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Comment by nestorD | Hacker News Reader

My understanding, after reading the memoir of Bernal diaz Del Castillo[0] (who was an eye witness of the conquest of Mexico), is that it was Montezuma II who purposefully spread rumors saying that the conquistador were returning gods so that people would stop fighting them and start trading with them.

It was not superstitious belief from ignorant savages, it was a political move.

[0]: which I highly recommend, they are available on project Gutenberg for free: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32474/32474-h/32474-h.htm

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This is a fascinating story for reasons that have nothing to do with the Spanish or Aztecs. This is a story about technology and the internet; also it's about how history cycles.

The Spanish were probably a poor reporter of the conditions they encountered. Even if they had tried to be completely objective, they would have had a very difficult time explaining what they saw without a lot of context they didn't have. I think most people know this instinctively.

History moves in cycles, with one bunch being praised by one generation only to have them reviled by the following one. Then it will swing back the other way. Astute authors and historians can make some cash by riding the wave when it appears. After hearing such a one-sided story for so long, people are ready to hear the other side. It seems like it is an important thing that needs telling.

What does this have to do with the net? Take a look at the comments. You're the only person that read the first-hand account. Everybody else is riffing off how "right" the story feels, then projecting various present-day political and emotional responses to an event from 500 years ago.

Don't get me wrong, I think that's a great thing....as long as students stay tuned for the next flip around. Then they start realizing that for any one set of events, hundreds or thousands of narratives are possible. That's not a weakness of history, that's its strength. History is not a science where there is only one right and wrong. It's a humanities subject where the more we study, the more we understand about ourselves.

I'm not sure how this works in the age of Wikipedia where so many people want to Google for the right result. Sure is fascinating to watch, though.

It's the same pathos vs logos argument that has been well documented over the last 3000+ years. Emotion and logic have always been at odds.

Related trivia: logos initially meant story or account, as opposed to how it later evolved. So we're back to history again.

Woah, logos meant so much more than that! Check Wikipedia.

Of course! In Classic Greek there's a rich and nuanced meaning that we're still mining today!

In ancient Greek, however, say 1000-650BCE or so, it's much more murky, with "story" or "account" being the best we have right now.

From Wiki, "...What logos means here is not certain; it may mean "reason" or "explanation" in the sense of an objective cosmic law, or it may signify nothing more than "saying" or "wisdom". Yet, an independent existence of a universal logos was clearly suggested by Heraclitus..."

There's a whole other story about how beginning with the Sophists and then Plato and Aristotle the word started taking on the depth it ended up with. This journey in meaning was not the topic of my comment.

> My understanding, after reading the memoir of Bernal diaz Del Castillo[0] (who was an eye witness of the conquest of Mexico)

Diaz's account was written 50 years after it had happened and is generally considered by modern scholars to be of dubious accuracy and primarily intended as a self-serving defense of his own wealth later in life.

As Adorno writes, "At issue were not the wars long since won or lost but rather the rights to the rewards of conquest. Should royal grants to conquistadores endure in perpetuity? Was it legitimate to enslave Indians when they had not been captured as enemies in war? Did the natives of the Antilles owe further royal or personal service to the Spaniards or should they be allowed relief in order to rebuild their dwindling populations?"

The linked article has the benefit of 400 years of additional scholarship beyond Diaz's account.

> The linked article has the benefit of 400 years of additional scholarship beyond Diaz's account.

Scholarship on what documents? If you don't have new evidence, all you have is every generation's new academic fads applied to the same old text. This isn't Physics. Progress is unlikely.

The linked article discusses the additional documents beyond Diaz's account.

Have you read it? If it were written as a self-serving defense it hasn't aged well. It's incredibly self-incriminating.

Diaz's account is entirely intended as a defense of his own actions. But he isn't trying to defend himself according to modern standards, at all! He admits that the conquistadors slaughtered non-military people for all sorts of reasons, took women as "wives" from conquered people, killed people just for believing in a different religion, lied and backstabbed, stole any valuables they could find. Everything we criticize the conquistadors for today, Bernal Diaz isn't even trying to defend.

What he spends all this time defending against is accusations that Cortes broke the rules of the Spanish monarchy, and that some other conquistador is actually the one who had the right to plunder the Aztec empire. Nobody really cares about that nowadays.

Also - it's pretty clear from Diaz's accounts that the Aztecs did not treat them like gods. There are a couple characters at some point who think they are some sort of monster because they haven't seen people on horseback before. But for the vast majority of the account, the conquistadors are explaining to the locals that they are warriors who serve a king that lives across the ocean, and the locals understand that.

I don't recall that being mentioned in Bernal Diaz del Castillo's "The Conquest of New Spain". I've also read "The Broken Spears", an Aztec account of the conquest which was recorded once surviving members of the Conquest or their descendants had learned written language. In both accounts, it appeared that there had been forewarning of "Gods" from the east who would conquer the Aztecs from the priestly / ruling caste of the Aztecs. The whole story is really quite interesting, but wearisome on ones soul, I would highly recommend both books if you have the constitution for it. Werner Herzog recommends reading "The Conquest of New Spain" to "... understand the hearts of men."

> there had been forewarning of "Gods" from the east who would conquer the Aztecs

I'm reading a history of Christianity right now, that says this. Apparently the Aztecs had wiped out an earlier civilisation (Toltecs), and the legend is that the defeated king would return as a god and take revenge. The return would occur in a certain year of the 53 year Aztec cycle, and the avenging god-king would come from the East, and be light-skinned (all of which matched up).

>Montezuma II who purposefully spread rumors saying that the conquistador were returning gods so that people would stop fighting them and start trading with them.

>It was not superstitious belief from ignorant savages, it was a political move.

Your message suggests it was a political move that prayed up on superstitious beliefs. So, both, basically.

What one tour guide in Teotlihuacan told me (so take it FWIW) was that tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed vikings found a route to Mexico hundreds of years before the Spaniards, traded with the indigenous people for a while, and then left. Images of those people made it into their popular culture and, since they looked so different than the people of the region, those images took on an air of mystery. When people who looked like what were by then ancient paintings appeared again, the indigenous people didn't consider them necessarily immortal, but mystical.

Sounds like the kind of story a tour guide would tell tourists who skew more blond-and-blue-eyed than the typical Spanish conquistador. Evidence of Norse settlements in America is pretty much limited to Canada; so even legends about them as far south as Mexico would be a big deal.

Which contradicts the article, which I suspect is based on that book that has some shifty agenda to re-write history. The fact is, at least technologically, Europeans might as well have been gods. Anyone doubting this just read the history, a handful of Spanish conquering a whole empire (twice!). Imagine if Spain wanted to engage in a full fledged war with the Aztecs or Incas. They could have easily wiped out everybody.

I mean, when the Soviet Union fell, it wasn't because they were conquered by gods - somewhere I got the impression that was somewhat analogous to what happened in the Americas.

Europeans of the late 1400s and early 1500s weren't technologically "godlike" to the aztecs, incas or anyone else. It wasn't until the 1800s when industrial revolution in the US and Britain put the real separation between the west and the rest.

> Anyone doubting this just read the history, a handful of Spanish conquering a whole empire (twice!).

They didn't conquer the "whole empire". They conquered the elites. Big difference.

> Imagine if Spain wanted to engage in a full fledged war with the Aztecs or Incas.

Spain would have been utterly crushed. There is a reason why spain didn't wage a full fledged war against the aztecs or the incas.

> They could have easily wiped out everybody.

With what? A bunch of useless and inaccurate muskets?

I think you are highly overestimating what europeans were back then and their technological capabilities. Spain conquered the aztecs like the british conquered mughal india. They bought some elites, killed other elites and for whatever reason were at the right place at the right time to exploit the aztecs. Why and how is completely lost to history sadly.

But one thing we know for certain is that the atzecs elites were completely incompetent and ignorant and most likely divided. Which is a recipe for disaster. But all empires seem to verge towards that state amongst the elites - persians, romans, mongols, etc.

Minor nitpick.

>> the british conquered mughal india.

It was not the Mughals but the Marathas, however the methods essentially were as you described.

The Mughals were already in decline, during the EIC's rise. The dominant power in India during that time was the Maratha Empire. This period is often glossed over in history.

Fun fact, the Anglo-Maratha war was the first major campaign of one Arthur Wellesley, who later went on to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo. The battle of Assaye is one of my favourites [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Empire

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Assaye

It's like 400 pages! Can you recommend an excerpt?

Book two happens after the conquest of mexico and I found it less interesting, you can safely skip it.

Book one, however, has a surprisingly modern style and reads very easily.

The headers of the chapters contain a summary of their content, if you are mostly interested in what I said in the top comment you need to find the chapters that relate to the first travels (in the beginnig of the book), when Montezuma II becomes aware of the conquistadors.

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