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Ok, I will be “that guy” today.
I read a book about this recently (Empire of the Fifth Sun) and I learned that “Aztecs” is a modern term. The tribes of central Mexico didn’t use it. They were simply Mexica, Tepanecs and so on.
Also, while yes, other tribes did help Spaniards fight against Mexica whom they saw as an enemy (Mexica did conquer their people earlier after all) Spaniards had such a big technological advantage that even without help conquest was just a matter of time. In the book they describe one of the early battles where a small group of Spaniards were attacked for days by waves of Aztec warriors. They would start attacking at sunrise and stop only after sunset. After couple of days of fighting like that Spaniards lost… 2 men. Aztecs simply didn’t have weapons to effectively fight against modern, European soldiers. Once Spaniards managed to unload horses from the boats the battle was over. Aztecs quickly realized that even if they would mange to resists the first group of soldiers more would come and the huge loses they would suffer would mean they would not be able to defend themselves against other tribes. Helping Spaniards was the only way to survive.
Yeah, I’m gonna need a source on that book because that doesn’t sound accurate at all.
Ups, you’re right, the book is “Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs” by Camilla Townsend. I wrote the title from memory and got it wrong.
Thanks. Checking it out.
Explanation: While in the modern day, the colonial and genocidal aspect of the Spanish conquests is emphasized, and rightly so, the particular example of the conquest of the Aztec Empire is a bit more nuanced. The Aztecs ran a very brutal and senselessly violent hegemony over the surrounding city-states, wherein the subject city-states both paid tribute and were subjected to ‘flower wars’, ritualistic combat wherein their own warriors would be attacked, captured, and then sacrificed in Tenochtitlan. Obviously not a pleasant state of vassalage.
When Cortes and his band of miscreants arrived, the local city-states didn’t see brutal conquistadors, they saw a useful tool against the local tyrant-state. Cortes’ entire expedition was only successful because of tens of thousands of native allies to supplement the ~600 Spanish troops Cortes had as a shock force.
Shame it was a ‘meet the new boss, same as the old’ situation…
Extra context: the peoples that were unhappy under Tenochtitlán weren’t 100% behind the Spanish and didn’t ally with them outright, some were very wary of the possibility of ending up with “different asshole, same shit”[1], since Caribbean peoples already had contact with them and word spread of how greedy the colonists were.
Spanish canons were extremely helpful in the battles, too.
Which turned out to be mostly true, given all the torture and slave labor they were forced to do, but at least the ritual sacrifices ended. ↩︎
germs were the weapons of mass destruction
