Posted on 04/03/2002 2:41:45 PM PST by blam
Yep!
Here's a clue. When Cortez conquered the Aztecs, there was NO SPANISH EMPIRE yet. There was barely even Spain, the country, much less, an Empire, at this point. I can't seem to understand why it is such a confusing matter for you to accept what is the reality, according to EVERY BOOK OF HISTORY ON THE SUBJECT, including the journal of the conquest itself written by Cortez's chronicler, an eye witness, which for the life of me, escapes my mind as to the title right now.
Check this page out if you want the most basic synopsis
http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/prehistory/latinamerica/topics/spanish_conquest.html
Anthropologist, Marvin Harris (bless his soul), in his book Cannibals And Kings," speculates that a lot of the ritual killing in South America was in fact done to provide protein due to the lack of large animals as a protein source. The Carib Indian word for roasted human arm is BARBECUE.
The 9,500 year old Kennewick Man skeleton as well as (probably his cousin) Spirit Cave Man indicate that they were both in their mid forties when they died. All the skeletons of the males in this grouping of people indicate that most died of a blow to the left side of the head. All the female skeletons found were no older than 24 years of age. (a puzzle to James Chatters)
Spain was merely four backwater provinces when Isabella began the reunification of Spain. A short 50 years later, and Spain ruled half of the earth, no question. But at the time that Cortez was poking around and conquering the Aztecs through his wit and luck, these things had not occured yet. In fact, it is BECAUSE of Cortez and the Conquest that Spain grew to an Empire.
But when Cortez arrived, he had a handful of men who had never seen a city of more than 30,000. They stumbled into the largest empire on earth since the Romans and conquered it within months. This certainly was a marvel, a feat, and one of the greatest upsets in human history.
It's not really that contraversial.
I read a article years ago that the Great Plains was in fact a great forest till the Indians burned it down for centuries. I remember little else about the article but that statement.
I don't think this is an accurate description of the interpretation in Guns, Germs and Steel. I am thumbing throgh my copy of Prof. Diamond's book right now, and he attributes Spanish victory throughout the New World to vastly superior military technology (especially horses and swords), helped greatly by smallpox immunity.
The only thing that qualified as "clever manipulation" or "deceit" was the belief of the Aztec emperor that the Spanish were gods, which caused him to let them into the center of the capital. But this belief was itself a consequence of the fact that the Sapnish were immune from the smallpox ravaging the Incas and had such superior military technology to start with.
He argues that on numerous occasions, not just in Mexico, the vastly better weaponry of the Spanish enabled small bands of conquistadors to wipe out thousands of Indian soldiers at a stroke.
I think his interpretation is that luck had little to do with it, save for the original luck of landing in a new land where your military technology is vastly better rather than vastly worse.
Human beings have been at the helm of this earth since their creation. There is no "pure" wilderness where we can truly understand "how nature works" free from "human" meddling.
If you are truly an environmentalist and understand "nature" you realize nature is simply the result of a massive battle, and human's are simply adding to the mixture of conditions. We are not "ruining" the earth any more than the ancient Mayans "ruined" the rain forest or the ancient north american indians "ruined" the Great Plain Forest, as you pointed out. There is no ruin - only change.
The point that Guns makes is the overall point that the Indo-Euro society was itself the recipient of the fortune of an east-west vs north-south agricultural belt and the prevalence of easily domesticated food and farm animals which also led to "superior" diseases like smallpox. His thesis is that is was basically their luck geographically speaking that led to their eventual global dominance and not because of some racial characteristic of that God was on their side or whatnot. Then mameluksabre and I got a bit sidetracked by the particular question of Cortez's "luck." But, truly part of his luck was that he was from a society with superior military technology... based again on Europe's general luck with how their land happened to be formed.
I still maintain that Cortez was a slick guy and that it wasn't his horse nor his guns that were nearly as effective as his lies and manipulations. He was truly one of the greatest leaders of all time, and it was his leadership that made the impossible inevitable. Not to get all Ayn Rand, but Cortez is certainly a great example of how only the individual can truly change the world. The aztecs were more advanced as a society(notwithstanding the guns), but they lacked this fire of the individual... and so they perished as socialism always will in the face of a great man.
I still maintain that Cortez was a slick guy and that it wasn't his horse nor his guns that were nearly as effective as his lies and manipulations.
OK. I'm not an expert on that, so I'll defer to you. But if true, it is an argument that (IMHO, anyway) stands in direct opposition to Prof. Diamond's interpretation of what happened in the Spanish New World. The technological and civilizational advantages of the Spanish, including a written language, were in his view immense. How they came to have those advantages is of course a whole other story.
London was over 40,000 at the time, still recovering from the plague of the previous generation.
Paris had twice that population, Genoa and Venice may have had as much as three times that population. Some estimates of Moscow put it at nearly a quarter of a million around 1500 A.D.
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