Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

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1. dkimballFeb 2010
   It's a mangled version of Marvin Harris and Fernand Braudel.

   I tried to read _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, and gave up in disgust; Jared Diamond is a Green with an axe to grind. In the case of the American Indians, geography and disease did ruin them (or rather, it ruined the North Americans and the Amazonians; Mesoamerica and the old Inca Empire are predominantly Indian to this very day, and the most recent Maya revolt against the Spanish colonists was in 1911); but most of the time -- more or less all of the time, in the Old World -- ecological factors are secondary to cultural ones. Look at the history of rice: it was adopted as the basic grain of Persia before it was adopted as the basic grain of China (and long before Japan), because good Zoroastrian piety inspired the Sassanids (IIRC) to import this miracle grain and thereby ensure the prosperity of their peasants.

   I think that what's wrong with Diamond is best summarized in his book _Collapse_, the only work I have ever heard of that discusses how civilizations disintegrate and makes no reference whatsoever to Rome. His thesis is that civilizations fall due to ecological mismanagement, so he doesn't mention any that don't fall due to ecological mismanagement -- even the Roman Empire itself! (He admits in the preface that not all civilizations fall due to ecological reasons, but that suggests that the title of his book -- _Collapse: How Civilizations Choose to Fail or Succeed_ -- should have been something a lot less authoritative.)

   For what I think is actually the case, look up Peter Turchin's _War and Peace and War_, an "old-fashioned" -- or rather, newfangled -- work pointing to the importance of civilizational cohesion (Ibn Khaldun's asabiya, but not the normal Arabic definition of it) in the rise and fall of civilizations. Turchin is a population biologist by training, and tried turning his modeling techniques to history -- whereupon he was astonished to discover that a simulation with one variable and about four rules accounted for pretty much the whole range of human experience. The gory, algebraic details are in _Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall_; but _War and Peace and War_ is more accessible and has more historical examples.

   One other sidenote: guns and steel were not the fates of the two societies that Diamond was probably thinking of (certainly the two that came to my mind). It's a widely-held legend that Cortes and Pizarro defeated the Mexica and the Inca respectively by attacking with massive numbers of technologically-superior forces.

   In reality, Cortes was the leader of a band of adventurers that never got over 2,000 men and was normally closer to 150, most of whom carried swords and crossbows (and abandoned their clumsy, hot steel cuirasses for Mesoamerican quilted-cotton armor); he had about 30 horsemen at the beginning of his campaign, and in one of his decisive early battles was down to something like 15. He didn't win by a technological advantage; he won by his personal courage, the courage of his men, an enormous amount of luck... and the fact that the Triple Alliance thought that it was a good idea to leave a small state that hated them like poison, Tlaxcala, independent -- twenty miles away from Tenochtitlan. (This meant that they could fight the Tlaxcalans to collect a lot of prisoners for sacrifice, and give their men a lot of promotions: the _Codex Mendoza_ has a table of Mexica level-ups that would embarrass Squaresoft.) A friend of mine once quipped that any civilization that thinks that _that's_ a good idea, deserves what's coming to them.

   Pizarro maneuvered his way into a badly confused war of succession, imprisoned/befriended one of the two leaders, murdered him, and then pulled the same trick on the other one -- he won through politics, not through power. Even then, it took the Spanish government forty years of campaigns with regular infantry to fully conquer the Inca Empire (I've always wondered why Spain accepted Pizarro's treacherous conquest as opposed to telling him to stuff it, but his having already shipped back an entire roomful of gold bars and two roomfuls of silver may have had something to do with it)... but, again, it wasn't technology that let Pizarro win, it was politics, the same kind of thing that let the Manchus conquer China.

   See _Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest_ for details on both. You may even want to read _Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness_ -- an extremely, exuberantly partisan Catholic history of the conquest of Mexico (but still adventuresome, rousingly entertaining, and meticulously researched), which omits not a single detail except Hernan Cortes' five Mexica concubines. (Cortes was married at the time, and was a fairly serious Catholic. As a fairly serious Catholic myself, I have often tried to figure out what on Earth he thought he was doing, but have more or less given up on it.)

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2. keyboredMar 2025
   I spent 20 minutes skimming this for some reason. The conquest of the Incas might be most famous through Guns, Germs and Steel which isn’t mentioned here.[1] But the article seems to put a similar emphasis on the conquistadors being severely outnumbered, glazing their exceptional fortitude and skill etc. That narrative (from Guns, although the article uses The Last Days of the Incas as the source) has been critiqued in Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest[2] which among other things points out how Germs doesn’t mention or properly contextualize the native allies that Pizzaro had.

   Again I just skimmed it (for a mere 20 minutes) but I didn’t find much mention of the allies. Before the civil war among the Spanish (after the conquest) there only seems to be things like

   > The Siege of Cusco began on May 6, 1535, and the Spanish believed they were well and truly fucked. Discounting their native allies, they were probably outnumbered at least 500-to-1, and were completely cut off from reinforcements.

   What I’ve read on the matter says that Pizarro et al were always severely outnumbered by their allies as well. Why “discounting their native allies”? Were they so few that they didn’t matter?

   Yeah they had many native allies for some reason. This is mentioned for Cortes (Aztecs) but I didn’t find this for the Inca case.

   On the glazing:

   > In the case of Hernan Cortes, about 400 Spanish soldiers (later increased to over 1,000) subjugated the Mexican Empire of about 6 million inhabitants. In the case of Francisco Pizarro, about 180 Spanish soldiers (eventually rising to over 1,000, but with rarely more than 500 ever concentrated in one place) conquered the Inca Empire of maybe 10 million inhabitants. In both cases, the Spanish invaders had almost no understanding of the local politics, geography, culture, religion, or people they were invading. In both cases, the expedition leaders deserve a ton of credit for extraordinary leadership and competence while leveraging a technological imbalance to achieve a staggering military force and diplomatic multiplier.

   We don’t have to wonder why the conquistadors in modern day Mexico were so amazing.

   > All of this happened in, like, 15 pages of Conquest of New Spain. Note that the author, Bernal Dias, was a member of Cortes’s expedition and an outright loyalist of Cortes to the point of siding with him closely during the multiple stages of the Spanish expedition civil war between Cortes and the Cuban Governor. So Dias might have some incentive to portray Cortes well, but he still portrays Cortes as constantly lying to basically everyone, including his closest advisors, and sometimes for the sake of embezzling expedition funds at the expense of his own men. It’s wild.

   But someone is wrong on the Internet?

   > It might seem obvious that the Spanish leveraged their technology to achieve incredible military victories over the Incas and Aztecs, but I’ve actually seen some pushback against this point. Often, it’s pointed out that the Spanish didn’t have that many pieces of their most advanced technology (guns and cannons), and most of their foot soldiers didn’t have close to full plate armor. On the BadHistory subreddit,[3] there is a highly up voted and often referenced nine-part series on Cortes’s conquest of the Aztecs which argues, among many other things, that Spanish military superiority is highly overrated. And yes, that post is one of the reasons I’m writing this whole essay, because someone is wrong on the internet.

   That “someone is wrong” link[3] is an introduction (nine-part series) where the introduction polemically critiques Terminal Narrative. So it’s Historiography (I guess). The first part[4] critiques the narrative that the Spaniards in modern day Mexico conquered their foe, the Aztecs, which were “500 times more numerous”.[5]

   So what is the author’s refutation of that? On the one hand we have an anonymous redditor who either is a historian or has, with the help of other people, managed to create a cosplay environment of pretend-historians. (This is to say that I trust that they are in actual fact historians.) The author here has a book by one of Cortes’ men who had every incentive to embellish the tale for the audience of the Spanish Crown. Well he does not get into the Aztec side of things and instead goes back to the Incas:

   > MacQuarrie does a better job of describing how the Spanish trounced the Incas than Bernal Dias does with the Aztecs, and by MacQuarrie’s telling, the single most impactful element of Spanish military technology was cavalry.

   So no epic feat of disproving “someone is wrong on the Internet” happens here. Just telling us again what one man named MacQuarrie thinks.[6]

   My understanding from both the Reddit post as well as what I’ve heard indirectly about Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest[7] is that the conquest of the Americas by the conquistadors was first made into history in the predictably chauvinist way (winners writing history) as superior civilization or breed of men vanquishing the inferiors. Obviously that would be too much for a modern audience. So Germs from the 90’s tried a different tack. That book explicitly says that it is not a racist or chauvinistic history of how Europe became so successful. But critics claim that it still manages to be chauvinistic in how it wrongly claims that the conquistadors vanquished their enemies while being comically outnumbered.[8] And that they overemphasize planning and tactics and downplay being at the right place at the right time through no foresight of their own. Another point is that the failed conquistadors are given little consideration. Naturally, in popular history, it’s more exciting to only consider the expeditions and conquests that were successful, while contextualizing them with the failed attempts would perhaps ruin the flow of the story.[9]

   [1] I have not read it

   [2] ditto

   [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2vf565/myths_of...

   [4] https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2qn5us/myths_of_...

   [5] In [4] that is quoted from “Voldemort”, ostensibly Guns, Germs and Steel

   [6] I would think that quoting someone being wrong would prompt them to engage with any of their specific points, not just saying that they disagree with the narrative of severely outnumbered Spaniards conquering the natives and then going back to their Inca source.

   [7] And the first link in [4] cites that book as “wonderful”. For what it’s worth, good or bad.

   [8] Moreover with books like Guns the historiography used is Environmental Determinism. Which might be correct or wrong but it needs to be interrogated as well since it is not obviously correct. And that approach to history might just as well end up concluding that Europe was destined to win out under any contingency (see the introduction to the critique of Terminal Narrative in [3]).

   [9] PS: On second thought the expedition of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba into Yucatán is famous, and the Maya defeated them.

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3. JoeDaDudeDec 2020
   I can't read the (paywalled) article, but I did read the book "Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest" by Matthew Restall, summarized in [1]. In said book the author posits that the Spaniards were mostly outnumbered and resorted to "theatrical violence" as a way to exert control over the population and turn them into a compliant labor force.

   That still makes them pretty bad though, even if there is a somewhat rational reason to be bad. Their badness was one of their tools in the conquest.

   [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Myths_of_the_Spanish_Con...

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