Conquest of the Incas
mattlakeman.org
mattlakeman.org
They often think that the land was inhabited by loving tribes that just wanted to be left alone to live in harmony with nature.
The truth is that barbarism was common as tribes routinely slaughtered each other in numerous wars. Slavery, rape and human sacrifice were here far before the White man arrived.
I am not saying that the conquerers from Europe didn't do some horrible things too; just that the narrative often taught in schools is inaccurate.
As an aside; I went to the Smithsonian museum of native Americans or whatever it's called. I was MASSIVELY disappointed that it focused almost solely on post-European settlement. I was really hoping for history and information about the tribes before that. They're fascinating, and it seems a little backhanded to just focus on our impact on them (important obviously, but very dismissive of their long history).
How much of that is known?
That is because the pre-European natives in North America did not write anything down. The only information we have not from European writers is material remains like arrowheads, pottery and the bones of the animals they butchered.
‘Caribbean’, by the way, is derived from the ‘Canib’ Indians, from which we get another sweet and gentle word: Cannibal.
Idealizing these cultures would be similar to some revisionist historian in 2525 waxing poetic about the Nazis in the mid-20th century.
This was needlessly harsh. Sorry. :(
[1] Since I don’t care to get into a whole other topic than the OP (it’s got nothing to do with Incas, or Aztecs) on a comment that I see is now on the top of this thread.
A good book on this topic is The Dawn of Everything, written by an anthropologist and an archaeologist. A YouTube video from one of the authors is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SJi0sHrEI4
I disagree with the idea that "barbarism was common" in Native American societies. I don't think you can generalize from the Incas so directly like this
The real next-level excellence is that he is really tracing the history of technology along the way, going into significant detail about how the conquerors developed and utilized new tech to effect their victories.
From horses to the Mongols' bows to gunpowder, it is really the history of civilization and how the uncivilized were the energy that pushed change to the next level-up. I first learned of these sorts of systems in Gleick's "Chaos" (IIRC), where it looks like nothing is advancing, but, in reality, a kindof pressure is building to the point where a drastic leap is made suddenly and unexpectedly.
He always starts with geographical context, and this thread is never lost through the study. The constraints and characteristics of geography are always respected as key inputs into the civilization.
He is also very narrative-driven, while staying within historical fact. This is probably the key strength of the podcast. I had read so much about Egypt, but until listening to the Egypt episode, I never "got it". All of the strengths have synergy as well. For example, in the Egypt episode, North and South isn't used. Instead, upriver and downriver (Nile) is used, reflecting how they saw the world. Parlaying from there, the experience of how it would have been to live in the world is constantly revisited. In the recent Ghengis Khan episode, we take a walk with him through one of his conquered towns before it was razed, exploring how he likely felt disdain for settled civilization and always had a strong connection to his nomad way of life. But these leaps aren't just hot air. It is used as a window to do some further exploration of his religious views that we can confirm through sources.
Lastly, the production value is quite nice. He has a community that really loves his content now. There are voice actors, and most important to me, there is a very well crafted background soundscape that pulls you in. For example, in the recent episode, you can hear the throat singing subtly swell up in the background When the war machine is about to activate, much like how in Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick switches the music to Vietnamese percussion once the groups leaves "their" territory. Very effective - sometimes gives me chills or can bring immense emotional responses, such as the sounds of wind blowing through the razed city of Carthage while listening to a voice actor read a source about a visit to the now abandoned ruins (drew a tear that one did. Didn't expect that" from a three-hour history podcast!)
I'd recommend checking out the podcast if those characteristics appeal to you. It's not purely" analytical, though. There is an inspired artistic element that wants to explore the human condition, and some sort of underlying thesis that states that exploring history is a window into this. If pure analysis is what you are looking for, there are probably books better suited to that.
[1] https://mattlakeman.org/2020/06/25/polygamy-human-sacrifices...
[2] https://mattlakeman.org/2021/06/01/everything-you-might-want...
In _Debt_, Graeber argues that it is largely a myth that pre modern civilizations relied on barter, and instead used different systems for tracking debt between individuals and entities.
He says this of the Incas knotted strings in a footnote:
> I note in passing that a study of the Inca khipu system itself would itself be quite fascinating in this regard; the strings were used to record both obligations we would consider financial, and others we would consider ritual, since as in so many Eurasian languages, the words “debt” and “sin” were the same in Quechua as well
There is an interesting contrast to Persia, which, having been conquered by Muslims in the 7th century, was subjugated and converted to a new religion as well - and yet within a few decades the Persian bureaucracy and professional class was very influential within the Caliphate.
The difference might be in total mortality. Too many Amerindians died from Old World diseases and their know-how was lost.
BTW: " In lieu of taxes, every able-bodied adult male in the Incan Empire was legally required to work for the state for three months per year"
Taxes in form of labour are harder to steal or siphon away, even if local tax authorities are corrupt. This might have been the best tax system in pre-modern era, in this regard at least.
The Persian bureaucracy were equipped to work for the conquerors, and the empire would have needed them to run the new conquests.
The Arab empires were motivated to rule, and to spread their religion, but seem to have been quite happy to adopt local structures and institutions that were consistent with that AFAIK.
They were relatively well organized compared to neighboring people, but they weren't particularly well organized compared to many other places in the world at the time.
The administration of modern Bolivia and Peru is far more advanced than that of the Incan Empire.
They were able to introduce a common imperial language (Quechua), build up a very good network of roads and runners, and rule several dozen smaller ethnicities without triggering too many rebellions. They extracted taxes from the population quite efficiently without impoverishing it, and were able to build up massive uniformed armies.
I think this counts as extraordinary level of governance for that time. Certainly in the contemporary global top five, especially when taking into account just how big the empire was.
The same places aren't even in the global top fifty today.
This isn’t true at all. The Inca were not as technically sophisticated as the Europeans (or the Chinese for that matter), sure, but they were doing things on a scale comparable to the late Roman Republic. The extent of their territory was far larger than anything that existed in Europe at the time.
> The administration of modern Bolivia and Peru is far more advanced than that of the Incan Empire.
You are making this assertion based on the emergence of technical capacities that had nothing to do with these societies. Haiti is not more organized today than it was 200 years ago just because the government has computers now.
I'm not sure how it isn't true at all when we agree that other governments at the time had much more sophisticated administration. And it wasn't just Europe and China - many areas of the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Asia had much more sophisticated administrative states at the time.
We don’t agree about that. I am saying that they may have lacked technical sophistication insofar as they used stone tools over iron or steel, but this has no real bearing on their merits as organizers; the Incans were well-organized by world standards.
Europe did not have anything close to what the Incan Empire was at the time. China may have been better organized, but that just shows the sophistication of the Incans if we’re comparing them with an ancient civilization with an established bureaucracy and a population measured in the tens of millions.
> many areas of the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Asia
You will need to cite specific examples for this argument to hold any water; Japan and the Ottoman Empire are the only two I can think of.
Not having ledger or any complex/efficient system of writing or recording data at all did, though. But it's true that no state in Europe was as centralized however that had various societal and political reasons.
> better organized
Size/scale doesn't necessarily mean much either, e.g. nobody would say that the Soviet economy and administrative system was more efficient and "better organized" than the much more decentralized systems in capitalist countries.
Why do you consider that to be a limitation? They conquered the extent of what they could feasibly reach and then held onto it until the Spanish arrived. I’ve never received any indication that they failed due to a lack of record keeping.
That wasn't part of the argument? Lack of writing made their administrative systems less effective than it could've been otherwise. However plenty of less organized or centralized empires and states survived for longer periods.
> then held onto it until
The Inca empire was established less than a hundred years before the Spanish conquest (it was preceded by a much smaller state centered around Cusco). That's not a very long period. Most of the expansion happened almost within the living memory of the people living there when Pizzaro arrived (in the midst of a major civil war and as far as we can tell it wasn't the first one).
So it's very hard to determine how stable the system was or how long it could have survived. It was remarkable what they achieved compare to pre-contact states (e.g. the Aztec empire was more or less a somewhat lose confederation) but it really didn't last enough to be comparable to most of the more centralized old world empires.
Also it's not necessarily clear how far the administrative system extended from the core areas and how strong it was in the more distant recently conquered territories.
Statements like these makes me realize that many people don't really have a grasp of the state of things at the time. The Incan Empire didn't have a judiciary, didn't have codified law, didn't have currency. They didn't have a written language, but used a system of knots for record keeping.
Most places in Europe and Asia at the time had currency, written language, codified laws, etc. in the 1500's. I'm not sure it's worth listing them all anymore than it is to list every place that had agriculture. If someone is unaware that these were ubiquitous, they have no understanding of the time period.
> If someone is unaware that these were ubiquitous, they have no understanding of the time period.
I suspect the reason you are obliquely implying I am ignorant instead of making an actual argument is because you don’t have a compelling argument to make.
> The Incan Empire didn't have a judiciary, didn't have codified law, didn't have currency. They didn't have a written language, but used a system of knots for record keeping.
These are technologies. I already told you I don’t care about technical sophistication and I have not contested that the Incans were not technically sophisticated when compared with the Old World. The Incan Empire was governed better than contemporary Haiti, even if the Haitians have typewriters; the fact that it was all organized without currency or codified laws makes it more impressive, not less.
What I am asking you is if you can point me to a state in Europe contemporary to the period that was approximately 2 million square kilometers, with a population of at least 6 million people. I can think of perhaps half a dozen states that fit this criteria, which in world historical terms makes the accomplishments of the Incans quite impressive.
All Iberian colonies follow this trajectory. This stems from a Mediterranean attitude towards wealth and work which privileges politics over industry as a means of personal enrichment; politics here encompassing both the clientelism that characterizes these societies as well as the military adventurism and propensity to revolution that this region is famous for.
Considering that generally taxes in pre-modern stats were primarily used to fund warfare or fund the lifestyle of the local elite that's not necessarily worth much (the Inca empire was not different) i.e. whether the transfer of wealth is done according to the established law or not might not matter much if the system is inherently unjust)
If you had 100000 people and had to defeat 100 well armed soldiers, what would you do? Well, wait for them to get tired, ideally. Try to restrict their movement. Take away or disable their weapons. Withdraw to advantageous terrain. Heavier projectiles. Poison darts. Harassment. Long ropes and nets that you try to snag them in. Wait until they are mostly sleep and attack at night. Invite them to dinner and poison their food, or jump them then. Tough to coordinate this with 100000 people, I think that's the main issue.
I don't know if it boils down to military power or absolute capability. There's always a lot of soft power that goes hand in hand with hard power.
The Incas apparently did not fight at night.
And why they did not managed to kill the horses, were likely because they were too afraid of them and they were not used to killing large animals as none existed there.
Otherwise all it takes to stop a knight on a horse is to kill the horse. Or just hurt its legs enough, or make it stumble.
What would help the Incas would be pikes. Lots of pikes. Hard to know why they didn't copy them from the Spaniards.
Ropes with stones flung under their legs.
Killing them with arrows - really that part confuses me. The horses had in some cases some armor - but why didn't the other horses not fell from the missile barrage?
You also need enough love to be willing to be the first to fall in defense of your people.
Maybe they didn't even know that the horses could be killed? They could've looked like monsters to the locals.
But yeah, the lens of history is far from clear, except for "Fuck the conquistadors."
That said, would the locals have abandoned human sacrifice and cannabalism without getting their asses kicked?
Who knows? Sometimes, it's just assholes killing assholes, usually with innocents caught in the crossfire.
I don't know the story of the Inca very well, but I did just read about Cortes' conquest of the Aztecs (Buddy Levy, Conquistador), and the primary moral of the story that I got was "if you believe in human sacrifice of other people, and if the tribute you demand of vassal states is a certain number of their sons and daughters, don't be surprised if they follow some other dude who's got better gear". He'd have gotten nowhere without native allies, and lucky for him the Aztecs had managed to make enemies out of just about everyone else nearby.
Was he a good person? I think we can firmly say "no". Was he worse than the Aztecs? That's a tougher question. If you were an Aztec, almost certainly. If you were one of their subject peoples who cut an early deal with him, almost certainly not.
If you ask the descendants of those people, you might get a different answer.
Because even the highest ranking "natives" in the new order were still lower, than the lowest white conquisator.
> long sharpened (and hardened in fire) wooden sticks would be enough.
Also extreme discipline and training. Unprofessional armies even in Europe didn't do that well either. e.g. the Battle of Böblingen was about as one sided as some of the battles between the Spanish and Incas or Aztecs.
One person on its own, yes, but we are talking about thousands of people. Meaning the horses charge frontal, the infantery there (without Pikes) might get smashed - but those on the side would have a clear shot. Unless they all panic.
"Battle of Böblingen"
And wikipedia says 2:1. That is not in the same ballpark as 100:1 like with the conquisatores.
And by the time you start figuring these things out the Spanish already have thousands of allied soldiers from other tribes that you have subjugated fighting on their side.
e.g. when the Inca finally started trying to fight back back in earnest like in the siege of Cuzco the ratio was closer to 1:2 and the Inca were probably too reluctant to engage due to their experience in the initial battles. After that it was already way too late since the empire was reduced to a rump state with limited resources and the balance of power shifted.
Same happened in Mexico. Just like in Peru the early engagements for the Spanish were generally considerably easier than the final battles where they had 10s of thousands of soldiers fighting for them.
At the end of the day both of those empires were just a house of cards waiting to collapse. Europeans didn't do even remotely as well in less centralized areas. e.g. even against urbanized societies like the Maya who survived for much longer and successfully fended off several expeditions since the Spanish basically had to conquer each city state one by one.
Maces, war hammers, pollaxes and such were quite effective because armour doesn't protect you against blunt force. Inca or any other Native Americans didn't really have enough time to adapt before it was too late (especially with the epidemics hitting them so hard).
Pointy hammers were rather effective for pinching through the armor, not creating concussion.
And all the armors had weak spots.
Sure, bronze pikes would have stopped the cavalry, but you need years if not centuries of mounted warfare to figure that out.
And the name-comment synergy slaps, as the youngins sometimes say :-)
But this was a lesson long known in europe, but not in the Andes. Still, kind of baffling. I suppose religious motives played a role as well in not trying out those simple solutions.
Yes, and that's why crowd control with mounted police is still very effective today.
We tend to think of the period as being characterized by monarchs and royal armies. Pizarro and his men were anything but a royal army. The bulk of them came from Extremadura: a remote, mountainous, and relatively poor area of Spain renowned for producing soldiers. Pizarro is, famously, Cortez's second cousin once removed, from this same region. If you were a young man of Extremadura during this period, soldiering was pretty much your best prospect for advancement, and Cortez was your hero. The reconquista and other conflicts had supplied several centuries of constant warfare that honed Spanish cavalry into the very best of Europe. The Extemadurans were the best of the Spanish. The stock that Pizarro's conquistadors were drawn from was elite.
Now, consider how that stock was drawn. As I mentioned above, Pizarro's force was no "royal army". No agents of the crown went to Extremadura and mustered up an army to send to Peru. These men paid their own way to the new world as an investment. With the reconquista finished and fabulous tales of conquest coming from Cortez's campaign, many soldiers willingly went to the new world to make a fortune for themselves. The men in Pizarro's company had already been on a difficult path before they set foot in Peru, but they were not just servants of the crown loyally following orders. They were entrepreneurs desperate to make good on their investment. Pizarro basically had his pick of the most ambitious men available.
One thing that made Spanish cavalry of this period so dangerous was pure reckless courage. If you put an overwhelming force in front of them they would charge directly into it while screaming, "Santiago!". The notion was that the enemy would not expect such insanity, and God would see them through anyways. The crazy thing is that this worked almost all the time in Peru. Pizarro's men were evil, greedy men, but they routinely routed enemy forces many times their size with reckless charges. On flat open ground, mounted conquistadors were virtually untouchable. The Incas learned this far too late.
The kidnapping and ransom of Atahualpa was an insane feat that typified the conquest of Peru. Pizarro's force was billeted in guest quarters that consisted of several long buildings with many doors facing a central square. They were surrounded by a royal Inca army dozens of times their size. They were too far from the coast to retreat if things turned violent, and they were convinced the Inca meant to turn things violent. For his part, the Inca saw the Spanish as a distraction from the more important task of mopping up the civil war that had just happened. The Spanish were too small a force to offer any serious resistance. After some scheming and diplomatic back and forth, Atahualpa and several thousand of his soldiers walked right into Pizarro's trap. They entered that courtyard and Pizarro's men rode out of every door of those long buildings, screaming. The expedition's cannons were fired for added psychological impact. The Inca's were compressed from all sides and panicked. Atahualpa was snatched from his litter and taken captive. The Spanish massacred thousands in the square and then continued riding down the Inca soldiers who hadn't been able to fit in the square for hours after Atahualpa's capture. With their command decapitated, there was little resistance.
As the conquest slowly progressed, the Inca resistance was typified by brilliant logistics, massive numbers, and flawed command that just couldn't seem to come to grips with what elite Spanish cavalry could do. The Spanish were taken by surprise and surrounded in Cusco by an absolutely massive army that appeared seemingly from nowhere... and didn't attack. The Inca commanders wanted to ensure they had an absolutely overwhelming force, so they continued to amass forces instead of attacking when surprise was on their side. They initially controlled the fortress of Saqsaywaman, but the Spanish were able to take it back due to the long delay in attack. That gave them a position to endure a long siege, which they did.
Some Inca generals did have success once they knew what they were dealing with. They learned to ambush the conquistadors in mountain passes, rolling boulders down on them from above. They learned to attack on rough ground that the Spanish horses couldn't be useful on. However, the Inca rulers seemed unable to comprehend that such a tiny force could offer resistance, so they still ordered their generals to offer pitched battles on flat open ground, which went against the Inca every time. These battles, such as at Lima, were tragically expensive for the Inca because their generals led from the front and often went into battle resolved to win or die.
Naked military force wasn't the only reason the Inca lost. The Spanish were adept at turning factions against the Inca's. The Inca empire was young and had been rapidly expanding. A lot of the people they had so recently conquered were only too happy to join the Spanish, not dissimilar to how the Aztec's enemies were eager to join forces with Cortez. The Inca empire was also predicated on worship of the Inca ruler as a living god. That became a serious flaw when the Spanish set up their own puppet Incas. However, while Cortez had a massive native army at his back by the time he reached Tenochtitlan, Pizarro's forces were often shockingly outnumbered but still managed to pull off seemingly impossible victories. Spanish cavalry really was that good if you fought them on their own terms, and the Inca chose to do that more often than they were ultimately able to afford. There were also other factors, like plague, that should not be underestimated.
This happened over and over again, and indicates that the strictly top-down structure of the Incan empire, while probably very advantageous during their conquest of smaller neighbouring polities, was ultimately a huge weakness.
This article might help me reinspire myself with this history.
I sometimes like to wonder what if, and wonder how vastly different world history could have been. If the Catholic conquistadors had managed to overcome superstition and fear of the devil to try Teonanácatl, Peyotl, Cohoba and Ayahuasca.
Some things I remember from the book that don't make it into this article:
- The Inca empire was essentially a top-down command economy. Everything down to individual people's jobs was managed centrally from Cuzco.
- Pizarro's translator was from a native tribe that was recently conquered by the Inca, and he hated the Inca himself. It's possible that he translated things in an intentionally adversarial way at crucial junctures, like when the Spanish were deciding to execute Atahualpa.
- The official reason for executing Atahualpa was that, while in captivity, he had sent orders to have his brother Huáscar executed.
- Apparently Atahualpa was amazed to discover that he could write marks on a piece of paper, show it to to Spaniards like de Soto, and they would all be able to read out exactly the same words. He tried the trick with Pizarro but, being illiterate, Pizarro couldn't read out the text. This didn't help with the Pizarro-Atahualpa relationship.
- The account of how the battle at Cajamarca started is a little different. The Spanish sent out a priest who gave a long confusing monologue to Atahualpa about the death of Jesus, the nature of the Trinity, the immaculate conception of Mary, and other deep-cut theology, then handed him a Bible. Atahualpa was basically like "why would you worship a guy who was executed as a criminal" and didn't have any idea what to do with the Bible (or any book). Then the Spanish ambushed him.
It’s peak HN.
Again I just skimmed it (for a mere 20 minutes) but I didn’t find much mention of the allies. Before the civil war among the Spanish (after the conquest) there only seems to be things like
> The Siege of Cusco began on May 6, 1535, and the Spanish believed they were well and truly fucked. Discounting their native allies, they were probably outnumbered at least 500-to-1, and were completely cut off from reinforcements.
What I’ve read on the matter says that Pizarro et al were always severely outnumbered by their allies as well. Why “discounting their native allies”? Were they so few that they didn’t matter?
Yeah they had many native allies for some reason. This is mentioned for Cortes (Aztecs) but I didn’t find this for the Inca case.
On the glazing:
> In the case of Hernan Cortes, about 400 Spanish soldiers (later increased to over 1,000) subjugated the Mexican Empire of about 6 million inhabitants. In the case of Francisco Pizarro, about 180 Spanish soldiers (eventually rising to over 1,000, but with rarely more than 500 ever concentrated in one place) conquered the Inca Empire of maybe 10 million inhabitants. In both cases, the Spanish invaders had almost no understanding of the local politics, geography, culture, religion, or people they were invading. In both cases, the expedition leaders deserve a ton of credit for extraordinary leadership and competence while leveraging a technological imbalance to achieve a staggering military force and diplomatic multiplier.
We don’t have to wonder why the conquistadors in modern day Mexico were so amazing.
> All of this happened in, like, 15 pages of Conquest of New Spain. Note that the author, Bernal Dias, was a member of Cortes’s expedition and an outright loyalist of Cortes to the point of siding with him closely during the multiple stages of the Spanish expedition civil war between Cortes and the Cuban Governor. So Dias might have some incentive to portray Cortes well, but he still portrays Cortes as constantly lying to basically everyone, including his closest advisors, and sometimes for the sake of embezzling expedition funds at the expense of his own men. It’s wild.
But someone is wrong on the Internet?
> It might seem obvious that the Spanish leveraged their technology to achieve incredible military victories over the Incas and Aztecs, but I’ve actually seen some pushback against this point. Often, it’s pointed out that the Spanish didn’t have that many pieces of their most advanced technology (guns and cannons), and most of their foot soldiers didn’t have close to full plate armor. On the BadHistory subreddit,[3] there is a highly up voted and often referenced nine-part series on Cortes’s conquest of the Aztecs which argues, among many other things, that Spanish military superiority is highly overrated. And yes, that post is one of the reasons I’m writing this whole essay, because someone is wrong on the internet.
That “someone is wrong” link[3] is an introduction (nine-part series) where the introduction polemically critiques Terminal Narrative. So it’s Historiography (I guess). The first part[4] critiques the narrative that the Spaniards in modern day Mexico conquered their foe, the Aztecs, which were “500 times more numerous”.[5]
So what is the author’s refutation of that? On the one hand we have an anonymous redditor who either is a historian or has, with the help of other people, managed to create a cosplay environment of pretend-historians. (This is to say that I trust that they are in actual fact historians.) The author here has a book by one of Cortes’ men who had every incentive to embellish the tale for the audience of the Spanish Crown. Well he does not get into the Aztec side of things and instead goes back to the Incas:
> MacQuarrie does a better job of describing how the Spanish trounced the Incas than Bernal Dias does with the Aztecs, and by MacQuarrie’s telling, the single most impactful element of Spanish military technology was cavalry.
So no epic feat of disproving “someone is wrong on the Internet” happens here. Just telling us again what one man named MacQuarrie thinks.[6]
My understanding from both the Reddit post as well as what I’ve heard indirectly about Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest[7] is that the conquest of the Americas by the conquistadors was first made into history in the predictably chauvinist way (winners writing history) as superior civilization or breed of men vanquishing the inferiors. Obviously that would be too much for a modern audience. So Germs from the 90’s tried a different tack. That book explicitly says that it is not a racist or chauvinistic history of how Europe became so successful. But critics claim that it still manages to be chauvinistic in how it wrongly claims that the conquistadors vanquished their enemies while being comically outnumbered.[8] And that they overemphasize planning and tactics and downplay being at the right place at the right time through no foresight of their own. Another point is that the failed conquistadors are given little consideration. Naturally, in popular history, it’s more exciting to only consider the expeditions and conquests that were successful, while contextualizing them with the failed attempts would perhaps ruin the flow of the story.[9]
[1] I have not read it
[2] ditto
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2vf565/myths_of...
[4] https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2qn5us/myths_of_...
[5] In [4] that is quoted from “Voldemort”, ostensibly Guns, Germs and Steel
[6] I would think that quoting someone being wrong would prompt them to engage with any of their specific points, not just saying that they disagree with the narrative of severely outnumbered Spaniards conquering the natives and then going back to their Inca source.
[7] And the first link in [4] cites that book as “wonderful”. For what it’s worth, good or bad.
[8] Moreover with books like Guns the historiography used is Environmental Determinism. Which might be correct or wrong but it needs to be interrogated as well since it is not obviously correct. And that approach to history might just as well end up concluding that Europe was destined to win out under any contingency (see the introduction to the critique of Terminal Narrative in [3]).
[9] PS: On second thought the expedition of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba into Yucatán is famous, and the Maya defeated them.
I have also found the same thing in popular perceptions of the British Empire - it was heavily reliant on native allies to expand, and native soldiers and police to maintain itself (at least in South Asia, which is the bit I know the most about).
I recently read the second volume (Seven Years in Ceylon) of Leonard Woolf's autobiography and he talks about how an entire country was British run with no military outside a small number in the capital city (and many of the provinces were remote, requiring days of difficult travel back them). There were small numbers (single figures in some) of civil servants in each province, but entire districts were run by a single official.
> And that they overemphasize planning and tactics and downplay being at the right place at the right time through no foresight of their own.
Mentioned by the author
> Another point is that the failed conquistadors are given little consideration.
Also addressed by the article.
> That book explicitly says that it is not a racist or chauvinistic history of how Europe became so successful. But critics claim that it still manages to be chauvinistic in how it wrongly claims that the conquistadors vanquished their enemies while being comically outnumbered.
I feel modern academia (and also Guns Germs and Steel FWIW) desperately try to do the opposite these days - to claim that the natives where not militarily, technologically or logistically inferior to Europeans despite getting conquered by Europeans in what look like very lopsided battles. I feel that is just as dishonest as the opposite. Nobody does this to the Mongols or Huns or whatever. Their superiority is accepted at face value.
I also quoted the author about allies: “Discounting their native allies, they were probably outnumbered ...”
So that qualifies as mentioning native allies. It mentions the allies as being so inconsequential that they can be discounted when considering the forces they were up against.
> and their purported numbers are still like 100x lower than the forces they are facing.
Source?
> Also addressed by the article.
That part of my comment was not about the article.
> I feel modern academia (and also Guns Germs and Steel FWIW) desperately try to do the opposite these days - to claim that the natives where not militarily, technologically or logistically inferior to Europeans despite getting conquered by Europeans in what look like very lopsided battles.
First of all popular understanding (which is what I was talking about) seems to like narratives of dominating conquest. That goes both for Mongols and conquistadors.
Secondly they have arguments for their theories. That they are “desperate” speaks to their motivation and not the end result of their theories. So you would have to engage with their counter-arguments instead of falling back on saying that it looked lopsided. (Are you critiquing their history or their motivations? Different things.)
> I feel that is just as dishonest as the opposite. Nobody does this to the Mongols or Huns or whatever. Their superiority is accepted at face value.
I would hope that historians try their best to figure out why the Mongols or the Ottomans and whoever won, using a variety of approaches, arriving at the most empirically solid theory whether that is tech/logistical superiority or whatever else. But that is not known to me.
I read these posts years ago and they are even worse than I remember them being. If these rebellions could have occurred without the Spanish, they would have.
The whole motivation behind the post is silly, too:
> The Terminal Narrative […] replaces discussion of agency and autonomy with notions of superiority or condescending pity for a people vanishing from the earth.
His belief in agency never made any sense to me; how is it possible for a chain of historical events to have occurred differently from how they did? When did the laws of physics change?
The central question is whether or not the Iberians had some quality about them that allowed them to win. It’s conceivable (albeit unlikely) that they simply won as the result of a series of historical accidents; one is then left to wonder why it was the Iberians who came out on top of the coincidence each and every time. In this narrative, we have to assume they just arrived in the right place and the right time, all over South America, and then just happened (through sheer dumb luck) to be the ones who ended up in power afterwards. The simpler explanation is that the Spaniards had better models than the people they conquered.
Is this a serious argument?
When your allies massively outnumber you, it's not such good news as you might imagine. At war most of the time your allies turn on you as soon as they feel they don't need you to win (and almost certainly after you win). Who wants to share a victory with losers.
The ability of conquistadors to first make local allies so effectively (without any prior knowledge of language, culture or local politics) is insane, their ability to keep their "allies" in check even more so.
When people write "look how outnumbered they were" they don't mean Zack Snyder's "300", it's more of a Machiavelli thing I'd say.
Compare the conduct of Trump and his acolytes to Cortez, the Pizzaros and other conquistadors.