How did tiny Portugal and Spain, with less than 10 million inhabitants...

How did tiny Portugal and Spain, with less than 10 million inhabitants, manage to conquer a whole fucking continent just like that? The population of the Americas was from 30 million to 100 million, and they didn't have trouble kicking the asses of that many people in just a few decades. Were natives really that incompetent?

>horses
>disease
>rifles

The Spanish and the Portuguese were centuries ahead of the Americans, of course they beat them even with inferior numbers.
I'd like to see who you would fare against people with steel armor and weapons, horses and guns and all you had were fucking clubs and arrows.
Also, Portuguese America before colonization was really underpopulated when compared to Spanish America before colonization, so they had an even easier time.

Conquering tribal morons isn't that hard. Especially easy when you have decent metalworking and can scare your enemy with meme thundersticks that don't do anything.

it was a really long trip for the time tho, and the first contacts with some of the tribes weren't as easy as you might think

>rifles

How many man did Cortez have with him again?

How many ships did Vasco have at his disposal when compared to the Muslims in the Indian sea?

I think you're selling them short.

Biggest canons won't do you much good when you don't know how to use them.

Much less when you're months away from re-suplying said weapons.

Diplomacy was also a thing.

>be Spaniard
>cough to spread disease
>stab a couple indians

>be Portuguese
>shoot anything that moves from the shore
>stab a couple indians/africans/indians/mussies

>population of the Americas was from 30 million to 100 million
It was barely 30 million and entirely centered on Central Mexico and Peru (the only regions with advanced Empires and large-scale agriculture).

Once those two regions fell the rest was a walk in the park.

>implying spaniards didnt get disease too
>"Spanish colonizers treated the native population brutally"
>coming from the British
there aren't any bigger hypocrites in this world i swear, britain is almost a caricature of an evil empire

>10 million
More like 6 M
>5 M Castile
>1M Portugal

>using your limited yet relatively advanced resources so effectively you conquer an empire and break into new markets without much of a sweat
That kind of European gumption and ingenuity is precisely why they were able to control 90% of the worlds landmass. Whereas comparatively technologically sophisticated powers such as China lacked spirit and innovation and consequently stagnated. Backwards plebs in Asia or the Americas could never imitate the European genius to look towards the horizon.

I said less than 10 million. 6 million is less than 10 million so it's accurate.

Just like British did

>By conquering irrelevant shithole inhabited by archaic tribes or simply desert like Australia or Canada

China has learned now though

This post is very stupid.and you just want to say that you are special and superior

Why are there people like you?

Spain and portugal went looking a way to reach india

Population aint everything m8. Assuming youre from the Americas or Western Europe, you should have learned this in high school or earlier. But Ill give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you want a more open discussion of this topic.

Assuming by rifles you mean gunpowder, these are three of the big factors, along with steel and infighting among different native groups (lots of mesoamericans hated the aztecs for example and helped the Spanish take them down). Disease is probably the biggest one since it killed off so many people and destabilized any larger organizations of natives.

>Dominican

>>shoot anything that moves from the shore

That pretty much started after Albuqerque was fed up with the bloody backstabbing nature of the merchant ports.

He wrote a letter to the King explaining the mindset of the people he met.

Transcript of the letter is found in Crowleys book: "The Conquerors" page 337- letter to King Manuel.

In Portugals case it was also about finding Prester King John, and to launch a Crusade on Mecca from the Indian sea.

They almost suceeded at it too.

Bloody fucking Venetians

Most natives literally died of disease or helped the spaniards kill other natives. They weren't incompetent, just kinda retarded and naive. When Cortez tried to take over Tenochtitlan he literally got his ass kicked by rock-throwing mongols. Lots of mounted infantry also fell into canals and drowned.

>ywn embark on the adventure of your life and against all odds utterly BTFO the established powers from the other side of the planet which you had never heard or known about and be discussed about in a taiwanese noodle forum 500 years after

Forgot pic

>How many man did Cortez have with him again?
A bit over 500 when he first set out. He took an unknown amount of losses to disease and small battles. 1,400 by the time he got to Tenochtitlan according to a letter he wrote (he had subverted a force of troops under de Navarez sent to arrest them and converted them to his cause). Then he lost 860 between La Noche Triste, the subsequent death march, and Otumba, bringing him down to 440. Then when he besieged Tenochtitlan later, he had ~1,200 men again (100 cavalry and 900-1,300 infantry). All this minus a garrison at Veracruz.

In total, he had between 2,000 and 2,500 men. for his multi-year conquest. Spaniards anyway. If you count native allies than add at least several tens of thousands.