It wasnt the ~200 conquistadors who massacred Aztec after the fall of Tenochtitlan. It was their ~200,000 strong Native American allies who fought with them. For ~200 years, their people, families, relatives, ancestors were dragged away by Aztecs to be used in sacrifices and to be eaten during droughts as livestock. That kind of builds up a lot of sentiments in people.
But what I'm really curious about is why people are so obsessed with comparing mass brutality like this.
It seems like it's always to excuse it, right? Like, if it's not singular, it is okay? If someone says "Oh, the Nazis actually didn't kill so many more people than X, you know, as a % of population" -- does whether this is true or not even matter to our assessment of nazi genocide? What might be the motivation of someone making this claim? Or their implied suggestion as the significance of the comparison?
I would say that it's true that people sometimes romantisize all pre-contact American civilizations, some of which at some times/places were indeed also brutal empires. But the reason we pay more attention to, say, the brutality of the Spanish invasion of the Americas than to the Incas brutality is becuase it's the Spanish colonization that resulted in the world system we have today, and has lasting implications for it. If the Inca Empire (which was actually pretty new when the invasion began) had won and its descendent societies still ruled today, we'd be talking about different things.And if the Incan empire had invaded Europe and decimated it and still ruled parts of it today, well, yeah, we'd be talking about pretty different things. Nothing very puzzling about that.
And sure, conquest was brutal and Columbus in reality did horrible things to natives - but the atrocities he and other conquistadors committed pale when compared to what the natives did themselves, and at least the conquest had put the continent on a path that ended the atrocities.
"History is written by historians." Frank Herbert - Dune
According to this article. “When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated in 1487 the Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days”
https://qz.com/374994/aztec-sacrifice-was-real-and-its-not-f...
So, the math checks out.
Note that the Aztecs likely exaggerated their sacrifice counts[0]:
>Some post-conquest sources report that at the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs sacrificed about 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days. This number is considered by Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, to be an exaggeration. Hassig states "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony.[15] The higher estimate would average 15 sacrifices per minute during the four-day consecration. Four tables were arranged at the top so that the victims could be jettisoned down the sides of the temple.[22] Additionally, some historians argue that these numbers were inaccurate as most written account of Aztec sacrifices were made by Spanish sources to justify Spain's conquest.[23] Nonetheless, according to Codex Telleriano-Remensis, old Aztecs who talked with the missionaries told about a much lower figure for the reconsecration of the temple, approximately 4,000 victims in total.
Also, it seems like we'd wanna count the 40,000 to 240,000 Aztecs slaughtered by the Spaniards[1].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
I was just giving some support to the parent comment about the scale of sacrifices compared with the Spanish inquisition.
Even if the number is 4000, its still quite comparable with the number of executions of the Spanish inquisition over 3 centuries.
About [1], yes, I do not dispute that. But we were comparing different systems and that the Aztec system was much more cruel from a modern standard.
900–1,300 Spanish infantry
90–100 cavalry
Looks like they had some help.
1) This is excusemaking for genocide.
2) This also has little basis in either the historical or the archaeological record.
The Spanish never had an intention to exterminate the local population: they needed people to exploit the land they had conquered. The massive death toll was a result of an influx of diseases from the old world, and not due to some extermination policy they had.
On the other had, the natives did perpetrate genocides on a regular basis, and the conquest did put an end to it. So I believe that in the end life actually improved for the majority of those natives who did survive the waves of diseases, compared to what they could hope for under their traditional way of life.
The figures can be discussed, but all this means then is that we're in agreement and "Now we're just haggling about the price"
Genocide (or at least the destruction of the native culture) may be a morally consistent position for those who believe in utilitarianism: if you don't like the idea of child sacrifice, it may be better to destroy a culture that favors child sacrifice.
The morally consistency of similar problems has been explored by Yudkowsky on "baby eating aliens": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...
Under no meaningful comparison can you claim that native civilizations were less brutal than the Spanish (and to a lesser extent, Portuguese and later French and British) extraction operations. "Look! The Inquisition! Three thousand people, that's it!" Columbus's second voyage kidnapped 500 Taino from Hispaniola alone and 300 of them died on the way back to Europe, and that was just the start of things. By 1542, las Casas--a Spaniard--estimated that the Spanish had killed between twelve and fifteen million natives, and while that number is probably not well-sourced by las Casas, modern research suggests that that number, if it is inaccurate, is likely to be so on the low end when you tally up the whole thing.
"Look! Three thousand! The Aztecs! But the Aztecs!" The Mexica? Yeah, they sucked a whole lot. It's not a huge surprise that the Tlaxcaltecs and others thought the Spanish were a good bet, because the Mexica were downright vile. So yanno, let's scratch the whole thing off, call that one fair-is-fair (it's not but okay). Now how about the other millions to tens of millions killed by the Spanish alone and forced into slavery?
Because these genocide-softpedaling assertions are hiding the ball.
Here's las Casas himself. Read it, if you have the stomach.
“They [the Spanish] forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders, shouting, ‘Wriggle, you little perisher.’
What was that about the implied nobility of destroying a culture that has a problem with child sacrifice? Shit, this wasn't even for any reason in particular, it's nihilistic murder for the heck of it. And the Taino, to the best of my knowledge, didn't practice any form of human sacrifice at all. What's your high-minded lesswrong-dot-com excuse here?