The conquest of new Spain
Vivid, powerful and absorbing, this is a first-person account of one of the most startling military episodes in history: the overthrow of Montezuma's doomed Aztec Empire by the ruthless Hernan Cortes and his band of adventurers. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, himself a soldier under Cortes, presents a fascinatingly detailed description of the Spanish landing in Mexico in 1520 and their amazement at the city, the exploitation of the natives for gold and other treasures, the expulsion and flight of the Spaniards, their regrouping and eventual capture of the Aztec capital.
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2010–2026years
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- Also "The Conquest of New Spain" .. written as a first hand account by a soldier for Cortes.
Obviously cruel and exploitative what the conquistadors did, but it's an example how fact can be sometimes more incredible than fiction.
How a small band of soldiers got in way over their heads and had to bluff and bully their way through, or would have certainly been killed.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108490.The_Conquest_of_N...
- I say in another comment that humans like to eat meat because meat is a very good food for humans. What we like and don't like to eat depends on our biology and is tuned to drive us to find the food we need to survive, and thrive. So I don't believe you can decouple enjoyment _of food_ from the needs of a biological body- and so you can't sensibly speak of "purely for enjoyment".
On the side, this biological drive to feed is of course tuned for a different era, before technological civilisation and it leads to excesses today, e.g. the over-consumption of sugar, and the over-consumption of meat, particularly in _some_ parts of the world (e.g. the Americas and Western Europe). I certainly agree with the adage "eat food, mostly plants, not too much". But "mostly plants" means "also some meat". A little meat, we do need to eat for a balanced diet and a healthy life.
In any case, the desire to kill an animal to show off one's hunting prowess is rather on a different level to biological needs. Nobody _needs_ to kill an animal for sport in order to stay alive. Everybody needs to eat. That is the ocean of difference I refer to in my comment.
I'm not convinced that if more people grew up hunting, they would accept recreational hunting more- I think the opposite would be the case. I believe that people in the developed world, today, are so far removed from the reality of raising and killing an animal to take its meat, that they have lost all sense of perspective on the matter. I believe that this distance from the act of killing has caused people to adopt extreme views, like veganism (though not necessarily vegeterianism, more broadly), or a complete indifference to the fate of animals. If more people had direct experience of hunting -or farming- and slaughtering animals, I believe we would see many fewer embracing these extreme views.
I don't think it's possible to decouple morality from the opinions of a specific culture. Morality is not a universal. For example, some human societies practiced cannibalism, even advanced societies like the Aztecs. There is a book that I love, "The true history of the conquest of new Spain", written by one of Hernan Cortez' conquistadores, Bernal Díaz del Castillo [1]. In the book, he describes the horror of the Spanish at the everyday cannibalism of human sacrifices by Aztecs and also the self-mutilating cult of the Aztecs' priests. People in different historical times have found very different things acceptable or unacceptable. We can't really hope to find "a bright moral line, without reference to a specific society's opinion" for anything from within the perspective of having been born and raised in a particular socieity, in a particular point in space and time.
Personally, I think that valuing all life as sacred is what comes closest to a true moral universal. This might surprise you, but my point is that valuing life means accepting the fact that life on Earth is made to consume other life to preserve itself. In order to survive, every living thing on the planet must eat some other living thing. Well, except for plants that do us all a big favour of underpinning the great food chain with their ability to feed directly on the rays of the sun. Everything else- we must eat each other; and plants. In any case, I believe also that valuing life above all else means that we should only take what we need. This means eliminating excesses like industrial food production and mass consumption, for instance, and certainly it means reducing the suffering of the animals we kill for food to what is absolutely unavoidable.
Hunting for sport is absolutely avoidable and I don't think it comes close to killing for food.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernal_D%C3%ADaz_del_Castillo
- Yeah, a lot of people simplify it and say it was guns, horses, and armor that allows Cortes to conquer the Aztecs, but I eventually learned that it was nothing like that.
The guns, horses, and armor (although there were only a few relatively primitive guns, mainly cannon) did offer an advantage, their opponents learned to deal with these elements. A couple hundred against tens of thousands will lose even with the tech advantage.
They really only had a chance because they found lots of allies willing to overthrow their cruel oppressors. Even then, something like half of the Spaniards were killed in the street fighting in what is today Mexico City, both in the initial escape after negotiations went downhill and the return with a large army.
The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz contains an interesting account of the fighting that took place, and he makes it clear that their allies were essential to their victory. It's a fascinating read.
- At least for the first conquistadores, this is wildly incorrect. It is true that they saw the Mesoamerican culture as wrong (particularly the human sacrifice bit), and put the conquest of territory for Spain as of high importance, but their understanding of the world was more complex than what you describe. I really recommend reading Bernal Díaz del Castillo‘a firsthand account of the conquest of “New Spain” to get an idea of how these people viewed the world!
- Despite the many issues, I'd still suggest anyone interested in the Aztec empire at the time of the Spanish conquest to read The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Díaz was present not only on the Cortés expedition, but on the earlier expeditions led by Córdoba and Grijalva.
The article mentions, plausibly so, that the issue of human sacrifice was often exaggerated by the Spaniards. Nevertheless, it is clear that the practice (and self-mutilation, primarily of the ears) was an important aspect of not just Aztec life, but many of their neighbors' as well.
Díaz writes, "I have spent a long time talking about the great cue of Tlatelcoco and its courts. I will conclude by saying that it was the biggest temple in Mexico, though there were many other fine ones, for every four or five parishes or districts supported a shrine with idols; and since there were many districts I cannot keep a count of them all. [...] Every province had its own idols, and those of one province or city were no help in another. Therefore they had infinite numbers of idols and sacrificed to them all."
Discussion of deities and their numbers aside, Díaz' repeated report is that sacrifices of various sorts were widespread, and that evidence of human sacrifice, or the holding of prisoners intended for sacrifice, was found almost universally from the coast to Mexico.
Edit: Reading again, on the subject of tzompantli, or a similar arrangement for sacrificed remains, Díaz writes, "They strike open the...chest with flint knives and hastily tear out the still palpitating heart which, with the blood, they present to the idols in whose name they have performed the sacrifice. Then they cut off the arms, thighs, and head, eating the arms and thighs at their ceremonial banquets. The head they hang up on a beam, and the body of the sacrificed man is not eaten but given to the beasts of prey."
- Check out more history of natives' genocides in the Americas:
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"A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies"
- Paperback https://amzn.to/2dnhEhE
- Kindle https://amzn.to/2dngoLi
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"The Conquest of New Spain"
- Hardcover https://amzn.to/2duUoKt
- Kindle https://amzn.to/2d1NWyU
