Contested Legacy of the Conquistadors | Hacker News Reader

Contested Legacy of the Conquistadors

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18 pointsThevet13 comments

Haven't read the article, but I recently read Kim MacQuarrie's The Last Days of the Incas (on the advice of someone on here). I got the impression from there that the conquistadors, or at least Pizarro, were pretty bad. Not for wanting to conquer and dispossess another empire - that was after all what the Incas had done to their predecessors. But they were worse in a number of ways: a) they were highly deceitful, surprise-attacking a friendly people, and constantly making and breaking promises; b) they were unusually cruel towards the Incas and went out of their way to humiliate them c) rather than ruling the people they conquered, they just tried to extract insane amounts of gold for personal enrichment, not stopping even when they had received far more than they could ever need. A classic example of this is their kidnapping the emperor Atahualpa under false pretenses and claiming they would release him if he filled up a room with gold up to a line drawn on the wall. After an empire-wide effort to raise the sum, with his subjects melting down enormous amounts of artwork and religious objects, they got the ransom and reneged on their word. What a tragic loss to history, for such shabby reasons.

I'll add this to my reading list. I recently finished "1491" by Charles Mann and wanted more reading. Thanks for the plug. :)

If you want something in a wonderfully engaging narrative style, there is also Conquistador by Buddy Levy.

Disclaimer: I am intensly cranked out about such things. My apology as first line of defense is that denial can be a form of sorrow, but I refuse to believe I were in denial. I frequently do get things mixed up, and I may be gullable, and I believe it generalizes that most people are. So what might appear as history revisionism is really only the outflow of weariness about the same. Also, I tend not to read up because of lack of interest paired with distrust.

tl;dr.: Atahualpa was taken to Spain on his own wishes, for having done a great job, what ever job this may have been. The rest of your account may well be a folk believe. Elvis is alive!

“and constantly making and breaking promises;”

Same happened to the native Americans in the US.

Only the travel from Spain to America was a considerable risk, compound that with a vast uncharted territory full of bizarre empires and only certain kind of people were willing to take the odds.

Of course not everyone was the same, but they were the exception. If you want to read something more positive and inspiring look for Cabeza de Vaca or Bartolome de las Casas for example. They tried to improve indigenous people's rights, or at least enforce the existing law, which gave them some protection but was ignored.

I read Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain, and got a very similar impression, bolstered by the fact Diaz was a first-hand participant, and very proud of all this stuff. The conquistadors were also pretty horrible to eachother, so I got more the feeling that they came from a culture that was unnapolagetically brutal, deceitful, and greedy to an extend we find hard to understand today.

I can't read the (paywalled) article, but I did read the book "Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest" by Matthew Restall, summarized in [1]. In said book the author posits that the Spaniards were mostly outnumbered and resorted to "theatrical violence" as a way to exert control over the population and turn them into a compliant labor force.

That still makes them pretty bad though, even if there is a somewhat rational reason to be bad. Their badness was one of their tools in the conquest.

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

Is there a non-paywalled version?

https://archive.vn/WXjUC

Still paywalled ;-;

and they don't even deliver their promise of a latin version for non subscribers ;o;

also paywalled. Tried outline.com, also paywalled :/

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