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by poisonarena 1814 days ago
Who trained Cortes? The Spanish developed tactics for decades and decades, building knowledge from previous wars and conquests.
2 comments

Cortes was an opportunistic lawyer/notary he had no military experience before the conquest of Mexico and I’m not sure there is any evidence that he had any military education.
Well he overthrew the Aztec Empire..

Also his dad was an infantry captain. And he seemed to be commanding his armies, and armies of allied tribes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Otumba

Yeah he turned out to be a fairly competent commander but it was main his diplomatic skill that allowed him to conquer Mexico. There is no way he would have won without the tens of thousands of native allies that fought alongside the Spanish.
It does not make any sense. To this measure, every last soldier in a European army until post-WWII era should be a highly trained veteran.
I think you are missing the point entirely, I am saying that there is a thing called collective military knowledge, The Spanish had experience in fighting wars for many years. This knowledge of tactics and techniques is passed on through training.
And I'm saying that virtually every country on Earth has some military knowledge. You really think that France/the German principalities/England/the Ottoman Empire/the PL Commonwealth/the Kievan Rus'/... just forgot everything after a war, and that Spain, miraculously, was the only country to understand that experience is a thing?

And do you believe that the Southern American populations religiously waited for the White Man to bring them the concept of armed conflicts, and that they lived in perfect harmony until then, miraculously oblivious to the concept of conquest and imperialism?

I think you may be putting words in my mouth and getting pretty worked up, because I didn't say what you are implying. I am just stating(for the third time now) that Spain was at the cutting edge in 15th century warfare. Regarding your last paragraph, which is on some other tangent, but since you brought it up, it is known that the Aztecs and Mexica had a very different view on the purpose of warfare.
While it’s true that the conquistadors had immense success in their initial encounters with the natives, the Aztecs would have adapted eventually to counter the Spanish had they not been crippled by the European diseases. This seems to have already been the case in the siege of Tenochtitlan where the Spanish suffers huge casualties despite having similar numbers (together with their allies) to the Aztecs. This was the case with many of the North American tribes and even with the diseases it took the Spanish another 150 years to subjugate all of the Mayan cities.
How could you say that like it is a fact? How do you know the Aztec triple alliance would have countered the Spanish?