11 thoughts on “You’d Think…”

1. Heck, do you think that there was ever a battle when the Indios didn’t outnumber Cortez’s army thousands to one?
   If they had met him at the beach they just would have died sooner.

2. True.

   Perhaps the Mayans should have predicted guns and steel armor.

3. Yeah, you won’t be so smug next December when the History Channel falls out of the sky.

4. The victory of Cortez’s 500 men over literally millions of Indios has long puzzled historians and anthropologists.
   I have the answer.
   There was no word, in Aztec, for “Get ’em!”

5. No but expects the Spanish invasion.

6. The Indios always outnumbered the Spanish. What the Spanish did well was turn their conquest into an internecine war and got the Indios to fight the detested “others.” That wore down the various tribes to the point where the Spanish waltzed in and said, “I won.”

   Hmmm, maybe there’s a lesson in politics there. Nah. Purity in ideology above all else!

7. Well the Europeans pretty much wrote the book on divide and conquer. They’re still doing it today. How’s that Euro working out?

8. The history-geekiest explanation I’ve heard for the terrible wars of Europe is that the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War fostered the growth of unique nationalist ambitions while it destroyed the only unifying cultural and political institution, a pan European Church.
   Of course that only accounts for the wars after the Peace of Westphalia.

9. Cortés, with 508 Spaniards, did not fight alone but with as many as 150,000 or 200,000 allies from Tlaxcala, and eventually other Aztec tributary states. It was not difficult for Cortes to find allies to fight with him, the Aztecs were not generally liked by the neighbouring city-states.

   From the easily accessible (and in this case accurate) Wikipedia. The Aztecs weren’t exactly the nicest rulers, nor all that popular with any of their neighbors.

10. Actually, they *did* know he was coming. They did not resist because they believed it was Quasiquotl’s (neah, spell it yourself) will. Check the history

11. nerdbert – are we talking about Aztecs or Mayans?

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