gleeaikin, you have made some valid points. Nobody’s hat is truly white. I also concede that the Spaniards would have had no chance toppling the Aztec empire without the help of indigenous tribes who also hated the Aztecs. My overall point is that the world is better off without the Aztecs and their bloody gods.
Interestingly, not too many decades earlier, it was an Aztec chief advisor who promoted the program of “flowery wars” when he said let us make [our neighbors] our bread basket, or something to that effect. War captives were ritually slaughtered and eaten. They had no large animals for protein, only birds and fish.
Actually, there are still a lot of Aztecs, it was only necessary to destroy the leadership to succeed. When I was in Mexico there were 1/2 million Aztec language [Nahuatl] speakers who spoke ONLY Nahuatl. I studied it a little in a linguistics class. The name of the Tlaxcallan tribe that allied with Cortez is interesting. Tlaxcali means tortillas. One unique feature of the language is that in addition to prefixes and suffixes, it also has infixes. So to say “I eat tortillas,” you can say “Nicua tlaxcali,” or “Nitlaxcalcua”. The x sounds like sh.
Inaccurate, in the long run.
Once contact was made between the two "worlds," it was all over but the shouting for the civilizations of America.
This is because the Aztecs and Incas were defeated primarily by germs, not Spanish arms.
The results for the original Americans would have been much the same had contact first been made by Aztecs sailing up the Thames.
You are correct in that the conquest, as it occurred and when it occurred, was much more a result of Cortez organizing native opposition to the Aztecs that it was of Spanish valor.