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by shakow 1814 days ago
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?

1 comments

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?
I’m not saying that they would have defeated the Spanisn in the long-term but conquering and permanently occupying all the native states in Central America would have significantly more expensive for the Spanish. Without the diseases I think it’s not unlikely the Spanish empire in the new world would have more closely resembled British India i.e. a bunch of semi independent states and directly controlled areas with the majority of population still preserving their culture and language. And in general European colonization would of the new world would have been more similar to what happened in the rest of Asia and Africa.