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Correct. To the great dismay and anguish of the Mexica at the time. The hubris and bigotry of the Spaniards (repeated elsewhere by them and other Europeans) wa
by navi0 2y ago
Correct. To the great dismay and anguish of the Mexica at the time.
The hubris and bigotry of the Spaniards (repeated elsewhere by them and other Europeans) was truly a loss for all of humanity.
It’s on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in my book (pun intended).
- roughly 2y agoThey did the same to the Incan Quipu, which more recent study and discoveries suggest was an actual full written language, not just a counting system. The conquistadors came across full-fledged empires with sophisticated arts and cultures who’d built cities that dwarfed their European counterparts with building techniques and on terrain that would’ve flummoxed western builders at the time (and still cause us to pause today) and destroyed as much of it as they could put their hands on. Smallpox was the disease, but the Spaniards were the plague.
- mistrial9 2y ago> dwarfed their European counterparts I agree this is tragic and under-reported, but I think you weaken your case when you exaggerate like this.. Its not a direct contest for "greatness" since they were so different.
- helpfulContrib 2y ago[dead]
- jcranmer 2y agoIt's not that much of an exaggeration. Tenochtitlan--the capital of the Aztec Empire--is estimated to have been about 120-150k people at the time of contact, which is larger than any city in the Spanish Empire at the time. Even the Spaniards themselves, as they recorded in their journals, were astonished at the scale of Tenochtitlan.
- VHRanger 2y agoAnd it was such an amazing civil engineering project on top! Built in a lake with aqueducts, land bridges, etc. It must have been truly something to behold even by today's standards.
- roughly 2y agoIt's not an exaggeration. As the other response notes, Tenochtitlan was possibly the largest city in the world at the time, and the Aztec empire contained many other cities with populations over 10k. The Inca built a massive empire (8-12M people) centered on the Andean mountains linked together by roads and suspension bridges and built monumental architecture using masonry techniques that are impressive even today. We're just starting to get a handle on the scale of the Mayan empire, because they built their cities in parts of the Guatemalan jungle we have a hard time getting through today - some of the more recent work has found evidence of raised causeway networks stretching over a hundred miles linking large scale settlements. Go further south, and the Amazon jungle basin has been considered uninhabitable because of the density of the jungle and the poor quality of the soil, except that we've found evidence of cultivation of plants and more recent evidence of large-scale settlements and waterworks. The Spaniards did not walk into a backwards people or somehow just miss what they were looking at - the civilizations and cities they found were advanced and obviously developed and on a scale that, even outside Tenochtitlan, would have rivaled European cities at the time for both size and sophistication.
- mistrial9 2y agothis story is tragic and it is not widely known, and also.. the story of Jonah in the Hebrew bible describes a city of 100,000+ people .. and that was just one city somewhere at that time.. that was three thousand years ago in the Middle East
- bernawil 2y agoRome reached the million people mark in the 2nd century. All great cities of classical antiquity (familiar to the Spanish of that time) had over 100k pop: Carthage, Tyre, Byblos, Athens, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople...
- VHRanger 2y agoMalthus was wrong on a ton of things, but his theory of population growth in pre-industrial cities effectively holds to the data (even according to economic historians). Cities were effectively constrained by available food and transportation costs before the steam engine, so you'd get cycles of population growth, followed by population decline. Particular places reached support capacity of surrounding land until something caused systemic failure, and population decline. Think of ancient China, for example with its cyclic population growth in a unified empire, followed by some natural catastrophe or political instability -> civil war as the political system weakened.
- jjtheblunt 2y agoHow did the Spaniards justify this to themselves?
- heresie-dabord 2y agoIt would have been horrifying to witness mutilations and sacrifices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
- AlecSchueler 2y agoWould it have been more horrifying than seeing public executions or bodies mutilated through castration or circumcision in Europe?
- TedDoesntTalk 2y agoReligion
- taejavu 2y agoThis is not an apologist perspective, my heart weeps for the knowledge that was lost. But from the perspective of the Spanish conquistadors, all of Aztec culture looked like devil worship. Bear in mind these were Catholics who were suddenly immersed in a culture that regularly performed ritual human sacrifice. So they buried their statues and burned their books. It's tragic, but not all that surprising, really.
- roughly 2y agoI think that's how they justified it, but all the looting and slave labor are what required the justification. The book "Why Nations Fail" spends a while discussing the Spanish approach to the Americas, and "Extractive" doesn't even begin to cover it.
- christkv 2y agoYou do realize that the Aztecs also practiced slavery as well.