Cortez did nothing wrong. The Aztecs would have been a fucking

>>295178

>We'd be dealing with an ideologically Volkish Mexican ethnic state more interested in preserving its violent heritage than in cooperating with the world.

You say that like it wouldn't have been awesome.

>>295191
It would have been, but I dunno, it would have been pretty fucked up, too.

>>295178
You mean like Nazi Germany if they hD won the 2nd world war?

>>295178
Can you imagine Modern Aztec Society
>Yes, we still sacrifice people, but with lethal chemicals, surgeons, and painkillers now. Its literally painless.

>>295219
I was thinking more Imperial Japan. Only they'd expand in the Caribbean, the Southwest, Texas, and South America instead of China, the American Pacific, and Southeast Asia.

>>295233
The ones who sacrificed also had to offer blood, either by opening their war wounds, tearing off their nails or piercing their tongues or penises.

>>295178
He was still an asshole like all conquistadors. They didn't give a single shit about anything other than gold and glory and more gold.

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>>295178
Cortez was God's punishment for the Aztec's sins

Aztec society was basically on the verge of collapse anyway. It would be interesting to see what would have happened if Cortez recognized them as just another nation, respected their borders, opened up trade, etc.

I think they would have modernized either way once the plebs realized how bad they had it and the traditional native culture would be eroded like it is now. Just with less spanish genes floating around.

>>295178
I wish. The world needs a big bad villain more convincing than North Korea or ISIS.

>>295178
I say it would've been pretty fucking awesome. Maybe they would've pulled something akin to Japan and modernized quickly(they were focused on growth). Additionally, Aztec Philosophy was comparable to Greek philosophy in depth. Imagine the additional views on everything we'd have. East, West, and a New World one.

>>296101
Verge of collapse? lol how? The Empire was at it's height, on the verge of adopting metal forging AND of defeating some of their major enemies + expanding considerably.

>>296071
Stuff like
>God sent me
Always sends shivers down my spine.

>>295178
The Aztec empire was built off of slavery and sacrifice. It had 100 years at best before it collapsed.

>>296158
1. Disease
2. Tarascan's
3. Everyone hated the Aztecs

>>296158
Whoops, you're right. I thought I remembered the Aztec population dwindling and the reach of the empire shrinking before Cortes arrived but it turns out that happened afterwards directly due to his disruption. My bad.

>>296197
Their slavery was different than the kind we're "used" to.

Speaking of, were the Tarascans rivals of the Aztecs in a similar sense to how Rome was rivals of Carthage? Were they idealogically opposed or did they just hate each other via proximity

>>296211
You mean the diseases brought by Cortez?
They were almost defeating the Tarascans after years of attrition. If Montezuma hadn't accomplished it, the next emperor would've, seeing as how he was mainly focused on putting down rebellions. Their empire was usually grown by an emperor, then the next one would consolidate their grip on said gains and so forth. "Everyone" being the Tlaxcallans, a small city state completely surrounded by the Aztec empire, and the semi-nomadic tribes at the edge of the expanding empire. What's surprising about that?

>>296211
Everyone hated the Aztecs because it was necessary for them, they allowed rebellions to get captives.

And the disease appearance didn't mean they were on collapse.

>>296211
>2. Tarascan's
Tarascan's what?

>>296224
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarascan_state

The Aztecs were warmongering fucks building an Egyptian-style slaves-and-priests-and-human sacrifice empire. The Tarascan state, from the little bit I've just read about it, was just a state that came into existence pretty much as a consequence of Aztec aggression in what is now the American Southwest.

>>296224
They might have been long-scale traders with extremely advanced technology but tiny and ethnically/culturally diverse population.

Think Israel if the middle-east was actually competent.

I have no sources, though.

>>296696
>American Southwest
40wats.jpeg.gif.webm

The purepecha are still there, in Michoacan. They are poor ane malnourished pig farmers nowadays. They just don't occupy the rest of Michoacan, which comprised about 60% of their empire.

>>296891
Yeah, I read Wikipedia more closely after typing that post and realized that.

>>297189
For more background, my great-great grandpa traded cattle with the Purepecha and learned their language, probably in his 20s. This was uncommon then and, with the intervening 80 years of fake Mexican nationalism, is even rarer today. He was totally foreign to the area, so it's especially weird to see how the native mestizos remain while everyone else has been forced out. The Purepecha themselves have a dictionary and Youtube language lessons and remain impoverished pig farmers, mainly because everyone else in the area is fantastically racist.

I could be wrong, but if they wanted our family to know better, then they shouldn't have stolen our land and kicked us out, those darn Mexicans.

This ia why we need a second Purepecha empire.

Whether or not their traditional ethnic divisions remain, dunno but there population is only 200k here implying the lowest imperial population was probably in the few thousands. Talk about losing 999 out of every thousand due almost exclusively to plague....

>>295178

>Mexican ethnic state

They weren't mestizo until my ancestors raped them into it :-D

>>299100
Oh, and I've heard of Oaxaca, Mixtec, Chiapas etcetera migrants but not Purepechan migrants. Very xonfusing.

It's not like anything the Conquistadors did or didn't do would have stopped smallpox from depopulating the Americas.

>>295178

Except the Aztecs would have helped bring the Enlightenment earlier and would have improved society on a whole.

Well, ideally speaking anyway, but it still would have been highly likely. First of all, anyone who automatically relates the word "Aztecs" with sacrifice is a meme historian. I don't blame them, but the Aztecs had internal conflict from day 1. Human sacrifice was always controversial, but the power in the Aztec (read: Triple Alliance) Empire were the Mexica, whose dominant philosophy was that of war, expansionism, conquest, and a sort of "Manifest Destiny". With these things came an intense, overly-dramatic take on life and death, economy, and ultimately, cosmological vision (read: religious BS). It helped society stick together, but mostly for the Mexica.

The other states that were allied with the Mexica to form the Aztec Empire were dismayed by Mexica dominance, that's why they used the Spanish to take the head of the Aztec empire down. We all know how that ended in history for those that allied with the Spanish; even though the Spanish didn't fully go apeshit and killed their native allies, the Spanish didn't share much of their empire and couldn't prevent the natives from dying from disease, PLUS once the political and economic capital of all Mesoamerica fell, it became difficult to thrive and live without Spanish aid.

But if for a moment, the Spanish decided to pick up where the New World left off, and infused Old World culture and knowledge with the New World culture and knowledge, everything would have advanced centuries ahead, especially if they revived Mayan civilization.

>>295178
You're mixing based Cortez with the likes of Alvarado, the viceroys or the catholic priests, Cortes was a rightful conqueror and give the nahua people a fair treat, he tried his best to keep aztec society intact while at the same time introducing them to the western world, however he had little to no power once the first real spanish governor set foot on Mexico, all the genocide, semi-slavery and the casta system were forged by people who thought so high of themselves even among spaniards. Cortes was not precisely a model man, yet he's far from the hitler some people think of.

>>299157
cont.
Here's what I mean:
> Engineering

Take a look at the Aztec's capital, Tenochtitlan. It was almost literally a city floating on a lake. It had straight, well defined canals and roadways that were wide and extremely clean that also connected to the mainland. Hundreds of boats entered the city using canoes, and left the very same way. Nezahuacoyotl, a legendary poet, warrior, philosopher, humanitarian, and engineer, designed an aqueduct and dam system where the water levels of the lake that Tenochtitlan resided on could be controlled to prevent from flooding. Earlier in the city's history, it was decided that human excrement could be used as fertilizer for crops, and these crops could grow using the nutrients of the lake on floating gardens, or chinampas. The city was clean, well engineered, and effective.

Not only 20 years after Spanish conquest, the streets of Tenochtitlan were literally covered in shit. So much so that it became a problem. This wasn't just Spanish soldiers not knowing how to handle cities, it was a major European issue with civil engineering at the time and for centuries to come.

Imagine how many lives could have been saved if Europeans adopted the Aztec's method of food production, irrigation, and overall civil engineering. It would have taken a lot of work, and yes, Europe is different than Mexico, but it could have at least been
studied and applied in some situations.

>>299198

cont.

>Science

We'll never know the exact number, but many Aztec and Mayan books were burned by the Spanish. In just ONE Mayan book, the orbit of Venus was predicted so well, that the calculations can still be used to locate Venus' position to this day, to this exact moment, within several minutes. The orbits of almost all the planets and several other celestial bodies were certain to have been recorded (hint: Mayan ceremonies). This could not have been without the aid of Mayan mathematics, of which at the moment we are only aware of their arithmetic. Researchers are trying to understand Mayan geometry, using modern house construction methods used by modern Mayans. It is known that Mayans were able to form perfect 90º angles using a clever method of rope and knotts, and constructed many of their structures with ropes and knots. It is believed the Mayans held knowledge of roots, plane geometry, irrational numbers, complex fractions, and other mathematical structures, and this is all being based off of things that modern Mayans know AFTER their culture has been essentially wiped out. Who knows, the Mayans might have predicted methods of calculus and the like, and certainly, mathematics would have been advanced centuries ahead of what it is now.


In terms of science, the ancient Olmecs, a contemporary civilization with the Mayans, understood magnetics and electrostatics enough to construct devices using lodestones. This was over a thousand years before the Chinese invented the first compass. Now, it's up to debate if the Olmecs invented a compass or were just shitting around with magnetism, but with Old World knowledge, basic ideas of electricity and magnetism could also have been advanced significantly using this New World knowledge. The Mayans were known historians, so it is probable that they could have kept in record the scientific advancements of other civilizations in the Mesoamerican region.

>>299236
I know, I know, tl; dr, but basically, I covered only a bit of what could have happened if Cortez and the other conquistadors were only more aware of what they stumbled upon. Some conquistadors and other Spanish were dismayed at what befell of the New World, since they seemed to understand the potential and culture it had.

The Aztecs were fierce, but there was enough civilization and culture among them to have helped the world out, aside from giving to the world some of the most important crops it has: potatoes, coffee, chocolate, and corn. (They also provided avocados and tomatoes, but that's personal preference.) Corn being the most important crop in the world, or at least the most widely used.

I havent even touched upon the linguistic, poetic, artistic, and philosophical advancements the New World could have given the Old World.

Instead of humanity and potential betterment for a great number of people world wide, we got genocide, enslavement on a brutal and massive scale, and a wiping out of millenia of human civilization and legacy, only within the past 100 years being revived. What a tragedy.

I really can't see the Aztecs catching up with the old world even if they had been spared conquest, Europe and Asia had just too much of a head start compared to the Americas thanks to having started their civilizations a lot earlier while the people that would become the Aztecs and everyone else that side of the pond were still nomads spreading trough the huge ass landmass.

If by some miracle they managed to survive into the later centuries I imagine they'd go the way imperial Japan did and become almost suicidally nationalistic and closed off.

>>299236
Weren't most Mayan cities abandoned for centuries even before the Spainards arrived, though?

>>299670

Yep, Mayan civilization was in a poor state, but their books held their legacy. Imagine if our modern civilization came to an end, but the internet was still active and held all the videos, webpages, sites, etc of our history and culture

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>>295178

Hey, you know what brought the aztecs down?

Smallpox.

You know what would've brought them down if Cortez hadn't invaded right then and there?

Smallpox.

You can shake hands whenever you like, that smallpox is still gonna get them indjus sooner or later.

Cortez was a conqueror and lusted for war, gold and glory. He was not a nice guy and he did plenty wrong. But he was also a man of his age and there were many like him - including among the Aztecs. Did he do anything wrong? By whose standards? By ours? Yes. By theirs? No. He was spreading the word of Christ in that special ISIS kinda way.

>>299695
>But he was also a man of his age and there were many like him - including among the Aztecs
How could the Aztec civilization create a machiavellian mindset without historic records of another empires?
Your logic is flawed.

>>299655
The first great civilization of the americas arose in 1400 BC, dunno why they somehow stopped advancing towards modernity for close to 3000 years, unlike euros, chinese or arabs, ancient meso-american former states were left inhabited one after another, leaving barely any connection between the past dominant empire and the new ones, hell, the capital of the aztec empire was founded just 200 years before conquest.

>>299704

They had historic records of other empires. They followed the Teotihuacan culture before them - the previous dominant city state. There were other dominant city states of the time which the Aztecs eventually came to rule over.

>>299198
DESIGNATED

>>299885
SHITTING

>>299963
STREETS

>>299885
I was going to mention that, but I was really hoping no one would...

but if any country should be famous for designated shitting streets, it should be the countries in greater Western Europe.

>>295178
I don't think anyone thinks Cortez did anything wrong, it is the subsequent treatment of natives by the rest of the conquistadors and local Spanish viceroyalty in the area that are generally criticized.

If anyone judges Cortez or the Spanish royalty (not viceroyalty), they are objectively wrong.

>>300000
Waste of get.

>>299236
These are interesting posts man. I love thinking about this period in history. These huge civilizations with cities comparable with Rome or London (in many ways more impressive) and we know so little about them. I assume you'll have read '1492' and '1493' by Charles C Mann?
These books tell so much about the difference between the popular perception of contact between the Old and New worlds. The populations of both North and South America were much higher than have traditionally been assumed.
Much of the population was wiped out by huge epidemics that spread ahead of the Europeans; and so the accounts of the native societies that we have are essentially the remnants of societies that have just experienced an apocalypse.

>>299113
Spread cowpox?

>>296043
I never thought I'd see a list where piercing your penis wasn't the worst option.

>>299157
>>299158
>>299198
>>299236
>>299265
Where can I read about this, Anon?

>>299265
The Aztecs burned lots of books than predated them too, and at least the Spaniards tried to preserve the natives cultures even when other factions only wanted to assimilate them to be Spaniards (Christians and Speaking spanish).

>>300723
see >>300061

Also "Daily Life of the Aztecs" goes over a lot of interesting stuff, forgot the author's name but you should be able to find it. Bernal Diaz del Castillo's "Conquest of Mexico" is invaluable source, as accurate as a first hand account of what happened 1514-1521 and some more or less years after. Also visit FAMSI and Mexico lore online, they have volumes of information on Mesoamerica. Finally Wikipedia is a very good general resource, just make sure to double take what you read with other sources

>>300742

Yep, the Aztecs were a bit of jerks as well. It was their method of war, that's why my post assumed things were taking place after the Mexica governing body were defeated. Things could have gone so well, but only in a very ideal situation.

>>300000
is more or less right, Cortez actually was a pretty alright guy overall, but relationships deteriorate quickly when two cultures are so different. I'm surprised Cortez didn't snap earlier, after what he and his men went through you would have assumed he would have become much worse than how he ended up.