I've been reading this the past couple weeks (great book by the way) but it got me to wondering...was there anything the Inca could have done weapon wise to come over the spanish metal armor, and horses? It seems like ultimately that was their downfall. They had to resort to just trying to over run the spaniards, but they had absolutely no answer for getting through their armor or stopping charges.
They basically had to be able to hit a spaniard in the face (assuming his face guard was up) or be around moutainous terrain to stop the charges.
First, a hail of poison darts fired out of blowguns nick many the Spaniards in the face and kill them.
Then my warriors charge with clay incendiary grenades that don't really work because our chemistry sucks, but they bonk the Spanish on the helmets and they have to comedically pat themselves and roll around to put out the fire.
The enraged Spanish charge, so we retreat behind our big ditch of stakes covered in leaves.
Finally the surviving unhorsed Spanish start chasing us down with fire and sword,
but all this was just to buy time for our plucky protagonists to recover the stolen crystal skull and fire the ancient alien laser beneath Macchu Picchu.
G fricking g.
To answer your question no metal and horses were really good compared to rocks and sticks.
There was nothing the twinkas could’ve done to avoid getting COLONIZED by BIC (Big Iberian wiener)
long term, maybe not. In the short term, if Pizarro hadn't arrived when he did, down to that very four hour window, he would have been absolutely blown the frick out.
Please elaborate
He came right after the conclusion of Inca civil war, in which Atahualpa was an usurper that committed numerous atrocities, including levelling some temples and holy places, having no source of legitimacy except his army. The state was insecure, society hysterical due to ominous religious portents and impoverished by war and spread of diseases that preceded Spaniards. Most importantly Pizarro arrived at Cajamarca to find Inca with only numerous but ceremonial retinue scarcely armed or arrayed for battle, instead of a war host, most chieftains and warriors had been send away mere days before. It was like ambushing Hitler during Hitlejugend and Todt Organisation parade day.
Just overwhelm them with numbers and logistics. The Spaniards had no support, the Inca could have had plenty if they weren't moronic.
The Spanish would have had vastly more support if they operated with hindsight logic too.
The Inca didn't need hindsight to prepare.they needed to use what they had.
Eh no, this is a modern assumption many people from the western world had, that the Incas were a monolitic absolutist monarchy, in truth the Inca state was a recent hegemonic confederation in the process of unifying the Andean world, you either joined in good terms and made ready to bring tribute such as crops and women or got wrecked and joined as a defacto slave, upon arrival the spaniards immediately worked on building up local support, creating an alliance of disgruntled natives which allowed them to defeat the Incas, to give you an idea of how the spaniards worked to make themselves rulers of a land look at Pizarro's wife, Ines Huaylas Yupanqui, her ethnia saved Lima and Pizarro from getting overrun by Inca loyalists.
To put you in perspective its as if general Tommy Franks married the daughter of one of the Northern Alliance warlords and set home as part of the Afghan government after toppling the taliban.
Reading about Cortez and Pizarro is really fascinating. Like, I often think that history is about big impersonal forces and long-term trends and that individual actions don't matter much but here are a few hundred soldiers who went on a quest for gold and ended up completely changing the civilisational path of a continent. You could also say the same for Muhammad about 900 years earlier.
Yah I find it really interesting too, how much a bunch of poor morons from Spain basically changed the world.
And it put it into perspective that I had never really considered. These guys weren't exploring for pride or knowledge. They basically did all this so they didn't have to do manual labor for the rest of the lives. AKA they were just lazy as frick and trying to beat the system. Which is basically whey they hit the new world more as bandits than anything else.
Bartolome de las Casas told the king that if he didn't make the Spaniards stop treating the natives so awful, that God would permanently punish Spain. Sometimes I wonder if he was right.
I guess a good first step would have been for Atahualpa to get rid of them when they first appeared at his doorstep instead of using them to attack his political opponents
Agreeing to meet with Pizarro personally while absolutely shitfaced probably wasn't a great move either.
inkas had many more problems than weapons:
1.their kingdom had no proper rule for dynastic changes/follow ups, civil war after every kings death was the result.
in such civil war phase/its weak aftmath phase the spaniards arrived, the incas still heavily weakened.
2. "the inkas" comprise of several tribes, where " the inkas" we know were the ruling tribe. and their way of ruling was genoziding/thinning opposing tribes by forced relocation (ie ethnic cleansing) into shittier settlement areas and so on.
food tributes, pretty females pulled out of each tribe, slavery and stuff.
and so we had a situation like with the aztecs, where the bully (inkas) suddenly was confronted with a bigger bully (conquistadores) and guess who the formers peons followed? right, since they are not russians, the suppessed tribes followed the spanish, carried their weapons and provided auxiliares to frick up their former masters.
3. geography. its all steep mountains and deep gorges, shit weather/climate, footways only. everything takes forever to be moved. unless horses.
plus, conqustadores came battlehardened. 1/3 spanish vets, 1/3 exiled muslims/jews (of what the muslims were moore war vets), and 1/3 german/austrian mercenaries thx to habsburg. btw. parts of chile (the shitty mapuche ares)were owned by some german/austrian noble family til 1800s.
>since they are not russians, the suppessed tribes followed the spanish, carried their weapons and provided auxiliares to frick up their former masters
Are you saying modern day russians aren't as smart as Incas?
Not him but fricking probably considering the Incas didn't even enter the iron age yet had such good state institutions and allocation of resources like food, clothing and other services to provinces that needed them or in exchange for labor to the point that a bunch of homosexual historians cum thinking about how LE EPIC SOCIALISTS they were.
Meanwhile modern Russia's social programs do not fricking work even one bit even though modern technology makes it far easier to manage and run that shit
It was disease that conquered the Americas, not gunpowder or horses. One arquebusier does not stand up against 10,000 clubmen charging at him.
Were guerrilla raids and camp sabotage a tactic the incas used? Seems that repeated harassing attacks at night over weeks or months would have exhausted the spanish to the point that they would have withdrawn on their own by preventing them from getting any sort of rest. They wouldn't have even needed to kill any.
They did eventually start using tactics like that but had several major frickups like trying to attack a Spanish built city and getting fricking destroyed instead of sticking to the shit that was working for them and actually winning
>weapon wise to come over the spanish metal armor, and horses?
Their main problem was internal unrest, not Spanish invasion. The empire had 100 000 warrior army, there was like 500 Spaniards and they were just able to efficiently divide and conquer + kidnap the emperor.
>come over the spanish metal armor, and horses
No, Jarod Diamond explains this in his seminole work, 'Guns, Germs ans Steel'. Truely groundbreaking analysis of the rise of European culture and world dominance that has no equal.
The word you are looking for is 'seminal'.
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