On top of being what enabled them to form alliances, it also begs another question. If it was primarily these masses that overwhelmed the Aztecs (and I don't disagree) then what need did they have of outsiders, let alone letting them act as rulers? It was the perception of alien levels of weaponry and technology that both gave the locals the morale they needed, and justified the Spaniards being deemed leaders.
In the end the defeat of the Aztecs was decided just as much by politics as by violence.
Also it's not like Cortez won every battle, they were even catastrophically defeated in the "night of tears". Coming back from that defeat wouldn't have been possible without indigenous allies and their thousands of skilled and well-equipped warriors fighting on Cortez' side against the Aztecs even after Cortez was driven out of Tenochtitlan (and not to mention logistic support which was probably even more important).
People sometimes needs a push to get onboard an idea. When you have been inside a system for along time it is difficult to see to what extreme is not just and how very possible it is the change it. Looking at you USA.
You presuppose they needed the outsiders. The Aztec empire was not some ancient, unwavering fact of life which the native mesoamericans could not conceive of changing. It only lasted 100 years. It is entirely possible that the rebellion was going to happen anyways in the next few years or decades and the arrival of the Spanish was just the butterfly flapping its wings that happened to trigger it at that moment.
> justified the Spaniards being deemed leaders.
The native allies of the conquistadors installed the Spanish to replace the Aztecs in exchange for a lower tax rate and increased independence. They did not accept spanish leadership, they just preferred empowering a neutral third party than any particular longstanding rival. Spanish domination came later after smallpox decimated the native population and intermarriages with the pre-existing elite meant there was no native power structure left to stand up to them.
Like put the Black Prince up against Alexander and even Alexander has a uphill battle. Now take away Alexander's cavalry and give the Black Prince primitive firearms. Unless Alexander gets the jump on him or finds a way to make the meeting of forces otherwise highly unequal, that battle is probably only going one way, and that's for forces of comparable motivation levels.
The numbers disparity only gets you so far ancient empires generally lack the social sophistication to motivate soldiers (especially when recruited from their possessions/allies) to the degree that more modern societies do. Those Aztec conscripts who have been "voluntold" into service by their communities at best are not going to fight to the bloody end. They do not consider themselves citizens of "The Aztec Empire". They are not going to march to their near certain deaths for the benefit of the empire like they're some Red Army machine gun squad piling into a rowboat to cross the Volga in 1941. They can not even have the mental framework for that because a pre-industrial society does not run enough surplus for the state to do the things it must to create that in more than a "kings guard" sized force.
Edit: For a comparison point, the Romans are "a level up" from a lot (but not all) of the societies match up with and they just mop the floor with them. And consequently, anyone who doesn't get subjugated right off the bat winds up looking a lot like the Romans socially and militarily because that's what it takes to compete with them. The Aztecs are competing with borderline stone age societies. They are essentially a bronze age society that's mastered the art of subjugating stone age societies. Spain is half a dozen or so levels up from that. So while the outcome wasn't guaranteed it shouldn't really surprise anyone that the kind of force that Spain can project across an ocean and beat what the Aztecs can field in their own back yard.
Exaggerating a bit, but I'm fairly sure the Spanish speech was: "if you kill the other guys with your much better weapons, you will reach El Dorado".
And they basically did. Not a singular city of gold, perhaps, but the Spanish looted tens of billions of $$ worth silver and gold from Central/South America between 1492 and 1550. Which is all the more impressive given how little European manpower it took and how low their relative incomes would've been at the time.
Ironically, Europe already had cochineal, but they foraged the source (parasitic beetles), while the bronze-age Aztecs had the brilliant idea to farm them on planted oak forests.
The dude was beyond in over his head but somehow pulled it off.
The Spaniards had armor and combat formation. Having basic protection and having men march next to you closely must make you quite confident.
On the other hand Aztec fighting style seems to be "Go berserk and attract enemies to you so you can harm them to take them as captive so you can sacrifice them later for prestige". You are actually competing with your fellow warriors to show how brave you are". It seems the culture has optimized for not taking into account fear of death.
That might be a big advantage against other tribes that have the same level of tech than you but haven't bet the farm on militaristic culture but it probably breaks down pretty quickly on armies who rely on "confidence in the collective" rather than individual prestige and have somewhat of a tech edge
"This same zero-sum competition extended to the Mexica army, which as soon as battle was joined became not an army but a swirling melee of individual glory-seekers. The purpose of the Mexica warrior was not the victory of the group, but competition with his peers, and the way to win the competition was to secure captives for sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli. This singular fact drove almost everything about Mexica combat strategy, or the lack thereof. Great warriors wore towering feather headdresses to attract opponents so that they could be disabled and sacrificed. The Mexica had projectile weapons, but specifically designed them to be non-lethal and only employed them for demoralization. The Mexica wielded long, shallow obsidian blades and flint-studded clubs that were designed to incapacitate by cutting a hamstring or crushing a knee, rather than to kill. The only way to advance as a Mexica warrior was to sacrifice more captives than your peers,8 and the incentives of the system shaped everything else."
After some more reading, it seems indeed that this Inda Clendinnen book from 1991 may be lackluster on how the aztecs actually behaved on the field
I don't think they could have taken control of the Aztec empire without allies and a lot of political intrigue. I think a good modern analogy was how the US quickly took over Afghanistan after 911. You could say we did it with a small group of special forces and a lot of air power. But really it is more like there were already (warlord) factions ready to strike at the Taliban who knew they could win with air support and everything that would come after. For the Aztecs, the role of the cavalry was like those B52 strikes.
Oh, those foolish savages! They're so dumb!
Good thing we know what they thought as they died, so we don't have to guess with self-congratulatory scorn as our guiding self-check.
"the Spanish were vastly outnumbered, so their weapons alone were irrelevant in the battle"
Irrelevant? Tell this to Atahualpa Inca, who, during the second big Spanish conquest, was taken alive by a group of mere 168 Spanish soldiers, unsupported by any local warriors, while having at least several thousand guards with him. Force ratio of 40 or 50 to 1 ultimately made no difference.
When the Spanish showed up, the Aztec's enemies didn't immediately line up to join the anti-Mexica alliance, as some people tend to think. The Spanish weren't seen as gods and worshipped. Pestilence would be a factor later on, but in early days the natives they met were quite healthy. The Spanish weren't seen as foreigners from across the sea or anything special because that wasn't really a concept for the natives. The Spanish were just another funny looking tribe from over the horizon that had showed up to fight for space, much like the Aztec's once had.
The Spanish initially had to fight hostile tribes on their own. There were battles where they had to fight through the night, while they were injured, and against incredible odds. The Spanish, especially the ones from Extremadura, were widely regarded by contemporary Europeans as some of the very best soldiers on the continent. Only after they'd done some hard fighting were they seen as having a chance against the Mexica and worth making alliances with.
So, yes, the Spanish won allies who helped them fight the Mexica, but they needed their guns, steel, and horses to win those allies.
What's interesting is how highly he speaks of his indigenous allies and even opponents, there's not a hint of disrespect (well, minus the Aztec practice of human sacrifices of course), he praises the skill, courage and discipline of the warriors, the craftmanship of their weapons and armor, and he's full of awe and wonder when they first arrive in Tenochtitlan:
"Among us were soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, including Constantinople, all over Italy, and Rome, and they said that they had never seen a plaza so well laid out, so orderly, so large, and so full of people."
It doesn't mention the spanish conquest but I wouldn't be surprised if all those tribes living under Aztec rule needed a little morale boost and seeing a bunch of guys with iron weapons and armor who wanted to do away with the aztecs surely helped with that
[1](https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-aztecs-by-inga-clendinne...)
I read that same review a couple of weeks ago and it made a deep impression. It's one thing to know "the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice", and another to be confronted with the scale, sadism and calculation with which it was practiced.
"If anything, the Spaniards lacked the conceptual framework to fully comprehend the industrial-scale, ever-so-civilized and bureaucratic evil of the Mexica, and so they inadvertently downplayed it
[...]
No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings"
"Starbucks-and-airport-lounges class" is a good phrase. I'm gonna use that one.
TL;DR - native alliances were important, but Spanish armor made them nearly invincible against native weapons, their military tactics were superior, and cavalry were extremely overpowered against armies made up only of footsoldiers. Weaponry and tech were certainly not irrelevant.
- European diseases
- superior weaponry
- alliances with local Aztec enemies
The first wave of smallpox killed 5-8 million and is by far one of the greatest factors.
There's also plenty of accounts from the early days of Cortez' invasion where the Spaniards had a very hard time against the indigenous warriors even when the Spaniards were not largely outnumbered.
The peasants immediately broke and fled, which is where you get the crazy ratios from - fleeing armies are extremely vulnerable and near harmless. Had they fought, they likely would have inflicted far greater casualties on the military forces. However given there were roughly comparable peasant and military forces, the outcome was not in question, so it would have been suicide. Of course so was fleeing.
What most of the comments along with article writer are missing - it was not just technology, that Spanish used, but organization structure and command of professional military forces - that is one of the reason why 1000s of peasants were incapable to fight against couple of men in armor, as they lacked coordination - that would be the same as pitting street kids against a swat team, even if they were given the same weapons.
The same applies to Aztecs that had different POV and mindset against battle-hardened professional European soldiers - when you read how Aztec demise unfolded, in some of it you have to question what they were thinking, but that is mostly because of our modern bias, that has not much knowledge of their beliefs on how they viewed world around them.
Also, not more important fact - now, just like then, not all people were interested to be involved in war, and a peace agreement for them was even better than being part of alliance(and the choices here are to die for foreign Aztecs as one of them) and join fight. And those who already hated Aztecs to the guts, also had plenty of motivation to see all of that empire burn.
PS. People who are mentioning bunch of foreigners are clueless about European history - whole European FEUDALISM political system was born out of bunch of foreign raiders, that we know today as vikings and their descendants, that carved up Europe and limited their in-fighting with rules and brought unified force against those that challenged them. Europeans had pretty much the same scenario before repeated on native Americans and many times.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/16/mexico-500-yea...
Within five years as many as 15 million people – an estimated 80% of the population – were wiped out in an epidemic the locals named “cocoliztli”. The word means pestilence in the Aztec Nahuatl language.
im not exactly sure what this means, but if you are interested you should read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
the reason it happened this way is because the Americas had very few domesticated animals and we get most of our diseases from animals.
That book has some many errors in it I actually suggest you don't read it.
"why were Eurasians able to so easily take over the Americas" than this book.
First there were just more old world diseases which could infect humans than new world diseases. Prior to contact, the old world had about 80 to 90% of the world's total population, so a priori if a disease was to emerge in humans it was overwhelmingly more likely to emerge there. On top of that the old world saw much more domestication of livestock (and particularly livestock animals that had evolved alongside great apes) which in turn created more opportunities per capita for diseases to jump to humans.
For the exchange itself, Europeans were building the ships and sailing them to the New World. It was primarily Europeans on those ships, and especially those passengers who would be most likely to be incubating diseases (the old, young, and infirm) were overwhelmingly more likely to be Europeans headed west. Europeans afflicted with diseases after they reached the Americas would generally not have been allowed on ships back to Europe, or if they were they would likely not survive the voyage. Syphilis likely came from the new world, and it's easy to see how, but if there had been some American equivalent to small-pox it would simply have not been able to make the journey before going extinct as the native populations harboring it were wiped out by Old World diseases.
For it to have been "the other way around" the Americas would have needed a vastly different ecology and the people living there would have needed to beat the Old World to the level of technological development necessary to make contact.
There were also rival indigenous states (Tlaxcala, etc.) that were never conquered by the Aztecs but had been trapped in continuous low-intensity war with them for years.
Though it is worth saying the Aztecs weren't universally despised. Some regional dynasties were allies. Some of those were also unpopular.
And as most military based societies, Aztecs had also a big problem with management of ecology and natural resources, caused with their own development, big cities with a less than optimum management of fecal waters, and never ending wars.
Deforestation came with dry spells and agriculture suffered while they were trying to negotiate a solution with the stars. All the social structure was supported by a lot of drugs abuse, probably.
Which is both likely true and morally against what we currently seem to believe.
There was unrest and violence in the region long before Cortez arrived on the scene, when he did he was the external catalyst to ignite the powder keg. When reading accounts of the conquest, information gathering, political scheming and negotiations were often more "decisive" than the actual fighting.
The historical record is completely clear and we have first hand accounts, primary sources, from the people present. It's all readily available and anyone interest can easily verify it.
And yet, even in the comments responding to yours, people confidently state just blatantly untrue things.
- Gunpowder and steel had essentially nothing to do with Cortez's victory.
- The Aztecs did not see the Spaniards as Gods
- Smallpox played a role at the very end but had little to do with Cortez's victory.
- They leave out the primary reason Cortez won (his ability to build a coalition of native people who hated the Aztecs).
- They leave out the secondary reason Cortez won (superior European battle tactics).
- They ignore the fact that there were Europeans fighting on both sides (a delegation was sent from Cuba to stop Cortez; they were the ones that actually brought the smallpox not Cortez).
The idea that the Aztecs took the Spanish for gods and specifically that Moctezuma mistook Cortez's for the returning god Quetzalcoatl is fiction. We actually know the exact book that it came from.
Smallpox did play a role but it was brought by the slaves of Europeans sent to _stop_ Cortez nearly two years after he started fighting the Aztecs. By the time smallpox killed Moctezuma's successor, Cortez's victory was already assured. The disease was not the key to his victory; it was more that it prevented insurgency after the conquest.
Also worth noting that if your theory was that Cortez won because of the gun powder or steel that is hard to square because by the time the two forces clashed the Aztecs had more of it then he did given the rival European forces trying to stop him.
Cortez won primarily because he had an army with a nucleus of veterans from the Italian wars that applied the lessons of the Reconquista.
The technology that let him win was European tactics and political manuevering not anything physical they brought with them.
Usually a single explanation isn’t sufficient, but and it’s likely a combination of disease, better weapons, cultural differences (attitudes towards war and one another), alliances as you mentioned, etc.