> Armed with years of practice, detailed anatomical knowledge, and obsidian blades sharper than today's surgical steel, they made an incision in the thin space between two vertebrae in the neck, expertly decapitating the body.
I found this little bit of rhetorical flourish very amusing because there’s a lot packed in that statement that’s painfully relevant to the fall of the Aztecs. It’s true that obsidian can be cleaved to be sharper than some random surgical implement but it’s relatively brittle and prone to breaking when used in combat. That’s great if you’re an Aztec warrior who’s social standing depends on collecting live bodies for sacrifice or a priest cutting someone up, but it might be the second foremost reason why Cortez was able to conquer them - the first being Montezuma’s reticence to slaughter them in the jungle when he first heard of them and his subsequent religious obsession with the white conquistadors, until it was too late and they were well established. History could have turned out very different but from the beginning, even without the guns and cannons, the Spaniards were always better equipped for life or death combat than the entire Aztec society and all their vassal cities.
I second this. I watched this episode of Fall of Civilizations podcast(on YouTube) while recovering a few weeks ago, and it's very informative and well-produced (as are all the episodes).
Conquistador by Buddy Levy is also an great source on this topic. He has other books about disastrous expeditions in the Arctic. His writing theme is basically "some guys set out on an expedition and then everything went to shit."
I recommend Conquest by Hugh Thomas and its long list of notes and citations. A few podcast episodes isn't nearly enough to understand the nuances of the Aztec conquest.
The best sources aren't their diaries but all the depositions and testimony they made while fighting over the spoils. Anyone who survived the expedition spent the next decade fighting over it in Spanish court.
The Aztecs never had a chance, this wasn't even a real war from the Spanish side.
The Conquistadors were more like sponsored entrepreneurs.
You can think of this as America's first contact with Venture Capitalism.
If the first wave had failed, but the potential profits were there, they'd have regrouped and come back with more resources and a new "market penetration strategy".
> the second foremost reason why Cortez was able to conquer them - the first being Montezuma’s reticence to slaughter them in the jungle when he first heard of them and his subsequent religious obsession with the white conquistadors
I've read that the biggest reason of Aztec's fall was their panic fear of horses. Is this not true?
It's true that the natives were initially afraid of horses, but I think that overstates it.
You can find some accounts of earlier battles that went like this:
> The Indians, who had never seen any horses before, could not think otherwise than that horse and rider were one body. Quite astounded at this to them so novel a sight, they quitted the plain and retreated to a rising ground. [...] Our swords had done the most carnage among them, though many were killed by our cannon. Wherever the cavalry made its appearance the enemy had most work to do. The fighting lasted about an hour; and our enemies maintained their ground so well, that they did not quit the field of battle until our horse broke in among them. There were two caziques among the five prisoners we made.
But not much later, the natives recognize the importance of the horses and specifically targeted them:
> Besides all this the Indians kept continually throwing sand in our faces to blind us. Here, indeed, the great mercy of God alone could save us. The chief object of the enemy was to capture one of our horses, in which they did not altogether fail; for, as Pedro de Moron on his well-trained mare, attended by three others of our cavalry, was attempting to break through the enemy's ranks, the Indians wrenched the lance out of his hand, and fell furiously upon him with their broad swords, wounding him severely. They gave his mare such a terrific cut with the same weapon in the neck, that the animal instantly fell down dead.
This from The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo. At any rate, it is perfectly sensible for unmounted infantry to be terrified of horse cavalry. Mounted cavalry is hard for infantry to beat without specialized weapons and tight formations.
Aztec weaponry was not limited to obsidian blades. They had extremely effective slingers and other ranged weapon types that were devastating even to the armored Spanish. Excepting the cannons and horses, the Aztecs were not really significantly worse off than the Spanish in terms of weapons.
If you had to choose between 100 trained Aztec slingers and 100 Spanish armed with only with their personal firearms, you'd almost certainly want to choose the slingers.
edit: according to conquistador accounts, apparently even the atlatl darts could pierce their armor.
They didn't. The Spanish invaders allied with locals, to the point where some of those locals' descendants had special--though not equal--status into the colonial era as the indios nobles.
It's fairly clear that the numbers on both sides are very rough, but it's not what I would describe as very skewed at all. Also, note the Spanish themselves suffered 50%+ losses, which is a horrific casualty rate for pre-industrialized warfare.
Aside from that, it's historically very common for one side to win even against much higher numbers with good (even accidentally good) strategy and with decisive bold actions, or even just good luck.
edit: also worth mentioning that the Spanish were mostly fighting with their lances and swords, not guns.
Yeah, what you describe is not a remotely hot take. The technical advantage, such as it was, for the Spanish invaders was armor more than guns (though that was also subject to being unsuited for climate, etc.).
The Guanche, native inhabitants of the Canary Islands, deployed both slings and cast stones (incl. boulders) against the Spanish very efficiently.
It is a rather unknown fact, but the worst colonial defeat of the Spanish ever didn't happen in the Americas, but on the island of Tenerife, where a Guanche chief called Bencomo trapped the Spanish at Acentejo and killed several thousands of them.
It is doubly remarkable, because the Guanche at that time were really living in their Stone Age. Their civilization was nowhere near as developed as the Aztec Empire.
I wonder why there weren't diseases endemic to the new world that would affect Europeans in the same way that smallpox did to the indigenous populations. Were diseases better able to spread in Europe due to city size/density/public health differences?
That's what you get when you have a scientist try writing a book that's simultaneously popular science and popular history. And judged as a popular history GGS does get a lot of things wrong and isn't up to the standards historians work to hold up. But on more scientific questions like "why there weren't diseases endemic to the new world that would affect Europeans in the same way that smallpox did to the indigenous populations" it does a good job.
EDIT: Really, the reception to GGS is probably one of the best illustrations of what Thomas Kuhn was talking about in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions about different paradigms having different rules that I can recall seeing in my lifetime.
Mainly "actual historians and anthropologists" on reddit and in related circles. GGS is far less controversial outside these circles and often lauded - also by "actual historians and anthropologists".
Plagues Upon the Earth is maybe even more on point to the plague bit in particular, with the co-evolution of human society and infectious disease over history taking the front stage.
Not just syphilis. Tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria decimated european settlers for centuries. That's a large part of why Haiti could break free from France for instance, France would send troops, half of which were dead within months from diseases.
That's also what protected inland parts of Africa from colonisation until the XIX century.
The diseases that you mention are of African origin and, when introduced into the New World, massacred the natives almost as efficiently as smallpox.
Africa is a huge cauldron of human pathogens, which is not that surprising, given that hominids developed there. As a rather tragic consequence, Africans were sought after as slaves, because they were resistent to many of the diseases that killed white or Amerindian indentured workers.
Syphilis appeared in Europe in 1493, and it's widely believed the Columbus crew brought it back from America, though last I heard it's not considered 100% proven.
The Old World had bigger cities and more domesticated animals, which promotes epidemics.
I also assume the fact the our species is indigenous to Africa means that's where our natural predators have had vastly longer time to evolve.
My understanding is that the leading hypothesis is that:
1. The “Old World” had a much more extensive animal husbandry. A lot of the nastiest diseases human beings pick up come from animal reservoirs. With humans living in closer quarters to animals for a much longer period of time in Eurasia/Africa than the Americas, more diseases crossed over and became endemic among the population.
2. A great amount of the Eurasian continent is along an East-West axis, whereas the Americas are primarily North-South. This means that seasons and climates and climates tended to be more closely aligned, which leads to easier spread of agriculture and domesticated animals, which leads to faster population growth and disease spread.
Many of the deadliest human diseases including those that ravaged the new world like smallpox, influenza, and measles were zoonotic diseases that originated in domesticated animals. Since the new world didn't have as many domesticated animals, they had fewer zoonotic diseases.
It's also largely an accident of history. The Conquistadors inadvertently introduced smallpox suddenly by sending for reinforcements during a Caribbean smallpox outbreak. The Mayans that the Spaniards spent the next two centuries conquering weren't nearly as quickly exposed and died off in fewer numbers from European diseases.
I've heard that a few times, but it never made sense to me why that didn't go in the other direction - if the Europeans had diseases the native americans didn't have immunity to shouldn't the native americans have diseases the europeans didn't have immunity to as well? Seems like that should have just balanced out.
If they slaughtered Cortez and five other Cortezes that came afterwards, it wouldn't matter. Guns, germs, steel, horses, and the seething hatred of the Aztecs by the people they brutality oppressed predetermined their fate.
It took them several more centuries to conquer the Mayan civilization with New Spain as a base of operations. Without the Aztec conquest giving them that foothold, it would not have played out the same way at all. If the Aztec leaders were determined to slaughter them in the jungle it would have been impassable to the Spaniards regardless of how many cannons, guns, or horses they had. Even before the Conquistadors knew that Tenochtitlan existed, they were almost wiped out several times by tribes on the coast.
Montezuma invited the Conquistadors into the city and they even held him as a hostage for months before any fighting broke out. Those alliances took a while to establish and the germs only came later into the campaign when they started sending ships back for more troops during a Caribbean smallpox outbreak.
I recommend reading Conquest by Hugh Thomas. The whole story is fascinating and very nuanced - it took several expeditions to even get that far and Cortez was possibly the luckiest man alive in the 16th century.
The Mayan and Aztec conquests were completely different. The Mayan polities were situated in terrain that was much harsher for an invader, military capability doesn't mean much when a military force can't be effectively maintained in the field against. There also wasn't much incentive for the spanish to extend their domains into the mayan polities at that time. The spanish were far more focused on populous areas where they could extract wealth which was the only way for spanish conquistadors to gather volunteers. Even under these conditions the actual military engagements were very one-sided with most of the Yucatan conquered within thirty years of the Aztec conquest.
>>but it might be the second foremost reason why Cortez was able to conquer them - the first being Montezuma’s reticence to slaughter them in the jungle when he first heard of them and his subsequent religious obsession with the white conquistadors, until it was too late and they were well established.
Montezuma was never in a position to slaughter the conquistadors in the jungle. The Tlaxcalans (a rival state to the mexica) engaged the conquistadors in a series of brutal skirmishes (most with the advantage of surprise) on their home turf but failed to make any real progress. Its very clear that the attacking Tlaxcalan warriors suffered horrendous casualties when they engaged the castillans in close quarters combat due to the superior steel weapons(mostly swords) of the latter. Since the Tlaxcalans vigorously defended their independence its hard to argue the Mexica could have done any better fighting at a distance that would have stretched their supply lines.
As for his supposed religious obsession, its unclear and isn't necessary to explain his actions. There is certainly no evidence that Montezuma was confused or acting irrationally; he repeatedly tried to deter the conquistadors from coming and made attempts to play them off against the Tlaxcalans.
If it weren't for an epidemic of smallpox, the Spanish would have to conquer Tenochtitlan at a very high price in blood. Urban combat negated a lot of the advantages of European steel.
The Tlaxcalans made the mistake of engaging the conquistadors where their cavalry was most effective and allowed them to fortify themselves at Tzompachtepetl, at which point Spanish armor provided to be too effective for Tlaxcalan tactics (send wave after wave of troops instead of overwhelming them). Eventually they just kind of gave in and weren't really defeated in great number before allying against the Aztecs.
In their very first skirmish at the edge of Tlaxcalan territory where it was mountainous and undeveloped, a small scout troop took down two horses out of the sixteen that Cortex had with him. Spanish tactics and discipline were enough to overcome large numbers only when they controlled where the battles happened. If Montezuma had used guerilla tactics during the subsequent trip, it would have been far more effective (he had plenty of spies reporting on their movements so I don't think the logistics would have been that difficult). Cortes even lengthened the journey in part to minimize how much time they'd spend in terrain that favored those tactics.
Maybe "obsessed" is the wrong word but Montezuma was influenced by legends of Quetzalcoatl as a white-skinned, bearded man who opposed human sacrifices and was reluctant to just go out and slaughter the conquistadors. Their religion was definitely an influence in the whole affair beyond just the whole human sacrifice bit.
> But the Spanish conquistadors who marched into Tenochtitlan in 1519 saw them differently. For them, the skulls—and the entire practice of human sacrifice—evinced the Mexica's barbarism and justified laying waste to the city in 1521
This almost reads like “that’s just your opinion man” with regard to human sacrifice. The Aztecs were hated by the groups they subjugated causing them to join with the Spanish against the Aztecs.
On the one hand, I get that scholars want to maintain a neutral position so that moral judgements don't cloud their study. That makes a lot of sense to me. On the other hand, human sacrifice is bad.
Yeah I think it's proper for scholars to maintain a neutral frame of mind when conducting their research. The problem happens when that neutrality leaks out of the scholarly setting.
Cultural Relativism, like so much of Post Modernism, falls apart when the logical consequences are taken to the extremes.
Everything can be deconstructed, leaving nothing of meaning. “I ground him in the mill, down to subatomic particles, and there was not one atom of life! Not one particle of consciousness!”
Good and Evil do not exist, or so the argument goes, only arbitrary constructs. And yet. I look at the Aztecs; their worship of death, and I question.
Evil absolutely exists. Pretending it doesn’t is a device of people who have some vested interest in ignoring it, or people who are so limited by their own comfortable experience that they have never been confronted by it.
I have been reading Team of Rivals, a deep dive book about Lincoln’s presidential cabinet during the civil war. It is amazing that many of the men write about how, after having personally witnessed slavery, they then vigorously oppose it. (Seward, for example, goes on a trip to the South for vacation and basically comes back hating slavery because it is so clearly wicked).
I imagine human sacrifice, death camps, gulags, they all evoke similar responses. ‘Societal good can only be reached through mass slaughter of the undesirable’ is the subtext. That should be repulsive to any with a functional moral core. The amount of suffering enacted by the Aztecs as they killed their neighbors children… I can’t imagine.
In the real world, evil is a morally lazy concept for people unwilling to consider that some abhorrent behavior that adults must be held accountable for also has root causes that we might have some culpability in. Pretending bad behavior happens in a vacuum shirks out duty as stewards for our society, pushing all responsibility of it onto the people who have to deal with the worst of it. Personal responsibility is the start, not the end of addressing the bad things that people do.
But the same people who refuse to see the difference between "civilizations that systematically conduct large-scale murder" and "civilizations that don't" will, if you disagree, call you a Nazi. But if the two are equivalent, then what's wrong with being a Nazi?
Note well: I am not endorsing the Nazis. I am merely pointing out a bizarre aspect of cultural relativism and associated movements.
Also note: They could make a case that the Spaniards were also in the "systematically conducting large-scale murder" category. But if that's the argument, then there's still a moral judgment to be made between civilizations.
It's fascinating that we consider the Aztecs an interesting historical culture, but recent monstrosities, well, monstrosities, and their perpetrators monsters.
It is similar with the Romans, a very developed and interesting civilization which was nevertheless extremely brutal towards its foes.
Caesar's wars were basically one long string of genocides and the Roman military principle "Murum Aries Attigit" meant that unless a besieged city capitulated before the Romans started attacking it, there would be no mercy to the captives.
It is worse than "that's just your opinion man" since the statement tacitly accepts the religious premise that the killing of people represented by the skulls were a "practice of human sacrifice." There was never a tradeoff for the Mexica in which they had to give up something worthwhile for something more worthwhile, only delusion.
It is like saying in a couple hundred years from now "For them, the gas chambers and crematoriums—the entire plan to purify humanity—evinced the Nazi's barbarism and justified laying waste to Germany in 1944."
Human sacrifice has a context. War is often over resources. To win over a competitor has value in gaining the competitors' resources. But then, they have to quit needing those resources.
It was a brutal and ugly practice. But their environment was unforgiving. Brutal. To demonize the survivor, the winner in the conflicts, is a natural impulse. But to pretend it was all futile and pointless is to miss the entire context.
Exactly. I am not even sure how can someone call an environment where food just grows on trees and winter doesn’t exist brutal, compared to the mini Ice Age that was happening in Europe at that time.
To me, it was only brutal because they made it so, it could have been a heaven.
Think again. Forestry collapse, drought, it was all a factor.
Sure during the good times there's plenty. But during the bad times, the survivors did what they did.
Plenty of horror in Europe, we should maybe revisit our European history. It's 'better' they just let peasants starve to death, while taxing them to penury. Because that's just a bureaucracy, not deliberate murder. Because they deliberately starved the Irish, refused aid, because it was a better world with fewer Irish in it?
And Africa! My god, what a fantasy that Africa had less of a history of war and slaughter.
Forestry collapse, drought, famine, were all factors present everywhere around the world as well, and human sacrifice is not a solution to this.
I argue that deaths due to famines, epidemics, wars, unfair food distribution, racism, slavery, exploitation are a whole different category from the human sacrifice. Each one of the former had a cause or a purpose. A lot of it was due to mismanagement, ignorance, fight for resources and control and people being assholes.
Me deciding to keep food to myself to feed my family or my clique and not to share it with you, forcing you to starve, is very different from me going to your house, kidnapping you and killing you for no reason at all. Oh, pardon me, the reason was to build a fucking wall made out of you and your family skulls. You're justifying completely senseless violence here.
The only thing in Europe that comes close in my mind is the burning of the witches and the holocaust, for which there was and is much repentance to this day.
The environment in central America at the time was unpredictable and prone to sudden failure. That is different. More competitive, if you will.
Context is everything. To be surprised that the winner in such an environment resorted to war is naieve.
Yes, it's barbaric to put skulls in piles. I guess they had to glorify what they did, as a sort of metal shield against murder. I don't know, I wasn't there.
To justify human sacrifice as “contextual” is absolutely wild. Should the holocaust be seen “in context”? Or are you one of those who think only European colonizers / white people are capable of evil?
War, murder, slaughter - all of these things existed everywhere. But gleeful and ritualistic mass-murder is different beast altogether. Some people are just evil.
Everything can be justified given enough mental gymnastics, but I personally draw the line at genocidal, mass-murdering, religious cults, torturing and ravaging an entire region for centuries.
I do not care about the context in this case at all, there was no reason to do this beyond savage, violent, prehistoric warfare and population control.
Human sacrifice isn't neatly mapped to warfare at all. Yes, there was sacrifice of POWs, but there also were warlike cultures which didn't engage in human sacrifice, and also cultures that practiced human sacrifice with their own people on the altar, especially kids, in order to please the gods.
As Bret Devereaux [0] likes to say, people in the past believed in their own religion. Without accepting that, it is impossible to understand a lot of ancient practices. Reinterpreting everything in the most cynical/materialistic way means fooling yourself. If you believe in omnipotent beings that are capable of destroying the entire world or at least you and your city unless they get their cup of fresh blood, you will do quite a lot to please them.
> Human sacrifice [...] abortions [...] is pretty much the same.
Ok, so to you a fertilized egg is pretty much the same as a fully grown, developed, adult human. That's fine, but the majority seems to disagree with you.
If you are interested in learning more about the whole meeting of the Spaniards and Aztecs. Please check out Conquistadors by Buddy Levy one of my favorite books!
Very cordial to begin with, mainly because the Spanish had allied with a large number of other tribes, many of which were enemies of the Aztecs.
The Aztecs invited them into the city as honoured guests/curiosities. After many months the Spanish (and their tribal allies) massacred the city after a series of events internal and external to the city.
It’s a fascinating episode in history, if you don’t want to read a book then the Aztec series of the podcast The Rest Is History gives an amazing 7 parts walkthrough of the saga.
I think what many people miss about the Europeanization of North America is how often the Euros formed alliances with different tribes. Some tribes formed a bond with the French, some with the Spanish, English, Portugeuse and probably a few others too. It was much more complex than can be described in a sound bite.
Human sacrifice is still a part of many societies today, especially the West who fights for it. Today it's performed by different people for different reasons than the Aztecs, but how will the people centuries from us view our practices and reasoning for it?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadI found this little bit of rhetorical flourish very amusing because there’s a lot packed in that statement that’s painfully relevant to the fall of the Aztecs. It’s true that obsidian can be cleaved to be sharper than some random surgical implement but it’s relatively brittle and prone to breaking when used in combat. That’s great if you’re an Aztec warrior who’s social standing depends on collecting live bodies for sacrifice or a priest cutting someone up, but it might be the second foremost reason why Cortez was able to conquer them - the first being Montezuma’s reticence to slaughter them in the jungle when he first heard of them and his subsequent religious obsession with the white conquistadors, until it was too late and they were well established. History could have turned out very different but from the beginning, even without the guns and cannons, the Spaniards were always better equipped for life or death combat than the entire Aztec society and all their vassal cities.
I recommend the fall of civilization episode on the Aztec.
The battle of tecnoticlan was epic. The Spaniard got lucky in many aspect as well.
They would have come back, but really it was a close one. ( we have diaries from Spanish soldiers )
The best sources aren't their diaries but all the depositions and testimony they made while fighting over the spoils. Anyone who survived the expedition spent the next decade fighting over it in Spanish court.
I've read that the biggest reason of Aztec's fall was their panic fear of horses. Is this not true?
But also the strategy and combat discipline of units was way superior in the old world.
You can find some accounts of earlier battles that went like this:
> The Indians, who had never seen any horses before, could not think otherwise than that horse and rider were one body. Quite astounded at this to them so novel a sight, they quitted the plain and retreated to a rising ground. [...] Our swords had done the most carnage among them, though many were killed by our cannon. Wherever the cavalry made its appearance the enemy had most work to do. The fighting lasted about an hour; and our enemies maintained their ground so well, that they did not quit the field of battle until our horse broke in among them. There were two caziques among the five prisoners we made.
But not much later, the natives recognize the importance of the horses and specifically targeted them:
> Besides all this the Indians kept continually throwing sand in our faces to blind us. Here, indeed, the great mercy of God alone could save us. The chief object of the enemy was to capture one of our horses, in which they did not altogether fail; for, as Pedro de Moron on his well-trained mare, attended by three others of our cavalry, was attempting to break through the enemy's ranks, the Indians wrenched the lance out of his hand, and fell furiously upon him with their broad swords, wounding him severely. They gave his mare such a terrific cut with the same weapon in the neck, that the animal instantly fell down dead.
This from The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo. At any rate, it is perfectly sensible for unmounted infantry to be terrified of horse cavalry. Mounted cavalry is hard for infantry to beat without specialized weapons and tight formations.
If you had to choose between 100 trained Aztec slingers and 100 Spanish armed with only with their personal firearms, you'd almost certainly want to choose the slingers.
edit: according to conquistador accounts, apparently even the atlatl darts could pierce their armor.
It's fairly clear that the numbers on both sides are very rough, but it's not what I would describe as very skewed at all. Also, note the Spanish themselves suffered 50%+ losses, which is a horrific casualty rate for pre-industrialized warfare.
Aside from that, it's historically very common for one side to win even against much higher numbers with good (even accidentally good) strategy and with decisive bold actions, or even just good luck.
edit: also worth mentioning that the Spanish were mostly fighting with their lances and swords, not guns.
It is a rather unknown fact, but the worst colonial defeat of the Spanish ever didn't happen in the Americas, but on the island of Tenerife, where a Guanche chief called Bencomo trapped the Spanish at Acentejo and killed several thousands of them.
It is doubly remarkable, because the Guanche at that time were really living in their Stone Age. Their civilization was nowhere near as developed as the Aztec Empire.
When 80-90% of the enemy population dies from unknown diseases, victory becomes much easier.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pmu2ft/recom...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
EDIT: Really, the reception to GGS is probably one of the best illustrations of what Thomas Kuhn was talking about in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions about different paradigms having different rules that I can recall seeing in my lifetime.
That's also what protected inland parts of Africa from colonisation until the XIX century.
Africa is a huge cauldron of human pathogens, which is not that surprising, given that hominids developed there. As a rather tragic consequence, Africans were sought after as slaves, because they were resistent to many of the diseases that killed white or Amerindian indentured workers.
The Old World had bigger cities and more domesticated animals, which promotes epidemics.
I also assume the fact the our species is indigenous to Africa means that's where our natural predators have had vastly longer time to evolve.
1. The “Old World” had a much more extensive animal husbandry. A lot of the nastiest diseases human beings pick up come from animal reservoirs. With humans living in closer quarters to animals for a much longer period of time in Eurasia/Africa than the Americas, more diseases crossed over and became endemic among the population.
2. A great amount of the Eurasian continent is along an East-West axis, whereas the Americas are primarily North-South. This means that seasons and climates and climates tended to be more closely aligned, which leads to easier spread of agriculture and domesticated animals, which leads to faster population growth and disease spread.
It's also largely an accident of history. The Conquistadors inadvertently introduced smallpox suddenly by sending for reinforcements during a Caribbean smallpox outbreak. The Mayans that the Spaniards spent the next two centuries conquering weren't nearly as quickly exposed and died off in fewer numbers from European diseases.
Montezuma invited the Conquistadors into the city and they even held him as a hostage for months before any fighting broke out. Those alliances took a while to establish and the germs only came later into the campaign when they started sending ships back for more troops during a Caribbean smallpox outbreak.
I recommend reading Conquest by Hugh Thomas. The whole story is fascinating and very nuanced - it took several expeditions to even get that far and Cortez was possibly the luckiest man alive in the 16th century.
Montezuma was never in a position to slaughter the conquistadors in the jungle. The Tlaxcalans (a rival state to the mexica) engaged the conquistadors in a series of brutal skirmishes (most with the advantage of surprise) on their home turf but failed to make any real progress. Its very clear that the attacking Tlaxcalan warriors suffered horrendous casualties when they engaged the castillans in close quarters combat due to the superior steel weapons(mostly swords) of the latter. Since the Tlaxcalans vigorously defended their independence its hard to argue the Mexica could have done any better fighting at a distance that would have stretched their supply lines.
As for his supposed religious obsession, its unclear and isn't necessary to explain his actions. There is certainly no evidence that Montezuma was confused or acting irrationally; he repeatedly tried to deter the conquistadors from coming and made attempts to play them off against the Tlaxcalans.
This is relevant. The Aztecs were very able to slaughter the Spanish in the alleys/canals of Tenochtitlan itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Noche_Triste
If it weren't for an epidemic of smallpox, the Spanish would have to conquer Tenochtitlan at a very high price in blood. Urban combat negated a lot of the advantages of European steel.
In their very first skirmish at the edge of Tlaxcalan territory where it was mountainous and undeveloped, a small scout troop took down two horses out of the sixteen that Cortex had with him. Spanish tactics and discipline were enough to overcome large numbers only when they controlled where the battles happened. If Montezuma had used guerilla tactics during the subsequent trip, it would have been far more effective (he had plenty of spies reporting on their movements so I don't think the logistics would have been that difficult). Cortes even lengthened the journey in part to minimize how much time they'd spend in terrain that favored those tactics.
Maybe "obsessed" is the wrong word but Montezuma was influenced by legends of Quetzalcoatl as a white-skinned, bearded man who opposed human sacrifices and was reluctant to just go out and slaughter the conquistadors. Their religion was definitely an influence in the whole affair beyond just the whole human sacrifice bit.
This almost reads like “that’s just your opinion man” with regard to human sacrifice. The Aztecs were hated by the groups they subjugated causing them to join with the Spanish against the Aztecs.
Society? Society cannot function for long without moral judgments. At least, it can't function well.
Everything can be deconstructed, leaving nothing of meaning. “I ground him in the mill, down to subatomic particles, and there was not one atom of life! Not one particle of consciousness!”
Good and Evil do not exist, or so the argument goes, only arbitrary constructs. And yet. I look at the Aztecs; their worship of death, and I question.
I have been reading Team of Rivals, a deep dive book about Lincoln’s presidential cabinet during the civil war. It is amazing that many of the men write about how, after having personally witnessed slavery, they then vigorously oppose it. (Seward, for example, goes on a trip to the South for vacation and basically comes back hating slavery because it is so clearly wicked).
I imagine human sacrifice, death camps, gulags, they all evoke similar responses. ‘Societal good can only be reached through mass slaughter of the undesirable’ is the subtext. That should be repulsive to any with a functional moral core. The amount of suffering enacted by the Aztecs as they killed their neighbors children… I can’t imagine.
Note well: I am not endorsing the Nazis. I am merely pointing out a bizarre aspect of cultural relativism and associated movements.
Also note: They could make a case that the Spaniards were also in the "systematically conducting large-scale murder" category. But if that's the argument, then there's still a moral judgment to be made between civilizations.
Caesar's wars were basically one long string of genocides and the Roman military principle "Murum Aries Attigit" meant that unless a besieged city capitulated before the Romans started attacking it, there would be no mercy to the captives.
It is like saying in a couple hundred years from now "For them, the gas chambers and crematoriums—the entire plan to purify humanity—evinced the Nazi's barbarism and justified laying waste to Germany in 1944."
It was a brutal and ugly practice. But their environment was unforgiving. Brutal. To demonize the survivor, the winner in the conflicts, is a natural impulse. But to pretend it was all futile and pointless is to miss the entire context.
To me, it was only brutal because they made it so, it could have been a heaven.
Sure during the good times there's plenty. But during the bad times, the survivors did what they did.
Plenty of horror in Europe, we should maybe revisit our European history. It's 'better' they just let peasants starve to death, while taxing them to penury. Because that's just a bureaucracy, not deliberate murder. Because they deliberately starved the Irish, refused aid, because it was a better world with fewer Irish in it?
And Africa! My god, what a fantasy that Africa had less of a history of war and slaughter.
I argue that deaths due to famines, epidemics, wars, unfair food distribution, racism, slavery, exploitation are a whole different category from the human sacrifice. Each one of the former had a cause or a purpose. A lot of it was due to mismanagement, ignorance, fight for resources and control and people being assholes.
Me deciding to keep food to myself to feed my family or my clique and not to share it with you, forcing you to starve, is very different from me going to your house, kidnapping you and killing you for no reason at all. Oh, pardon me, the reason was to build a fucking wall made out of you and your family skulls. You're justifying completely senseless violence here.
The only thing in Europe that comes close in my mind is the burning of the witches and the holocaust, for which there was and is much repentance to this day.
Context is everything. To be surprised that the winner in such an environment resorted to war is naieve.
Yes, it's barbaric to put skulls in piles. I guess they had to glorify what they did, as a sort of metal shield against murder. I don't know, I wasn't there.
War, murder, slaughter - all of these things existed everywhere. But gleeful and ritualistic mass-murder is different beast altogether. Some people are just evil.
I do not care about the context in this case at all, there was no reason to do this beyond savage, violent, prehistoric warfare and population control.
As Bret Devereaux [0] likes to say, people in the past believed in their own religion. Without accepting that, it is impossible to understand a lot of ancient practices. Reinterpreting everything in the most cynical/materialistic way means fooling yourself. If you believe in omnipotent beings that are capable of destroying the entire world or at least you and your city unless they get their cup of fresh blood, you will do quite a lot to please them.
[0] https://acoup.blog/
Ok, so to you a fertilized egg is pretty much the same as a fully grown, developed, adult human. That's fine, but the majority seems to disagree with you.
But curious, what's the gist of their meeting?
The Aztecs invited them into the city as honoured guests/curiosities. After many months the Spanish (and their tribal allies) massacred the city after a series of events internal and external to the city.
It’s a fascinating episode in history, if you don’t want to read a book then the Aztec series of the podcast The Rest Is History gives an amazing 7 parts walkthrough of the saga.
If they made it into a film, it would be about as believable as a John Wick movie.