was a massive coward and basically did nothing until it was too late and then once he naively invited their army into the heart of Tenochitlan (prob did not spell that right) they of course immediately betrayed him and took control of the capital and their leadership which left the entire empire in disarray. This combined with all the other native empires hating the Aztecs + the disease later on sealed the deal and dealt a blow they could never recover from.
Montezuma wasn't a coward as much as he was unaware of how Europeans operate (as with other natives). Europeans had 100s of years of major cultures colliding, siege warfare, naval warfare, massive plagues, complex multi ethnic economies, and really endless infighting. This created a type of ment famework that was able to easily out-wit natives.
Read books on first contact or early contact with any Europeans and natives anywhere in the Americas. Colonists could get attacked and literally ask the natives to wait to attack until tomorrow, and slaughter them in the middle of the night while the natives honored their pledge. That's the level of difference we're talking here... Native warfare was very different.
As someone far too interested in the subject... In order:
- Infighting between tribes in the area, and a multi generational hatred for the Aztecs.
- Tactical, negotiation skills of the Spanish. Natives were very much unaware of complex battle tactics and even general negotiation skills that Europeans learned at a young age at the time.
- Disease, both introduced by Europeans and otherwise.
- Technological advantage.
It really was the perfect storm for both sides, and the meeting of two very unique peoples in their apex.
They may not have been as tall but every single one would've had navy seal/SAS operator level endurance and grit. I read Bernal Diaz's first person account (He never mentions Cortes being tall, fwiw)
The Spanish tercios dominated european warfare for several hundred years, so it's likely Cortes' men had a similar edge as a small cohesive force, the horses were few but probably unstoppable (Though one gets decapitated by an obsidian axe). Also the wars fought by the Aztecs were very ritualized and with a heavy focus on capturing prisoners for sacrifice.
They didn't practice night warfare at all - at one point the Tlaxcalans decided to innovate and attack the Spanish at night but since for them it wasn't unexpected at all to be attacked at night it didn't surprise them.
The Tlaxcalans fought Cortes initially when he crossed their territory, eventually when they couldn't destroy him they started to negotiate and became allies.
While the native auxiliaries gave a lot of assistance it's also true that the Spanish were alone on multiple instances - their allies would get spooked and leave them, or during the noche triste when they had to escape Tenochtitlan and were intercepted by an army outside the city.
Disease only became a factor after the Aztecs had been defeated, a slave with the plague infected the whole region.
It was basically, and sorry for my autism, a space marines + imperial guard scenario, where conquistadors basically acted as marines with superior armor and weapons as well as better mobility and ballistics while the natives provided that much needed bulk of bodies and supplies which ultimately turned the balance in their favour. The accounts made clear in many instances collaborationism was the norm and conquistadores even married what natives were available to ensure political alliances, it doesn't remove any of the biggotry and genocide, but pretending many natives didn't took the opportunity to get a better shot at life and they didn't end up running parts of the colonies is inane.
I feel a lot of europeans always extrapolate their own experiences and narratives with that of the Spaniards, if you wanted an idea of what this was all about imagine british investors moving to India, killing a large chunk of the locals and then marrying the brahmin who sided with them and running the country while still keeping most of the local structures, then imagine more and more british moving to permanently live in India and mixing with the locals while forcing them to abandon most of their worst (by western standards) practices and enforcing christianity at sword point. In the end you have a population mostly of mestizos who can actually trace back some of their roots to modern age Europe yet are still clearly brown. That is Latinoamerica in a nutshell.
>the wars fought by the Aztecs were very ritualized
>They didn't practice night warfare at all
Anon is correct. The way that natives conducted warfare, negotiated, traded, marked boundaries, etc. was totally unprepared for conflict with the battle hardened Europeans. Especially the Spanish at that time. Especially Cortes and his peers. Understand that natives could be subverted extremely easily, and largely fought ritualistic wars or simply did the warfare equivalent of "chest bumping" and yelling "hold me back"!
Not that they didn't kill or fight, but nothing on the scale of European warfare.
>Disease only became a factor after the Aztecs had been defeated
No, small pox absolutely ravaged the besieged Aztecs during the siege of Tenochtitlan.
It's been a while since I read Bernal Diaz but I recall it being after the siege, and it affected the Tlaxcalans particularly badly.
>Would make a kick ass miniseries but you just know they wouldn't do it right.
I haven't watched it in full but there's this recent one. Back in the 90s they made a couple movies and TV series too.
>Would you say overall LATAM is, in genetic and cultural terms, the descent of conquistadores and spaniards as much as natives?
One funny thing I notice often is Indians with Spanish names (Place and people) and Americans thinking these are Indian names. It's like a Chinese interacting with an Indian called Smith and thinking "Smith" is some ancient Sanskrit term.
One factor no one has noticed but that Bernal Diaz mentions is that Indians were impressed by the similarities between their religion and the Christian one, and stuff like making a symbolic human sacrifice out of your god was an idea that struck 'em. Then again a Catholic would think that.
But while the Conquistadores did disregard the local culture when taking over, it has to be admitted that the locals also discarded their own ancient ways actively.
>It's been a while since I read Bernal Diaz but I recall it being after the siege, and it affected the Tlaxcalans particularly badly.
The epidemic had actually ended within Tenochtitlan before its fall but it had absolutely ravaged the Aztec society, for example crops could not be harvested because so many able bodied people were sick or dead. Florentine Codex portrays the situation as
>many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get up and search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds. By the time the danger was recognized, the plague was well established that nothing could halt it.
It's a bad thing for besieged if their food storages are minimal and your population is just recovering from outbreak. Spaniards were dealing with similar problems too naturally, and their allies were suffering from disease too, but at least they had wider range to gather supplies.
>How were a few thousands of them able to beat several empires?
They were fighting literal rock chucking cavemen who were too stupid to even invent the wheel, too stupid to develop written languages, 95% of whom only managed to domesticate dogs (which are basically self-domesticating), who constantly fought each other over wild food resources because their agricultural practices were 10,000 years behind the rest of the world. Their religious beliefs were basically "we're incredibly, irreversibly stupid so everything is magical". Indians were just so monumentally moronic, a handful of Spanish homosexuals enslaved millions of them. Visit a reservation and talk to anyone - they all sound, talk and move like they have severe brain damage. The tiny Spanish forces took over half the Americas because they had invaded the short bus continents.
The simple answer is they didn't
Not just because huge armies from local states they were allied with did most of the work/gave supplies (Mesoamerican soldiers and/or Spanish with Meso. armor even fought in Spanish campaigns the Philippines, up in Colorado, etc), and not just because diseases ravaged the population, but as there were more Conquistadors then people realize
EX: Cortes only had hundreds of Conquistadors at any one time, but got more at multiple points (like by convincing Narvaez' men to join), so JUST in Cortes's expedition, there were a few thousand Conquistadors, plus another few thousand Cooks, porters, slaves (who also all fought at times), PLUS disease, much larger allied Meso. armies, etc
As for why it succeeded: It was a combination of things that snowballed in Spain's favor
Cortes happened to go rogue at the perfect time to where Tlaxcala was desperate enough to be a key ally in Central Mexico, but before it was totally conquered; and also happened to come across translators. The way Mesoamerican diplomacy worked meant Moctezuma had an incentive to let them into Tenochtitlan, horses and cannons helped them act as a force multiplier alongside allied Tlaxcalteca infantry once hostilities DID break out to escape back to Tlaxcala, then as they rested, smallpox (which one of Narvaez's men happened to be infected with) struck Tenochtitlan, by which point the way Mesoamerican politics worked meant a bunch of actually-core-states-inside-the-empire (unlike Tlaxcala, which was an enemy state) switched sides since Tenochtitlan was so fricked it's influence they normally benefitted from was damaged, so they had more to gain by turning on it then by staying with it
After that point, Tenochtitlan was sacked, many former Aztec subjects recognized Spanish rule, and now Spain had a base of operations, a huge amount of existing infrastructure and armies to launch further campaign from, AND diseases were ravaging everybody, so again, things snowballed
1/?
Would you say overall LATAM is, in genetic and cultural terms, the descent of conquistadores and spaniards as much as natives?
What would have happened if US used the same tactics as the spanish in the context of the last 50 years of wars?
I'm not sure I can answer either question, my area of interest is Mesoamerica, the Conquistadors are just tangential to that due to the Conquest, and I know even less about modern Latin American stuff
I suppose context is different to modern times, but I believe spaniards specific social and economic conditions played a great role in how they approached the entire situation, while initially a mixture of trade and pirate expeditions more akin to the vikings than, say the pilgrim fathers looking for a place to flee religious oppression, the conquistadores shifted their perspective into, well, conquerors, as people have pointed out, they weren't originally a state sponsored army but an expedition cobbled together from the lesser elements of spanish society with a thumbs up from the crown who may or not profit from these private initiatives, the conquistadores were looking for a way to make both a name and a fortune for themselves and then return to the homeland, many have pointed out they could have just left with bags filled with gold and then maybe do like the british and establish some trade networks.
When is that they truly decided the future was in America and not in Spain is anyone's guess, perhaps by the point the siege was under way they realized this was a one time in History chance for people like them.
Most of them were young upstarts who even with all the gathered plunder won't stand a chance when dealing with their betters at the homeland, instead, in these new lands they were the object of awe, powerful warriors with new and strange knowledge whose alliance may be seen as something to be coveted, and by the point when they were distributing lands from the vanquished aztecs and taking wives from the natives their path was sealed.
In the final battle between Cortes and the Aztecs, Cortes had well over 100,000 natives fighting on his side (compared to the 1200 conquistadors). Cortes was a hustler and a player; he saw that the Aztec Empire was the continental bully and he exploited that fact. European tech and tactics helped as well, but mostly it was his alliances and political acumen that allowed him success.
Speaking of Cortes specifically, it's a fascinating story. He had a rivalry with another Spanish governor who aimed to have Cortes arrested; Cortes refused to lay down arms and at some points the Spanish fought each other. Ultimately, Cortes conquered the Aztecs so that he could claim governorship over their territories, and thus becomes immune to prosecution by a fellow governor.
Would make a kick ass miniseries but you just know they wouldn't do it right.
>You are a loin-cloth wearing spearchucker and you see this
waht do
>I can’t wait to hold hos still beating heart on top of a pyramid so that corn grows better
Very nice effortposting Anon, love it when someone who actually know his stuff decides to bless this godforsaken site.
From my experience as Latino myself, I'd say that the only thing many Latinoamerican cultures keep from the Indians is perhaps the natuve foods and a strong rhythmical emphasis in traditional music. Almost everything else is the result of Spanish culture filtered down and adapted by the local s into differeng styles and identities.
Genetically? I'm pale as frick but my dad is half black, his great grandfather was from Jamaica. My mother had a Spanish last name and apparently were landowners. Nothing that remains now unfortunately. But as you can see, Latinos are a combination of practically everything you could get your hands on, but the natives that have remained identified as such are almost always isolated from society itself.
Sorry but the human sacrifices are going to stop.
Sorry.
Why does literally every other board has better threads on history than PrepHole?
Same reason why comfiest places to discuss kino is every board other than PrepHole.
It seems every board is a containment board.
>Was it just having firearms?
It was having sword and art of the fencing.
Conquistadors were like these Kung Fu movies when couple heroes defeat armies only it was real.
>inb4 marxist seething
They used middle ages weaponry more than firearms. The English in the US colonies were the first mainly firearm users. Spanish and porteguese still used plate and pole arms, just lighter versions than knights of europe.
They mainly conquered by turning them against eachother. Aztecs had a lot of enemy tribes nearby not happy with being oppressed or captured and sacrificed to the sun. Many were mobilized against them.
This gave the conquistadors far larger forces than just their own to conquer with.
all you need is a few good men
local allies
Prolly has got something to do with the 200k Tlaxcalans and others who showed up to frick up the Aztecs.
In exchange they got a load of privileges in the new Spanish Empire.
Guns germs steel dude dont you read
They got help from locals who were tired of getting raided and enslaved by the indigenous empires. Such locals thought they could get revenge for years of oppression and also thought they would become vassals for the new empire.
Cortez conquest of the aztecs is the single *coolest* military campaign of all time
full stop
for me it's the rwandan paradrop during the second congo war
basically the Spaniards were superior plus also their chief opponents everywhere they went were such colossal twats that no one wanted to help them instead chosing to side with the clearly foreign invader
The problem with the "local auxiliaries did everything" interpretation is that, as I said before, the Tlaxcalans tried to kill Cortes and his men when they were alone, they tried multiple times, very hard even resorting to unusual tactics like night attacks and couldn't do it, so then resorted to "If you can't beat 'em, join them"
It was more like they sparked a civil war and encouraged riots while sitting on the side lines typically. It was more of a civil revolt and they happened to be right there on the sidelines to step in and fill the power vaccuum and bribe enough officials to side with them. Bribery back then might have been a real step up from donating having so many of your people for conscription or sacraficial rights on top of regular terrifs and taxes. Then they had hundreds of years of trying to build western style ranches before they decided it was their own culture and not imported.
Disease, metal armour /swords. Guns.
obligatory