Posted on 11/17/2016 11:37:21 AM PST by sparklite2
(Newser) When Hernan Cortez and his Spanish army marched into Cholula in present-day Mexico nearly 500 years ago, they were greeted by a peaceful people prone to building pyramids instead of stockpiles of weapons. Those people and their pyramids fell, and fast, with 10% of the local population murdered in a day as their pyramids were torched into oblivion.
But as legend has it, one mud-brick pyramid was hidden, perhaps accidentally by vegetation, and was for centuries mistaken for a mountain, until locals began to construct an insane asylum in 1910. That's when they discovered the largest monument ever constructed anywhere in the world.
Tlachihualtepetl, or the Great Pyramid of Cholula, stands more than 200 feet tall and nearly 1,500 feet wide, dwarfing the Great Pyramid of Giza in volume, reports the BBC.
(Excerpt) Read more at newser.com ...
So why did it take me to another site. I closed it and am running antivirus.
I doubt that "The Moscow Times" is based in Moscow, Idaho.
They were certainly not unarmed pacifists.
I read that book years ago-there are other good ones that tell about what was going down on both sides of that ocean at the time-life in that part of Europe was not happy or safe for most-the Spaniards were not nice or all that civilized in their behavior-they were just into rather imaginative methods of torture, not human sacrifice.
The Spanish king and nobles had a particular dislike for some people at that time-Basques from the Pyrenees was one-so being Basque, my ancestors got on a ship and came over here and took their chances-risky, but better than torture and hanging in Spain...
“they were greeted by a peaceful people”
Bwahahaha! Utter nonsense.
They were greeted by people who engaged in constant tribal warfare, wholesale slavery, “sports” in which the loser was executed, and human sacrifice in which the heart was ripped out of a living victim!
They tried to wipe them out and burn all their writings because they were so revolted by the savagery they witnessed.
Accidentally infecting people with a pathogen at a time in history when nobody had any knowledge of pathogens or immunity is vastly different from the intentional slaughter and genocide the Aztecs were engaged in.
And another piece of evidence of Tarantino’s foot fetish!
That’s a great book. I do have some sympathy for Montezuma who is portrayed sympathetically as I remember. Now that you mention it, I’m going to reorder it on Amazon.
Seriously, ~that~ is what impressed you, most?!?
:D
How do you burn down a mud brick pyramid?
“I do have some sympathy for Montezuma who is portrayed sympathetically as I remember.”
I have read it a couple of times. It does a good job of showing how the conquistadores were able to conquer enormous populations.
If you have ever read Machiavelli, it was obvious that both Montezuma and Cortez were Machiavellian “princes” of the first order. The author was rather sympathetic to Montezuma, and criticized Cortez a good bit. It is a brilliant work.
Machiavelli, Cortez, and Montezuma were all contemporaries. Obviously, Neither Cortez or Montezuma had read Machiavelli. Machiavelli only wrote down what was common knowledge of “princes” at the time.
Isabella and Ferdinand had only unified Spain and driven out the last of the Muslim invaders 25 years earlier. Spain had undergone about 700 years of nearly unending warfare.
A peaceful people who idled away their carefree days ripping the beating hearts out of the chests of their victims and who played soccer with their heads.
Yep. A kumbaya crowd before kumbaya was kool.
Nah, it took me about a hundred viewings before I even noticed it because of other... distractions.
;D
In European terms, the American Hemisphere human extinction events of the 16th-17th century were more comparable to the Black Death than to the Nazis. Not murder. Infectious epidemics.
And apparently Spain hasn’t learned much, since muslims are happily spreading their terror there again and no one is doing anything serious about it-smartest thing my ancestors did was watch the Spanish shoreline fade into the distance-it had to be bad there-an unknown wilderness full of Spanish soldiers running wild, and hostile natives was preferable to what was going on in Spain...
The Spanish have been a bloodthirsty, vengeful bunch at least since the Romans occupied the place-probably learned that from them...
The Spanish government still doesn’t like Basques-they always want to be left alone, never like anything the government does and still rebel at the drop of a hat, apparently-in my family we voted Trump and we are known to be unrepentant rebels-must be genetic...
A guy I went to college with was a Basque separatist from Spain-when he heard about a separatist uprising/fighting going on in the Basque area of Spain, he told us he was going over there to join the uprising, got on a plane and left-he was absolutely giddy about the thought of revolution and battle-never heard from him again...
I’ve always had some sympathy for Moctezuma-screwed over by the Spaniards and stoned to death by his own pissed-off subjects-and the last emperor-Cuatemoc-was duped into being taken prisoner and going south with Cortez and ended up being hanged from a Cieba tree by Cortez in a fit of rage-Cortez was not a nice man at all-he gave his Native mistress and-mother of his son-Malinche/Marina to one of his upper-ranking captains as a wife-without asking her-to reward him-...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.