Why do people sympathize with these guys over the Spanish?
They're arguably worse, aren't they? They were also conquerors who tore a bloody swath through Mexico, and their religion was a lot worse than the Spaniards'.
Why isn't it seen as a bad vs bad scenario?
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The Aztecs were peaceful people. Don't believe Spanish propaganda.
It's not about them being morally better or worse, its about Spanish incompetence and destruction of advanced civilization.
People weren't in the business of preserving foreign civilizations back then. It was pretty much unthinkable that you wouldn't totally fuck up and ruin outsiders you came across if there was something to be gained from doing so.
1) The Aztecs were not of European descent.
2) The Aztecs lost.
3) Traditional fictional tropes portrayed by the media make people who don't have a clue about history like them due to reasons 1 and 2.
>Spanish incompetence
>Spanish are expected to know about germs before germ theory
sympathy for aztecs is just like hatred for HRE or ERE or like that Stirner memeing.
Though they may not fully realise it, I think that Western people have a deep-rooted understanding that Christians are supposed to be held to a higher moral standard.
Yes and no. I don't totally buy this, there were many conscious people even then. It was poor management, epidemics and quite a bit of savagery. That would go differently under British rule, somewhat differently at least. Spanish and Portugese - plague to be avoided,
People confuse "the Aztecs" with "the Mexica." The Spanish conquered a fuck of a lot of territory and technically there were really only "Aztecs" in Tenochtitlan. I don't really think the Aztecs themselves are usually portrayed very sympathetically, but most of the people the Spanish conquered weren't Aztecs.
Imagine that, in the period of Spartan hegemony over the rest of classical Greece, a foreign power showed up and toppled Sparta, freeing the helots and the other city-states they had dominated. Now imagine that that foreign power proceeded to conquer the rest of Greece and persecute its inhabitants. Don't you think that today we'd sympathize with the Greeks in that scenario, even though the Spartans themselves were tyrants?
The Spaniards were set to be the top dog in Europe for once after they found all that gold and silver in the New World. Except they fucked up and brought all the silver back at once, and they fucking tanked the silver market and suddenly silver was cheap as fuck and the Spaniards ruined the chance to become rich as hell.
Because the scale of destruction on the Spanish side was much greater than that of the Aztecs. And now we hardly know much about the people, so we lost a lot of history and knowledge forever.
I think this this Aztecs were bad and, at least the ruling class, deserved what they got. But the Spanish being what they considered civilised were sort of expected to hold themselves to a higher standard. They weren't avenging crimes against against their people or stopping a potential threat or liberating an oppressed people. They destroyed a civilisation for gold. At least in part they were supposed to spread Christianity but they didn't really do that because there wasn't much left to convert afterwards.
Even with their technology, it seemed as though they were just as greedy and violent as any savage.
Because they were an advanced society and the Spanish landed just 5 days before they figured out how many hearts you had to pull out to develop a working smallpox vaccine which the spaniards would've destroyed anyway FUCKING WHITES amirite?
2 reasons
1: Regardless of the morals involved, they built some insanely cool shit which is now lost to history forever.
Their capital was the 6th most populated city in the world at the time, was like 4x the size of london, and had unmatched hydro-engineering feats. Even the spainish first person accounts remark that despite the savagry of human sacrifice their buildings, gardens, and cities were stupendous, and this was all built without metal tools or beasts of burden.
2. They really weren't any worse then the Spanish.
For starters, while they did systematically sacrifice people, the scale involved is a lot less then what people think. Per captia, they actually sacrificed less people per year then most european countries executed (hell london alone killed more per captia) and it's not like those executions were any less savage either: They had heads on pikes being paraded around and everything. At least for the aztec sacrifices, they were well taken care of and more or less lived as kings before they got their gut torn open, and they were garunteed the best afterlife possible. Finally, all of the people the aztecs were sacrificing were being captured in wars and battles instead of being killed on the spot. For this reason, the aztecs killed WAY less people in wars.
So it's really just a matter of the aztecs capturing their enemies and wars and killing them later rather then killing them right then and there like europeans did. At the end of the day, the amount of people being killed is more or less the same. Also, they thought they needed to do the sacrifices to stop cosmic energy from dying out, which is a pretty good reason.
Not really, see above.
Also, while the Mexica were definitely abnormal in their degree of human sacrifice, some amount of it or just bloodletting was very, very common throughout all of Mesoamerica. The Mexica weren't even the only ones gathering sacrifices from the Flower Wars the "victim" parties did too.
Being evil and being utterly destroyed isnt the equal payment
Did Germany deserve to get killed and repopulated by french and pols after ww2?
no because every culture is unique and genocide is an overblown punishment that offers no chance or repentence
the ultimate cruelty
I'm this guy
and I'm not really sure what you're saying "not really" to. Nothing I said was incorrect (and the Sparta analogy was meant to illustrate my point, not to demonstrate an exact parallel).
I'm not claiming that the other altepeme were nonviolent utopias, or that being victims means they were also saints. That doesn't change the fact that, when the Spanish arrived, much of the rest of Central Mexico was suffering under Aztec hegemony.
I did use "the Mexica" loosely, to refer to all the Nahua peoples and city-states in the Valley of Mexico, so if that's what you're referring to, yes, I was speaking slightly imprecisely.
What did the Aztecs do that was particularly 'bad' compared to any other people in that part of the world?
The European mental illness that is Pathological Altruistic Disorder.
>their religion was a lot worse than the Spaniards
well, at least they were pretty straight about it
>On May 6, 1527 an army of Spanish Catholics and Lutherans beholden to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and led by Charles III, [Duke of Bourbon]marched into Rome. For eight days these unpaid troops looted and pillaged the city, inflicting especially harsh treatment on priests, monks and nuns, forcing the Pope to flee the Vatican, and destroying art and smashing statuary. During the occupation of the city more than 2000 bodies were disposed of in the Tiber River, and another 10,000 were buried in Rome and its environs.
>"In the meantime, [Pope] Clement remained a prisoner in Castel Sant'Angelo. Francesco Maria della Rovere and Michele Antonio of Saluzzo arrived with troops on 1 June in Monterosi, north of the city. Their cautious behaviour prevented them from obtaining an easy victory against the now totally undisciplined Imperial troops. On 6 June, Clement VII surrendered, and agreed to pay a ransom of 400,000 ducati in exchange for his life; conditions included the cession of Parma, Piacenza, Civitavecchia and Modena to the Holy Roman Empire (however, only the latter could be occupied in fact). At the same time Venice took advantage of his situation to capture Cervia and Ravenna, while Sigismondo Malatesta returned in Rimini.
>"Emperor Charles V was greatly embarrassed and powerless to stop his troops, by the fact that they had struck decisively against Pope Clement VII and imprisoned him. Some may argue that Charles was partially responsible for the sack of Rome, because he expressed his desire for a private audience with Pope Clement VII and his men took action into their own hands. Clement VII was to spend the rest of his life trying to steer clear of conflict with Charles V, avoiding decisions that could displease him"
now, just in case this derails into muh eternal spaniard:
>Pope Clement VII had given his support to the Kingdom of France in an attempt to alter the balance of power in the region, and free the Papacy from dependency, i.e. a growing weakness to "Imperial domination" by the Holy Roman Empire (and the Habsburg dynasty).
>The army of the Holy Roman Emperor defeated the French army in Italy, but funds were not available to pay the soldiers. The 34,000 Imperial troops mutinied and forced their commander, Charles III, Duke of Bourbon and Constable of France, to lead them towards Rome. Apart from some 6,000 Spaniards under the Duke, the army included some 14,000 Landsknechts under Georg von Frundsberg, some Italian infantry led by Fabrizio Maramaldo, the powerful Italian cardinal Pompeo Colonna and Luigi Gonzaga, and also some cavalry under command of Ferdinando Gonzaga and Philibert, Prince of Orange. Though Martin Luther himself was not in favor of it, some who considered themselves followers of Luther's Protestant movement viewed the Papal capital as a target for religious reasons, and shared with the soldiers a desire for the sack and pillage of a city that appeared to be an easy target. Numerous bandits, along with the League's deserters, joined the army during its march.
>The Duke left Arezzo on 20 April 1527, taking advantage of the chaos among the Venetians and their allies after a revolt which had broken out in Florence against the Medici.
I think most people sympathize with the loss of a unique culture moreso than considering the Aztecs "good". The Romans were violent too, but the decline of Rome is still considered a sad process in history, because their civilization was beautiful.
The Spanish did not just fuck over the Aztecs. They enlisted other natives for help and enslaved them afterward. Hardly selfless. The Aztecs of course had pissed these other natives off beforehand with their spooky sacrificial shit, which was pretty much the intention - fear was used to maintain order in an empire decentralized between city states. The sacrifices were quite brutal, but despite the stereotype most were war captives or criminals - and in the end despite the flashy ritual aspects the victims were just as dead as someone who'd been drawn and quartered or broken at the wheel. Nevertheless they ignited LARP wars for arbitrary sacrifices when genuine enemies were hard to find. Mexico suffered sporadic killer droughts, which is believed to have created an atmosphere of superstition and desperation that helped ritualized sacrifices take hold, along with the concomitant population overshoot that drought brings, and lack of many suitable local animals for domestication.
Aztec cultures were not monolithic. Quetzalcoatl was a god who refused human sacrifice, and some Aztec philosophers questioned the necessity of it towards the end. There is some dispute over whether the priesthood really believed the same mythology as the commoners - new gods from conquered people were constantly syncretized in folklore but the religion of the priesthood seems more esoteric and possibly not really. polytheistic.
Only two things I can think of about the Aztecs seem "good" from a modern POV: universal education, and harsher punishments for nobles than commoners. I like the latter. Bizzare given how divergent their morality generally is.
Punishing various forms of altruism with death. And historically, very stupid, inefficient war.
>t. Omlec
Nah, the Spanish were way worse.
>Everybody says that all the aztec were violents thing is spanish propaganda
>posts real propaganda
Spaniards directly destroyed pyramids
the sun in that pic looks sort of displeased
It must be because it wants MORE human sacrifices.
>Per captia, they actually sacrificed less people per year then most european countries executed (hell london alone killed more per captia)
citation needed
>find amazing new civilization in an amazing new land
>kill everyone and destroy everything for gold
>Why isn't it seen as a bad vs bad scenario?
I think the educated can loo beyond that, but lower people see everything as being either good or evil, and everyone fitting into one of those two categories.
look, excuse me.
This thread is full of retards, fuck you all, Spain did nothing wrong
Just enslaved and genocided tons of people.
Do people really think that or are you just kidding?
>Why do people sympathize with these guys over the Spanish?
Guildfags, SJW and hipsters
I've always been in favour of the Spanish, hell if I were a Spanish citizen at the time I would have joined Cortez.
>implying there is anything wrong with enslavement and genocide
Is a fact.
or you think the silver walked by itself to the galleons from the mines?.
Natives in the mines.. that was a mass human sacrifce.
genocide
ˈdʒɛnəsʌJd
noun
the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group.
There's a reason why every other tribe in the area was willing to ally with the Spanish if it meant getting rid of the Aztecs for good.
Mexican here, I hate how they noble-savage these assholes, no better than the Spaniards.
The Mayans where the shit tho, best precolonization civilization in the entire continent.
Because they hated the aztecs, but they didn't know the spanish. So they got a cancer while curing the aids.
>or you think the silver walked by itself to the galleons from the mines?.
Natives were granted rights. negroes were the only ""people"" that were allowed to be enslaved inside the Spanish empire.>
>2029658
>Spanish incompetence
>Conquer an empire with a 500 strong expedition
>Incompetence
> and destruction of advanced civilization
Like Rome did with the Carthaginians. A latin tradition that must be preserved and that killed any possibility of a rebellion
>Le I would have been very smart if I had been there and would have ruled the world.
Economics were pretty dull back then.Most people were not really familiar with inflation outside of real state. Also Spain was the top dog of Europe for 2 centuries with 1/3 of France's population
>2. They really weren't any worse then the Spanish.
kek.Not even SWJ tier retards claim this currently. If the Spanish would have really being that bad more rebellions would have popped in an area were they held little control. And half of Mexico sided with Spain in the war of Independence.
>For starters, while they did systematically sacrifice people, the scale involved is a lot less then what people think. Per captia, they actually sacrificed less people per year then most european countries executed (hell london alone killed more per captia) a
nigga you just went full blown apples to oranges
>Natives were granted rights.
Right to die carrying clay out of the mines . yeah.
Why do you fuckers have to make it racial every goddamn time
1) The Aztecs developed independently from the Old World civilizations
2) They disappeared
Are you retard or something?
Because they can.
>Le I watch John Green so I hace a PhD in history kid.
Kek. You are a waste of oxygen
Natives were ensslaved , and tons of them died in the mines. you don't need a PhD to know that.
Because the spanish are european
>destruction of advanced civilization.
Are you saying that the spanish weren't move advanced?
Aztecs made some fancy buildings and a shitty version of hot chocolate, meanwhile the spanish learned how to sail across oceans, primitive chemisty/gunpowder, and most importantly they unlearned things like "we have to sacrifice people to keep the sun going"
>Natives were ensslaved
Only at the beginning and barely any.
>The Leyes de Burgos ("Laws of Burgos"), promulgated on 27 December 1512 in Burgos, Kingdom of Castile (Spain), was the first codified set of laws governing the behavior of Spaniards in the Americas, particularly with regard to the Indigenous people of the Americas ('native Caribbean Indians'). They forbade the maltreatment of the indigenous people and endorsed their conversion to Catholicism. The laws were created following the conquest and Spanish colonization of the Americas in the West Indies, where the common law of Castile was not fully applicable.
>The scope of the laws was originally restricted to the island of Hispaniola but was later extended to Puerto Rico and Jamaica. These laws authorized and legalized the colonial practice of creating Encomiendas, where Indians were grouped together to work under a colonial head of the estate for a salary, and limited the size of these establishments to between 40 and 150 people. They also established a minutely regulated regime of work, pay, provisioning, living quarters, hygiene, and care for the Indians in a reasonably protective and humanitarian spirit. Women more than four months pregnant were exempted from work.
>The document also prohibited the use of any form of punishment by the encomenderos, reserving it for officials established in each town for the implementation of the laws. It also ordered that the Indians be catechized, outlawed bigamy, and required that the huts and cabins of the Indians be built together with those of the Spanish. It respected, in some ways, the traditional authorities, granting chiefs exemptions from ordinary jobs and granting them various Indians as servants.
Now go back to fucking reddit. Thank you.
Most of the Aztec technology was lost, though. They had stuff in their codexes we've never rediscovered, herbal knowledge, cure for cancer, astronomy, they calculated dates for other galaxies even. It's not fair to say they were less advanced when most of their libraries were burned. If you knew anything about the Aztecs you'd know how advanced they were.
Thanks for the audible guffah friend.
Went from taking your post seriously and thinking you had a good point to laughter in the moment of an eye.
>herbal knowledge, cure for cancer,
Basically their own flavour of alchemy. The Aztecs didn't even achived Egyptian levels of technology.
Many of those laws were ignored in the colonies. There's a reason why we have a lot of legal documents from the natives making demands against the colonial authorities. And abuse and exploitation continued in the lands the natives had to work in. Hell that stuff still happens in northern mexico today in those rural areas and ranches.
>what was the Repartimiento
Not technically slavery, no, but de facto slavery is enough for the silver medal.
They were not slaves. Only niggers were enslaved in the Spanish empire.
>Repartimientos
Basically feudalism
The Aztecs were reported by the Spaniards to have 4,000 or so remedies for various ailments. None for cancer that I know of and some if you read them were strange with questionable ingredients like a hawks wing. But then again I recall in medieval Europe they used powdered rabbit pussy for pregnant women. That said, Aztec medicine was still pretty effective, Cortes himself remarked how the physicians there were better than those of Spain and there was no need to bring them to Mexico in a letter to the King.
See the codex Aztec Herbal, and Book 10 of the Florentine codex. Maybe Book 11 too with the names of the various plants used.
Incas>Mayans>>>>>>>Azkeks
>Spain did nothing wrong
They destroyed a culture of thousands of years you dense fucking mong. And that was something the Aztecs weren't fond of, hence they didn't even left garrisons in their territories, convert people or force their language. And yes, they expected people to revolt so they could still wage war and have sacrifices.
And yes, it was an effective system, only reason Spaniards got so much support was due to their capacity to make a breach in the frontlines, thanks to their technology, so the native army could flank.
I've literally been here for months and no one even knows this basic stuff from them.
It's every fucking time muh sacrifices and muh children, when the spaniards were as ruthless () and even they said that barely two kids were offered in Tenochtitlan every year, when the conquistadors said the saved guys from the sacrifice and they told the conquistadors that they had no reason to live anymore, that they found as many sacrificed people in Tlaxcalla as in Tenochtitlan, that even the first gen mestizo and christian historian of Tlaxcalla regreted the destruction of the Mesoamerican culture and I could still go fucking on, but what's the fucking point if BARELY ANYBODY FUCKING READS HERE. FUCK THIS BOARD
>A latin tradition that must be preserved and that killed any possibility of a rebellion
yeah, that's why literally all roman historians wrote history so their countrymen would stop being degenarate
>yeah, that's why literally all roman historians wrote history so their countrymen would stop being degenarate
This post makes no sense butthurt mestizo
l'll leave this here in case you want to fucking read for once in your life en.wikipedia.org
you think that the prehispanic culture was wrong because your morals.
Who tells you what is good and what is wrong?
god?
society?
your mommy?
>god?
Obviously
>we dindu nuffin!
I've literally never seen people sympathising the aztecs, must be a mexican thing
>This fuckin meme
> Plz dont pay attention to all of the mass burials
> Plz dont look at all the art of people pulling out organs to appease their gods
> Niggapriests use to cut there penises in order to draw blood and some how that garnered favor?
>Aztec gods confirmed to be gay vampires
One of the few times Europeans did the right thing and genocides an evil culture sparing the world its influence.
>They're arguably worse, aren't they?
opinion.
>their religion was a lot worse than the Spaniards'
opinion.
>Why isn't it seen as a bad vs bad scenario?
because not everybody bases their views in subjective reasoning like a retard.
>plz don't pay atention to the mass burials of soldiers in europe despite being all peaceful christians
>plz don't look at pic related
Pic related is propaganda, asshole
And you think that the destruction of a culture is wrong because of your morals. What's your point?
>propaganda
>those people did bad stuff!
>nu-uh, your people did bad stuff!
Everyone was and is shit.
1491, , pic related
Explain to me how they are different, then. Technically, aztec sacrifices are more analogous to war casualities, as I said further down, but my point is that if european nations alone executted as much people as the aztecs sacrificed, and then had full out wars with tons of inflicted casualities there, wheras the aztec's barely killed anybody in wars in lieu of gaining sacrifices instead, then eureorpean nations had far more inflicted deaths going on.
>Are you saying that the spanish weren't move advanced?
In a lot of ways, sure, but the fact Tenochtitlan was what it was demonstrates that in some areas the aztecs were ahead of them.
They make it racial because they want to claim credit for the hard work of others because they look similar and share a few lines of genetics.
But the spaniard were worse. And the brits even worse.
Oh right they never made a public event of murdering someone before thousands of people.
It's like the US Presidential election system, everyone really hates both, but choose one over the other for meta reasons. Aztec-bois are like HC, and Morion-lords are like Donny T...
...ello.
Do you have any book recommendations on the Aztecs or other native Americans?
>only good quality post in this whole thread
>Cortes estimates "three or four thousands souls" per year sacrificed by the natives
>V. A. C. Gartrell estimates that England executed 7,500 people per year (comparably)
>therefore the English were more murderous than the Mexicans
Cortes gave that figure as the /lowest/ amount of sacrifices he estimated in a year, not as a yearly average of sacrifices (and that figure itself was only given in a first report when he was still learning the culture and territory).
Cortes actually estimated a much average than that (pic related).
Most estimates accepted by historians are 20,000 sacrifices per year on average (minimum).
>*much higher
It's not meant to be war though
The problem is 20,000 still seems too high. There is no archeology that supports this many people.
>Cortez
nice source you have there.
Iron maiden was never used, also torture wasn't used as frequently in europe as most people think
nobody wants to be fucking tortured, so people were quick to confess almost all the time
>20000 in 4 days
>5000 in a day
>34.7 ritual sacrifices per minute without resting in 4 days.
You know, spaniards and portuguese used to over exaggerate things.
Their entire world view revolved around expanding and capturing their neighbors to be sacrificed so that the sun doesn't burn out.
That's a rather narrow view of their worldview. Human sacrifice was only a partial component of the religion and philosophy of the Nahuas.
I don't think the spanish could have or would have wanted to get an accurate read on such a number. Not just because they were Christian Propagandists, but because it was way too hard. It's hard for engineers to get accurate fucking traffic data in a 21st century high surveillance society. Getting an accurate read on executions in a large empire without a system of writing or means of identifying people would have been much harder.
They saw "A lot" and said "thousands."
The same way we get ridiculous myths like "300 spartans" fighting "100,000 persians."
Codex showing spanish encomendero burning natives alive because they were late with the tribute.
The spanish rule ended up way worse for the natives in general, enslaving whole cities and sending them to work to death in their mines and haciendas.
This is very true, I remember feeling repulsion when I found out the people of the city of Cempoal, who were the first to help the spanish with food, carriers and warriors were all enslaved and given among conquistadors after defeating the aztecs. their city depopulated and forgotten.
Honestly no, is not bad vs bad, more like having the flue vs HIV. The more you research the ore you realize the spanish were the ISIS of their time
Sacrifice = murder to appease a false god.
Execution = punishment for crime committed.
It's not that complicated...
I'm pretty sure that the txacalans have nothing to do with that.
Also what happened in cholula was a preventive attack, it was demonstrated later that was innecesary, but i would like to see you all in their position surrounded by potential enemies in a city that was before allied with the aztecs you sure would have done better and ending living in peace and harmony uniting all america under a flag of love, or maybe you would have ended in one of their pyramids as a war prisoner.
Well they didn't come with intentions to trade, so of course they were met with hostilities.