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Comment by jltsiren | Hacker News Reader

Mongol conquests were roughly comparable to the European conquest of the Americas. Both toppled great empires and may have killed ~10% of world population in a few generations. And both were more noteworthy due to their large-scale success than their brutality. While both waves of conquest were brutal even by contemporary standards, they were not extraordinary brutal. Being an absolute monster is a part of the job description of a conqueror.

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I think the comparison works in terms of percentages, but falls apart because the Europeans were not unified. Something like 3 or four great powers colonized America vs a single ethnic group for the Mongols (even if they did fight with each other)

The Mongol Empire was not a single ethnic group. The top leaders were ethnic Mongols (much in the same way as Europe used to be a family business), but the troops were mostly from conquered peoples. I would assume that the field army was mostly Turkic, as Turkic peoples were more numerous than Mongolic peoples and their societies and styles of warfare were similar.

also they splintered into multiple khanates early on with the great khans only having some respect rather than the ability to stop the infighting.

Right. Europeans in the Americas and Mongols in Eurasia did what was rational: both had significant, incomparable advantage in military technology and both used it for their advantage according to the standards of their time.

I believe the accepted narrative insofar as the New World is concerned is that it was largely disease that eliminated the population. There's a theory that is posited in Charles Mann's book 1492 which indicates a probable explanation for extremely high mortality rates due to susceptibility to the pathogens the Europeans introduced. The gist: natives of the New World had immune systems conditioned and selected for parasites, which appears to be an either/or proposition, which may explain, in part, the relatively disproportionate fatality rates among the native populations. Relative to that I think the warfare conducted by Europeans pales in comparison.

The best explanation I’m aware of for the disproportionate death rates by Europeans vs Native Americans by disease is mainly population density of European cities was dramatically higher, leading to a lot of diseases that would permanently spread throughout the population until the combination of evolution and immune systems brought it to a symbiotic, fairly neutral relationship.

Which didn’t remain so neutral when applied to fresh populations.

Native Americans simply weren’t playing host to as many diseases, and persisting virulent ones

The Europeans didn't topple any empire in the Americas. They collapsed by themselves due to the sickness brought over by the Europeans before they made contact. It would have been logistically impossible to topple an empire overseas.

This sounds the same to me as saying: "The gunshot didn't kill him. The infection did."

I think it's either an intent thing or a causality thing.

Imagine a hit man showing up to work one day, only to find his targets already dead along with their entire town... and only much later finds out that it's because he'd been an asymptomatic carrier for weird space germs when he was casing the joint the previous month.

Except in reality his targets weren't entirely dead, there were still millions left so he still went about killing the rest[0..2].

The intent in this case existed alongside unintended causes, but it was still there.

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

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

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars

"Invaders led by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés overthrew the Aztec Empire by force and captured Tenochtitlan in 1521, bringing an end to Mesoamerica's last great native civilization ... The Spaniards then murdered thousands of Aztec nobles during a ritual dance ceremony, and Montezuma died under uncertain circumstances while in custody... European diseases like smallpox, mumps and measles were also powerful weapons against the local population, who lacked immunity to them...By 1520, smallpox had reduced the population of Tenochtitlan by 40% in just one year." [1]

Maybe an oversimplification to assert "the Europeans didn't topple any empire in the Americas"?

[1] https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-americas/aztecs

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