[roughly]

They 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]

> 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.

[roughly]

It'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.

[jcranmer]

It'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]

And 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.

[mistrial9]

this 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]

Rome 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]

Malthus 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]

How did the Spaniards justify this to themselves?

[hennyting]

Because the natives joined in with them. The Aztecs were hated and ruled through military subjugation. They had a strict class system where the warriors were always trying to expand the empire and held most of the power. They required tributary and glory for the warriors (Aztecs started out as mercenaries). They'd invade their neighbors and bring in captives for human sacrifices... During one of their big holidays they "sacrificed" over 20,000 people by ripping open their chests with rudimentary knives.

And they also ritualistically tortured, killed and cannibalized children during the dry season. https://www.eiu.edu/historia/Thoele.pdf

That was extreme and insane to most of the native inhabitants. And it was even more outrageous to Europeans (or Asians). The Spanish weren't hero's and they exploited the natives and unwittingly spread disease but the Aztec civilization had to go and it died just as much from internal revolt than from the small amounts of European men that Cortes commanded. I have more respect for the Pueblo's than I do for the Aztecs. They survived harsher environments and had impressive self-taught farming and structural engineering skills.

[taejavu]

This 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]

I 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]

You do realize that the Aztecs also practiced slavery as well.

[AlecSchueler]

That in no way justifies the behavior of the Spanish at the time.

[heresie-dabord]

It would have been horrifying to witness mutilations and sacrifices.

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

[AlecSchueler]

Would it have been more horrifying than seeing public executions or bodies mutilated through castration or circumcision in Europe?

[AlecSchueler]

False reporting by the people who were on the ground, people with the perverse incentives of fame and fortune.

[bigbillheck]

They were getting fantastically rich.

[TedDoesntTalk]

Religion