Skulls reveal scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital (2018)

The best sources aren't their diaries but all the depositions and testimony they made while fighting over the spoils. Anyone who survived the expedition spent the next decade fighting over it in Spanish court.

But also the strategy and combat discipline of units was way superior in the old world.

You can find some accounts of earlier battles that went like this:

> The Indians, who had never seen any horses before, could not think otherwise than that horse and rider were one body. Quite astounded at this to them so novel a sight, they quitted the plain and retreated to a rising ground. [...] Our swords had done the most carnage among them, though many were killed by our cannon. Wherever the cavalry made its appearance the enemy had most work to do. The fighting lasted about an hour; and our enemies maintained their ground so well, that they did not quit the field of battle until our horse broke in among them. There were two caziques among the five prisoners we made.

But not much later, the natives recognize the importance of the horses and specifically targeted them:

> Besides all this the Indians kept continually throwing sand in our faces to blind us. Here, indeed, the great mercy of God alone could save us. The chief object of the enemy was to capture one of our horses, in which they did not altogether fail; for, as Pedro de Moron on his well-trained mare, attended by three others of our cavalry, was attempting to break through the enemy's ranks, the Indians wrenched the lance out of his hand, and fell furiously upon him with their broad swords, wounding him severely. They gave his mare such a terrific cut with the same weapon in the neck, that the animal instantly fell down dead.

This from The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo. At any rate, it is perfectly sensible for unmounted infantry to be terrified of horse cavalry. Mounted cavalry is hard for infantry to beat without specialized weapons and tight formations.

It is a rather unknown fact, but the worst colonial defeat of the Spanish ever didn't happen in the Americas, but on the island of Tenerife, where a Guanche chief called Bencomo trapped the Spanish at Acentejo and killed several thousands of them.

It is doubly remarkable, because the Guanche at that time were really living in their Stone Age. Their civilization was nowhere near as developed as the Aztec Empire.

Montezuma invited the Conquistadors into the city and they even held him as a hostage for months before any fighting broke out. Those alliances took a while to establish and the germs only came later into the campaign when they started sending ships back for more troops during a Caribbean smallpox outbreak.

I recommend reading Conquest by Hugh Thomas. The whole story is fascinating and very nuanced - it took several expeditions to even get that far and Cortez was possibly the luckiest man alive in the 16th century.

This is relevant. The Aztecs were very able to slaughter the Spanish in the alleys/canals of Tenochtitlan itself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Noche_Triste

If it weren't for an epidemic of smallpox, the Spanish would have to conquer Tenochtitlan at a very high price in blood. Urban combat negated a lot of the advantages of European steel.

In their very first skirmish at the edge of Tlaxcalan territory where it was mountainous and undeveloped, a small scout troop took down two horses out of the sixteen that Cortex had with him. Spanish tactics and discipline were enough to overcome large numbers only when they controlled where the battles happened. If Montezuma had used guerilla tactics during the subsequent trip, it would have been far more effective (he had plenty of spies reporting on their movements so I don't think the logistics would have been that difficult). Cortes even lengthened the journey in part to minimize how much time they'd spend in terrain that favored those tactics.

Maybe "obsessed" is the wrong word but Montezuma was influenced by legends of Quetzalcoatl as a white-skinned, bearded man who opposed human sacrifices and was reluctant to just go out and slaughter the conquistadors. Their religion was definitely an influence in the whole affair beyond just the whole human sacrifice bit.

The Aztecs invited them into the city as honoured guests/curiosities. After many months the Spanish (and their tribal allies) massacred the city after a series of events internal and external to the city.

It’s a fascinating episode in history, if you don’t want to read a book then the Aztec series of the podcast The Rest Is History gives an amazing 7 parts walkthrough of the saga.

I have been reading Team of Rivals, a deep dive book about Lincoln’s presidential cabinet during the civil war. It is amazing that many of the men write about how, after having personally witnessed slavery, they then vigorously oppose it. (Seward, for example, goes on a trip to the South for vacation and basically comes back hating slavery because it is so clearly wicked).

I imagine human sacrifice, death camps, gulags, they all evoke similar responses. ‘Societal good can only be reached through mass slaughter of the undesirable’ is the subtext. That should be repulsive to any with a functional moral core. The amount of suffering enacted by the Aztecs as they killed their neighbors children… I can’t imagine.

Note well: I am not endorsing the Nazis. I am merely pointing out a bizarre aspect of cultural relativism and associated movements.

Also note: They could make a case that the Spaniards were also in the "systematically conducting large-scale murder" category. But if that's the argument, then there's still a moral judgment to be made between civilizations.

Caesar's wars were basically one long string of genocides and the Roman military principle "Murum Aries Attigit" meant that unless a besieged city capitulated before the Romans started attacking it, there would be no mercy to the captives.