Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?

globalized community that we all participate in today. It began in the fifteenth century when Europe backed up against the Wall Of The Atlantic under immense pressure from external forces and cut off from the core economic power bases of the East, the sources of the spice and silk that had driven the global economy historically throughout Eurasia, are finally forced to innovate. Key names like Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal work on turning the Atlantic Ocean from a barrier into a superhighway.

Generational knowledge accrued from captains reporting in on tides and wind currents and whatever land they've managed to reconnoiter, building out the map as they go along, are able to find a way around the South Tip Of Africa directly to India, and therefore cut out the middlemen. The Spanish, meanwhile, are heading west. We honor the story of Christopher Columbus in 1492.

He sailed the Sea Blue. That was entrepreneurship. This was an expedition to arrive at the oriental markets by traveling west.

Of course, his figures were completely wrong, and he was saved by the fact that, unknown to him, there was an entire continent in the place where he thought Japan, China, the Spice Islands would be. Initially, that was perceived ironically as a disappointment, right? But over time, it became increasingly apparent this was a source of potential in land, in wealth, and in people that could be exploited.

A key turning point happened in 1511 when a Spanish ambitious nobleman seizes control of Cuba, de Velasquez. He sends out from this power base expeditions, exploring the coast of what we would call Mesoamerica, Central America. Later in 1518, he assigns that task to a man who he's had a somewhat tempestuous relationship with, a man named Hernan Cortes.

He'd arrived in the New World in Cuba in 1511. He had some legal training, so he served as a notary and worked his way up to being Alcalde, which is chief magistrate on Cuba, but he had much greater ambition. And he takes this warrant from the governor and runs with it.

He begins recruiting men to a much wider and much more ambitious goal, not just to explore the coast, but to penetrate into the interior, to find out what's there and to seize control of them. When the governor realizes what Cortes is up to, he tries to stop him. This great moment on 11/18/1518, He arrives at the waterfront just as Cortes gets into a boat to go out to his ships offshore, and the governor calls out to him, What are you up to?

And Cortes assures him, Don't worry, I have this all under control. But of course, the governor had lost control at that point. Now it was Cortes' expedition.

So this is the background. And again, as you say, he is literally going off the side of the map, right? He's entering Terra Incognita, unknown to Europeans previously.

His political antenna honed by years in the islands enables him to appreciate at a very early stage that there is a significant imperial power which has hegemony here in the Mainland, and that its subject peoples chafe under the authority of whoever this lord or imperial power is. He arrives in the lands of the Totonacs, who had recently been incorporated into the imperial orbit of a people who call themselves the Mecca, hence Mecca as we know it, but have come down to history based on their mythical origins in a land called Azlan as the Aztecs. So for simplicity's sake, that's what we'll refer to them as.

The Totonacs resented this authority as all subjugated and subordinated peoples do. And they saw the arrival of these outsiders as a potential opportunity to throw off the authority that had been imposed on them. So having established this relationship with the Totonacs, Cortes begins to march inland and he enters the territory of the Lashkarans, who are like an autoimmune system immediately rallied to defeat him, to expel him from their territory.

But he fights him to a standstill for such a period of time, the Lashkarans and he arrive at a new kind of arrangement. The Laxcalans again appreciate his strength, his power, his potential. They swing over to his side and will then henceforward serve as guides and reinforcements for his expedition deeper into the interior.

Can we pause here and talk about the numbers? So how many men had Cortez brought with him? Even the Talasha Collins had much larger numbers than Cortez did, so even the standstill is an impressive military achievement, especially because he's fighting without native support.

So what are the numbers even at this point? A few 100 on Cortez's side and multiple thousands on the Lashkarlan side. It's at this point that the critical technological differentials from the old and new world really begin to come into effect.

The classic text which got me invested in this whole scenario in the first place is Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel. He enumerates in the title those critical advantages that the Spaniards had. Guns in reality weren't so significant.

Once the native peoples got over the shock value, they appreciated given the very slow reloading times involved in firearms at that time, that they weren't so significant as assets on the battlefield. But steel was critical. Local weapons were carved from wood and from stone and from obsidian, that volcanic glass, which is razor sharp when honed to a point and quite dangerous as a slashing weapon.

But against the steel armor and especially the steel helmets that the conquistadors were wearing, it was much less effective. And the conquistadors were drawing on military traditions of the old world that went back incorporating long Toledo steel sword blades. They used those as thrusting weapons to take out indigenous warriors who were coming in with cut and slash weapons, which of course open up the side of the body to be taken out very early.

So the combination of the technology with generations of inherited military training and skill meant that the conquistadors had that critical edge on the battlefield. Now they weren't invincible, and Cortez again playing those mind games. He was taking casualties, and he was careful to bury his dead underneath the houses that they were sheltering in, so the Lush Carthons wouldn't be aware that they were even having some successes in hand to hand combat.

It was as much a mind game as it was a physical game. And the ultimate weapon, of course, the conquistras brought with them was their horses. I cannot emphasize or overemphasize enough how vital the horse was to the conquistras once they entered into the interior of the American continent.

They had the external asset, they had sail power, which enabled them to land anywhere they wanted on the coast, but in the interior, the horse was decisive. There were no native equivalents. The horse originated in North America, but it had subsequently died out.

And the local peoples had not just no horses, but no beast of burden generally. That was not integrated into their economies, into their ways of life, or into their military. The Inca, who we'll discuss in a moment, they did have one, which was the Lama.

When they campaigned, their armies trailing for miles behind them would be these endless baggage trains of pack animals, llamas. The Aztecs had had no equivalent. Their only domestic animals were the turkey and the chihuahua.

And speaking of dogs, the conquistros also bought these big war mastiffs, these fighting dogs which wore armor and were trained to take down men. Again, imagine the terrifying impact that would have for the indigenous people. The horse was the critical asset.

On attack, you could blast through any native formation, which didn't not just have the weapons, but the training or discipline to be able to stand up to mass shocked cavalry. And if things were going bad for the conquistadors, they could retreat much faster than, of course, the enemies could chase them. So Los Calans appreciate all these assets coming together, and they see this as their opportunity.

They were the holdouts, the last remaining major entity in Mesoamerica, which were still able to go toe to toe with the Aztecs. They've been completely surrounded. The Aztecs were upping the ante every year with these ceremonial flower wars, which are becoming more and more obviously wars of conquest.

And the Laxcalans have been cut off from the coast and from sources of salt, right? So they were being pushed to the brink. This is a Hail Mary for them.

If we ally with these outsiders, these strangers, who are just few in number after all, we may have some potential way to break out of this strategic trap that we've had imposed upon us. So they lean over to the size of Cortez, and they travel with him to Tenochtitlan, the capital, the glittering jewel in the midst of Lake Texcoco, the capital of the Aztec Empire. And again, this is a dramatic moment when Cortes passes through the causeways out into the city, and encounters Moctezuma II, the Hueh Latawani, as he was called, the great speaker, the emperor of the Aztec empire.

These two worlds come together at that moment. The interface between them was Cortes' interpretermistress, Donna Marina Milenci, as she became known, who is translating from one side to the other. So the dialogue that occurs then is one of those great tipping points in history.

What was the perspective of Moctezuma II? He was aware Cortes was coming. This is his empire.

He has envoys and emissaries and scouts and spies everywhere, and they're reporting back to him that something has washed up on the shores of our empire, and it is determined to meet with us. He initially bargains with Cortez, urging him to leave. He provides him with precious gifts, which of course just inflames Cortez even more, and just once he's got hold of Aztec gold, he's just determined to go all the way to the center.

So he continues playing this double game. His advisors, his counsel, urge him not to allow Cortes to proceed to the capital. His own brother, Cuitlahuac, tells him, If you allow this man inside your house, he will take your house away from you.

But Moctezuma proceeds, and from that he's been condemned by generations of historians, right? This was a mistake to bring the conquistadors into the heart of the empire itself. I actually think that was his best option, whether he was aware of it or not, because it was better for him to have Cortes as his guest within Tenochtitlan than it was to have Cortes, this random element at loose within his empire, talking to the subject peoples, inflaming them possibly against central authority.

He felt perhaps Cortes was what he said he was, an envoy from a great emperor on the far side of the vast ocean. Cortes, again with the mind games, had no warrant to say he was a diplomat or ambassador for anybody. He kept telling anyone who'd listen, I speak for the mighty Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor.

Of course, Charles V had no idea who Julian Cortes was. Cortes, again, is just winging it, the incredible improvisation here. And for a moment, the stasis.

The great turning point comes when word arrives from the coast that one of the Aztec regional military officers, on his own initiative, has taken action against the conquistadors left behind on the coast, the ones with the Totonacs, and some of them have been killed. Cortez sees this as his pretext. He marches into the palace of Moctezuma II, the Aztec Cuellatuani, tells him that for his own safety he was now being taken under the protective custody of the Spanish, and he should come with him or else there will be violence.

And this is the moment when Moctezuma's entire worldview just collapses, right? Nobody had spoken to him like this before. His psychology just disintegrates at that point, and he meekly allows himself to be led away.

He tells his people, Don't resist. I don't want bloodshed. I will pass with these strangers.

And then once Cortes is rounded up, the officers at the coast responsible for turning on his men there, he has them in front of the emperor and the entire court burned alive, which is a form of punishment totally unknown to the Aztecs, they watch this in grim silence. So once Cortes has seized the emperor himself, once he has Moctezuma, he already has the empire. He governs through what is increasingly becoming his puppet.

And Moctezuma seems to have fallen almost under the spell of Cortez, the classic Stockholm Syndrome. He gives him a grand tour of the city. Cortez, and again, subtle flex on his power, has brigantines, small sailing boats built, and he takes Moctezuma with him on a sailing cruise on Lake Texcoco, and the emperor's astonished at this new technology of using the wind to sail on the water.

Having the emperor was the key. So the emperor's mistake wasn't inviting Cortes into the city, it was making himself vulnerable by staying there also in an adjacent palace. If he had gone to some further location, made some excuse, a pilgrimage or an expedition of some kind, and had ruled through subordinates, Cortes would have been baffled.

He couldn't go chasing after the emperor. That would be obviously too provocative. But without the emperor there, Cortes would have had his options extremely limited.

And I don't know what he would have done in that circumstance. But because Moctezuma stayed in his capital, he made himself the target. Once he was taken, this was the key to controlling the entire empire at that point.

left the governor on Cuba, of course fuming. He rallies another expeditionary force, because Cortes is stealing his thunder, right? And he sends us under Panfil de Numayes, a larger force than the one Cortes brought with him originally.

This lands on the coast. Cortes appreciates he has to move, so he leaves one of his subordinates, the hot blooded Alvarado, behind in charge in Tenochtitlan, takes as many men as he can to the coast, confronts De Nevaez, defeats him in a minor battle, and again the diplomacy wins over the entire expeditionary force that the governor had dispatched. He tells them, My friends, why are we fighting?

We have the empire at my disposal. Join with me and we can share in the riches. So he wins over the vast majority of this new force.

It becomes effectively reinforcement. Marches back to the capital. He finds the mood has turned against him.

The problem with not being in charge is you can't be everywhere, and his subordinate, assuming that the Aztecs were mobilizing against him, had started a preemptive strike. There was a festival, the aristocracy, particularly the warrior caste, were celebrating, and Alvarado just descended on them, massacred everybody. The survivors rally the population, and when Cortes returns, he finds himself effectively under siege.

The people are so appalled now with the failure of their Huehletuani. When he tries to pacify them they throw stones at him, mortally wounded he either dies or the Spanish finish him off because he's no longer any use to them. So now Cortes is trapped in the city in Tenochtitlan.

He determines to break out, and that is, as you say, La Norte Triste, the tragic night, because so many of his men are left behind. They're either killed as they try to escape the city across the causeways or forced to retreat back to the palaces and they're taken alive and sacrificed subsequently. Cortez gets away with a minority of the troops still at his disposal, and makes it back to Laxcalan territory.

That was the critical aspect, the two features of the entire campaign. One, he has enough strike power with enough horses to defeat the Aztecs when they try to finish him off the Battle of Otumbo. They feel he's on the run, they have the numbers, the conquistadors are dragging their tails between their legs as they flee, Cortes himself is grievously wounded.

We can finish them off. And they had the numbers, they were winning, but again Cortes identifies where the Aztec general is. He rallies enough horsemen to blast through the Aztec ranks and take out their command and control.

The Aztec army disintegrates and the Spanish are able to flee. So the battlefield had bondages. They had their horses, their steel, critical, but just as critical as the diplomacy.

If the Laxcalans had turned on Cortes at that point, he would have been finished, or not one Spaniard would have survived. None of them would have made it back to the coast. But the Laxcalans see for their own reasons, not out of any generosity or humanitarian impulse to welcome back the conquistadors, they still see we are committed to these people and to our alliance.

So they give Cortes shelter. He recovers physically, begins to rebuild his strength, and is determined to go back to Tenochtitlan and for round two, and this time we're not going to be indulging diplomatic niceties. The Laxcalans, their own perspective on this, if you go to Laxcalan territory today, the Governor's Mansion there has murals on the wall, and these depict the Cortez and the Conquistadors from the Laxcalan point of view, and it's fascinating to look at how the relationship is not between a superior and a inferior, it's between equals.

You see them depicted in the same scale, engaged in diplomacy between partners, not between subordinates and dominant figures. The Los Calans drove a hard bargain. We want territory carved out of the Aztecs.

We want our own fortress in Tondichitlan after this is over. They saw this as them using the conquistadors, not the other way around, which is very important to bear in mind. That the Aztec empire, a distance, if you look at a map, seemed impressive.

But this was an imperial construct, and not just the remaining independent entities like the Laxcalans, like the Tarrascans who we can discuss later, were hostile to the Aztecs, so were so many of their subordinated peoples. The Totonacs on the coast, the Chalco states on the shores of Lake Texcoco, they chafed under Aztec hegemony and authority, and they too saw the conquistadors as an opportunity to finally shrug off the authority, the demands of the Aztecs and get revenge in a lot of ways. So as Cortez builds up for the final campaign against Tenochtitlan, against the new Hue La Tawane, Cuitlahuac, and then after he died, his brother, the last of the Hue La Tawanes, Coatomac, he has indigenous people flocking to his banner from all over Mesoamerica.

He's emphasized that he's still in the fight, he still has those advantages, more reinforcements are arriving at the coast and they're being integrated into the Conquistador army. But the force that marches on Tenochtitlan, the total numbers, the Conquistadors were maybe one half of 1% in raw numbers of that force. The overwhelming majority were other Mesoamerican peoples who see this as their final reckoning with the Aztecs.

And this is the integration, again, of the technology with the diplomacy. Cortez knows to take the city, he has to control the lake. And again, the innovations.

They need sulfur for their gunpowder. They have guns useless without gunpowder. So an expedition goes into the mountains to the volcano, Papa Catapetto, and they dangle with ropes inside the caldera of the volcano, scooping out the sulfur they need as the critical ingredient for their Another one builds prefabricated brigantines, boats, in their different sections, and then has untold numbers of porters, human load bearers, bring these prefabricated pieces over the mountains to the lake.

They're assembled, and then they're loose in the lake and then now they have control over the lake. Right? So bringing together the technology, the innovations with the local manpower, and this is the force directed against Tenochtitlan in the final battle.

I actually didn't know those stories. That's that's crazy.

Right. I think they'd have a pretty decent odds of getting getting some agreement there. Absolutely.

The old phrase is, the enemy of my enemy is my friend and diplomacy war. That's always very important.

the last of the Huayuertahuany surrenders to him and how he occupies, The territory and most importantly, the top of the social hierarchy, the existing structure as much as possible is allowed to persist. The conquistras just decapitate the local nobility and insert themselves at the top. Now this is the playbook that will continue to be applied less successfully throughout the rest of Mesoamerica because the existing political entities there aren't so sophisticated, right?

Nonetheless, there are rumors, there are always rumors of lost cities of gold and more conquistadors are now flooding into the new world to seek advantage of this. One of this is a distant cousin of Cortez named Francisco Pizarro. He met with Cortez and got the playbook, as you say, about how this is to be done.

And then, again, in one of these conquistador business ventures, he finds the funding for men and ships and begins pushing south down the West Coast Of South America, crossing the Equator and finally arriving in what is now modern day Peru. And he encounters what he's looking for, a sophisticated culture on the scale, in fact, in terms of territory on a much broader scale than Cortes had encountered in Mesoamerica. This is the land of the Inca.

When he arrived, there was civil war. The previous Sapa Inca, Huayna Capac had died in 1525 and his two sons, Atahualpa and Huascar, turned on each other. Atahualpa had just won the civil war and he was proceeding to Cuzco, the Inca capital, to be formally enthroned as the new Sapa Inca.

And that's when word arise to him that strangers have entered his realm. And again, we're talking 168 men pushed into the Andes Mountains and are seeking him out for reasons unknown. He encounters them outside a place called, as you say, Cajamarca in 1532, and he sees not threat but opportunity.

And just like Moctezuma II had been advised to not treat with these people, so does Adahualpa's envoy, who reports to them, These are not men of good faith. We can take them out. They tend to sleep together.

At night, we can set fire to wherever they're staying and just take them all out in one fell swoop. But Adolfoapa is interested in what they have to offer him. He's seen the horses.

He's seenin fact, Pizarro made a specific case of impressing the Sapaterinca with his horses. He sends one of his key lieutenants to put on a display of horsemanship, and famously, he charges right at the Sapaterinca and all his court, and the horse stops, just inches from Adelwalper's face, snorting and breathing, and Adelwalper has an absolutely stony face and professes to be unimpressed, and says, I will meet with your master at a time of my choosing. After the Spaniards leave, he has all of his court, including his generals who flinched or showed fear, executed just to make the point that we're not to be intimidated by these people.

He sends a blocking force, tens of thousands of men, to cut off any retreat and then he proceeds to meet with Pizarro at Cajamarca with the vast expanse of his army. There's a saying in Peru that Atahualpa was planning to have Pizarro for lunch but Pizarro ended up having him for breakfast. Once he enters into the confines of a narrow constricted courtyard space that's when Pizarro lets off the ambush.

He lets fly with all his artillery and all his musketry for the shock value, unleashes his horses, and the Adolfo himself is overwhelmed and taken prisoner at that point. So this, again, is the playbook, the copybook, as you say. Go to the top, seize whoever is at the very pinnacle of the social hierarchy, you control the entire structure.

Conquistros themselves admitted the night before that encounter, there were so many campfires from the Inca army scattered across the hills surrounding Cajamarca. It looked like the twinkling of stars at night. The conquistos themselves admitted when they saw the number of Inca troops filing into this courtyard, they were losing control of their own bladders out of fear, right?

They knew what the risks were here, but the shock value of that initial impetus was enough to carry them through. The Inca had never heard gunpowder weapons fired in any format before. The ancestral founder of their empire was Pachacuti, which means the thunder bearer, but to see a real world exemplar, that must have been just beyond shocking.

So the actual physical damage that the cannons and hakubas inflicted was relatively minor, but that explosion and the fact that these strangers seemed to be able to control the thunder must have been psychologically devastating. And then it came down again to that steel and those horses, right? When Pizarro unleashed the horses, this is something that the Inca, as you say, these are veteran warriors, the winners of a civil war, strategists at a tactical level within the framework of pre Columbian Andean warfare.

They were the top dogs, but this is something outside of their entire understanding of the universe. They'd never seen a horse before or knew what it could do if you integrate a rider into the saddle with stirrups and the shock value of that charge. They had no doctrine to push back against that.

And the psychological impact was that they tried to flee. They were piling up against the walls and in their desperation to scramble over them to the point where the walls finally gave way under the press of all those bodies. Some of them escaped into the countryside and the Spaniards rode after them just running them down as they fled, and the only thing that stopped the massacre at the end was night was falling and the Spaniards in darkness couldn't continue the pursuit any longer.

So it's what happens when something totally outside the universe of even veteran warriors plays out in a way that they have no mental appreciation of or able to draw back any kind of library of how do I respond in this situation. The fight or flight instinct just completely takes over, the flight was the winner in this instance. As you say, the only casualty was Pizarro himself.

He's reaching for Adahualpa to take him prisoner, and one of his more enthusiastic comrades is slashing and manages to cut his hand as he does that. That was the only injury any of the conquistros suffered at this critical moment.

The Swiss, for example, had already proved that a mounted knight could be knocked out of the saddle and defeated. If you have men shoulder to shoulder locked in place with long pikes to keep those horses at a distance and break up the impetus of their charge. But that requires, one, the technology, and two, the discipline, training, and institutional knowledge to do that.

Mesoamerican warfare was very loose in its formation. Warriors with a lot of space between them, which is the worst thing that you can do in regards to cavalry because horses can take advantage of that looseness to just blast to any formation that is coming at them. Now, one depiction of the pre Columbian societies is that they were somehow childlike innocents and couldn't have responded.

They did try to, and it's important to bear that in mind. At every level, both the Aztec and the Inca sought to put in place countermeasures to negate the advantages that the conquistadors had. One of the critical exemplars is confined space.

The Aztecs, when the Cortes showed up in 1521 for round two, by drawing them into their city, which was a network of islands connected by bridges and causeways. That minimized the advantages of the horses because that's not good horse country. They would learn to fight from rooftops and pelt the enemy with stones or whatever they could from heights.

They built man sized holes in buildings so they could slip from one to the other where the horses couldn't chase them. So they learned to use those kinds of advantages. They learned the stopping power of water.

Interestingly, both completely underconnected. They had no relationship with each other. But against Cortez, when he was taking one of the smaller cities on Lake Texcoco, it's La Palpa, the Aztecs broke the dikes in the lake and flooded the city, which took out a number of the conquistadors and their allies.

In that environment, of course, the metal armor works to the disadvantage of the conquistra. It drags them to the bottom. If they waited until nightfall when the Spaniards were sleeping, they might have bagged all of them.

And so the Inca too, later when the Conquistadors moved on Olaytantambo, again, the Inca flooded the river, allowed it to burst its banks and again bogged down the conquistador cavalry so that they were adapting. They took captured enemy weapons. They learned to fix conquistador swords to the end of long wooden poles, improvising pike tactics, again without being instructed to.

They intuited that keeping horses at a distance with long spears would be a way to negate the advantages that they had. The Inca employed the bolas, which they'd used for hunting the great birds of South America, to tangle the legs of horses. One famous incident: an Aztec warrior allowed himself to be speared by a conquistador and gripped hold of the spear, the lance, as it was in his body, fixing the conquistador in place so his supporters, his colleagues, could swarm and take him out of the saddle.

So they were trying to improvise. The Aztecs, with their captured Spanish prisoners, used them to learn how to use captured crossbows. The Inca, when they captured Spaniards, would use them to give instruction on how to use these firearms, and Manko Inca, the leader of the Inca resistance, made a point of learning to ride a horse himself, to demonstrate to his people that we can do this.

are the grand scheme of things. There are multiple wheels that define history. Grand wheels that grind slowly, geography and climate, and then the small wheels in the foreground are the individuals, the key players themselves, and this is an integration of that process, the big wheels with the small ones.

Yes, if Cortes, which could have happened on multiple occasions, had been taken out early, the conquistadors, leaderless, rudderless may well have disintegrated, and the conquest may have been aborted at that level. Pizarro, again, Adahualpa's critical mistake was inserting himself into Pizarro's trap. If he had sent an envoys to keep the negotiations at a distance, he may have been able to frustrate Pizarro's ambitions and as the head of what remained an integrated Inca empire, he may have been able to use those numbers to win the campaign in the short term.

When the Inca did finally turn on the conquistadors, Francisco Pizarro has seized Cuzco, stripped the temples of their gold and silver, the sweat of the sun and the tears of the moon, as it was called, shipped it back to Europe. He goes back to the coast to set up Lima, what would become the city of Lima, the modern capital of Peru. The danger with Cuzco is the fact it's elevated and away from the coast, which is where the Spanish of course with their absolute monopoly over naval power have the advantage.

His problem was he left his half brothers in charge back in Cuzco and they provoked Manko Inca, who'd been set up, Spazaro's puppet ruler, into outright rebellion. He rallies his people. He lays siege to Cuzco.

He takes Saxehomam, the great fortress that dominates Cuzco. And he has one of his generals, Cuizo Yupanqui, cut off reinforcements arriving from the coast. The Inca could win set peace confrontations if they used their terrain and their knowledge of it to their advantage.

Pizarro from Lima on the coast is taking reinforcements and pushing them into the interior to relieve Cuzco. And Cuizo is waiting till they enter narrow defiles and passes through the mountains, blocking both ends and then using boulders and other materials to just obliterate them from the heights. And more and more of these Spanish expeditions are being annihilated.

So at that level, when they use the terrain and their institutional knowledge of it to their advantage, the Inca are able to win CFP's battles, but they can't seal the deal in Cuzco and Manco makes the mistake of ordering Cuizo to attack Lima. He feels we have the advantage now. I've bottled them up in Cuzco, we've annihilated their relief columns, take out their city on the coast and the problem is over.

But attacking Lima meant passing across open ground, which with the Spanish then unleashed their advantage, the general is killed and the whole assault collapses. Back in Cuzco, yes, there's a handful of Spaniards holed up in just a couple of fortified buildings, desperately holding on. Day and night, they're under assault.

The psychological aspect to it, the beating of drums and the chanting and the constant rain of missiles to set their building on fire, they would have been wiped out except for two reasons. One, the open courtyards and plazas of Cuzco are good terrain for cavalry and they still have their horses. And secondly, again critically, the asset through diplomacy of the local peoples, The subordinated mitmares they were called or yanakonas, serfs, the defeated and subordinated people of the Inca had bought forcibly within their imperial structure, chafing under those authorities, see these outsiders as their chance to finally break free of Inca authority.

So strangely enough, as it may seem, more local peoples had kept joining the besieged Spaniards during the whole battle of Cuzco, which played out over many, many months. And the Spaniards ended up with more allies than they started during this battle because there were so many people within the Inca Empire. From the Canarii who were from Ecuador to the Chachapoya, from the Amazon Basin, to even the Ayamaka who used to be rivals with the Inca for control of Cusco itself increasingly side with the Spaniards, and that local manpower was the critical asset.

Without that, they would have been wiped out at Cuzco. So again, it's the Spaniards inserting themselves into an imperial orbit, which from a distance looks impressive with its geographic expanse and its total population, but which have been ruthlessly dictated to by a tiny elite of a hierarchy who would impose themselves over the entire system. Remember, a small number of people spoke Nahuatl, the imperial language of the Aztecs.

Only a small number spoke Quechua, the imperial language of the Inca themselves. It was the Inca Empire, but it was constructed from multiple, multiple different ethnicities. And when they saw their chance, they took it to side with the Spaniards.

forces, the great wheels that grind through history, the geography and climate structure one other factor. The fact that Eurasia was so stacked with domesticable animals, sheep, cows, goats, mules, pigs, and above all horses, and human interaction in biomes with those domesticated animals created the context for the evolution of contagious diseases, endemic or pandemic, that ripped back and forth through Eurasia, we're familiar with all their names. That never occurred in the new world.

The people there had no acquired immunity to diseases such as the big one, smallpox, but beyond that, the whole galaxy of communicable diseases that we're now familiar with is being universal. I think even if the Aztecs, Inca had won the short term proximate victories, the longer term demographic crisis would have undermined the functional capacity of their societies to remain integrated and to resist much longer. The pressure within them from their subject peoples as they felt the authority of their overlords beginning to weaken would have led to their fragmentation, which is the overarching cycle of pre Columbian societies generally.

They're extremely impressive, in fact, more impressive when you consider the disadvantages they had to struggle with. Their pyramids were built not through the assistance of beasts of burden or even the wheel, but simply through pure manpower and the application of that to construct it. The subject peoples would have broken for freedom.

And we see the recurring cycle of Mesoamerican history, for example, that when Cortes arrived, Tenochtitlan was one of the greatest metropolis perhaps on earth, beautiful and rich and heavily populated. A hundred years later, if he'd arrived in 1619 as opposed to 1519, he would have found a swamp with moss covered mounds and hills rising out of it. The parallel to that, of course, is Ciutawaken, the previous great metropolis which dominated Mesoamerica.

It rose, it expanded, it attracted a huge population, it overstressed its environment, and it collapsed. I think the Aztecs naturally would have gone the same way. So one way or another, the Spanish or even subsequent ways of European colonists would have entrenched themselves at the coast and would have perhaps more slowly pushed inland.

It's possible that you would see a more balanced relationship between the colonists and the indigenous peoples. But I think in the longer term, they all would have been folded into, the grand European imperial framework.

The vulnerability of the Aztec, the Inca, was that hierarchical nature of their society and the absolute loyalty that the system had invested into whoever was at top of the social hierarchical tree, the Huia Latawani for the Aztecs, the Sapa Inca, for the Inca themselves. Taking that individual destabilizes the whole system, potentially even means that it can be functionally governed through the use of intermediaries or even puppets. The dispersed people, as you say, the Comanche, even the Maya in Mesoamerica, whose city states jealously asserted and defended their autonomy against each other, meant that the Spanish couldn't take out the Maya in one fell swoop.

They couldn't do to the Maya what they'd done to the Aztecs of the Inca. They had to reduce their cities one by one and it was a long, laborious process that took almost to the end of the seventeenth century to finally consummate. And even then there was still smoldering descent.

In many ways, you can go to the highlands of Central America and they still speak the ancestral languages of the first one before they speak Spanish. Yes, colonizing powers can find aggressive bite back. Just look at Custer's last stand in as late as 1876 here in America, the entire seventh cavalry wiped out the Little Bighorn because they lost the initiative.

And at that point they were fighting warriors who had come together temporarily riding horses, firing guns, and then dispersing afterwards. It was very hard to pin them down and that was often a frustrating aspect. It took a long process of what amounts to really total war to finally bring them to heel, setting up barbed wire everywhere and of course slaughtering the buffalo to take away the basis for their culture and their food chain to finally bring the last holdouts to heel.

So it can be a long protracted process. The Inca and Aztecs themselves found that out. They never consummated even incorporating their entire zones within their empires.

The Aztecs had surrounded and were slowly reducing the Les Calans, but to the West, and what's Micawaca and the Porepucci people, or as they call today, the Tarrascans, had an empire of their own, and they were able to go toe to toe with the Aztecs. The first time the Aztecs crossed into Tarrascan territory, it was a disaster. A key reason for that was actually technology.

The Aztecs had no connection with South America. The Tarrascans somehow did. We know from linguistic evidence and costume choice, some exchange of flora and fauna, and above all in technology.

The Tarrascans could smelt metal. Like the Inca, they could smelt copper and they used that to form the points of their arrows, and their massed arches with their copper tipped arrows were decimating the invading Aztec forces. So the exchange, if it had been on a broader scale between North and South, would have been potentially an equalizing force.

Certainly not in Mesoamerica where everything was stone. They had the worst of both worlds. They could smelt silver and gold to attract the greed of the Spaniards, but they couldn't smelt iron to hold them off.

Right, no, but you know before that you would have thought that they would have done copperton, good bronze. They did have bronze in the Inca world. Oh really?

And if the Aztecs had had access to that, again they'd have given them a much more aggressive fighting stunt. Bronze can't stand up against iron but it's better than than stone. Right, yeah, or obsidian.

than the other one is able to accumulate. Yeah, they're closed worlds. They were very much, very insular in their societies.

To go further back in time. I think the only divergence that would have given pre Columbian peoples a real long term chance to hold off the Europeans if we reversed the clock another five hundred years back to leave Erikson and the Norse in Greenland. They knew of the existence of North America, Helloland, Markland and Vinland as they called them, as they explored them, and they tried to colonize the New World.

Their numbers were too few, the local resistance was too fierce and they were forced out.

I think essentially the key to it was following the blueprint as closely as possible. Go right to the top, establish a coastal sediment, which Cortez also was very invested in, so you have a secure base to fall back to if what's happening in the interior is not playing out. A base on the coastline was originally with the conquistadors, but more broadly the Portuguese, British, French subsequently, they would build those key strongholds on the coast, which because of their monopoly over nautical technology means they were effectively unable to be extricated by any local indigenous population.

And that's one thing that people tend to underestimate with the success of European expansion. At the end of the day, they had the fortresses, right? And again, the long institutional knowledge of what a perfect fortress should look like.

Those jagged edge star parametism and revetments and battlements which maximized firepower. Even Eurasian cultures, even the Ching Chinese struggled to be able to deal with that. The peoples of the pre Columbian Americans had no real chance of storming defenses on that kind of a scale.

The Inca, Aztecs even didn't even have siege warfare. They didn't have siege weapons, battering rams, catapults, nothing like that. So once the Europeans dug into fortified positions, it was very hard to move them out of that.

Pizarro's own environment was quite different from that of Cortez. I mean, the highlands of Mexico were quite elevated, but the Andes Mountains, the conquistadors were moving into. I mean, I've been at elevation in the Himalayas, and I was struggling to breathe with the altitude sickness.

that speaks to their physical stamina honed over many years of hard living and the core motivations. This better be worth it. So that's why Cortez and Pizarro were always kind of first among equals.

They had to keep demonstrating success. They had to be the alpha dog in all circumstances because around them were many ambitious men, some of whom had titles or claims that were just as legitimate as Cortez or Pizarro, and Cortez was always on top of that situation. Pizarro, of course, the end lost control.

He met his end as a rival faction stormed household. And he went down fighting not against the indigenous people, but against his fellow Spaniards.

from the moment when Cortez seized him, because previously the records of Moctezuma reflect that he was a peddalist autocrat. He centralized all power in the aristocracy. Previously it used to be possible to work up from outside the circle into the inner circle, but he forbade that.

He was almost Stalinist in his authority over his underlings, and he was the one who was amping up the ritualistic flower wars into successive campaigns of encirclement and annihilation for the Las Colin. So he was in every sense of the word an autocrat. Perhaps it's for the first time in his life being told what to do just led to a complete psychological break because once Cortez had hold of him, he seems to have pulled a complete 180 switch and become essentially willingly Cortez's puppet.

He was always trying to do what Cortes wanted in a way that would still be beneficial for his people, but would not rock the boat so much in terms of Cortes' authority. In the end, it wasn't Cortes who disposed of it, it was his own people because they realized that he had sold them out and he had to go. His being unilaterally deposed, that had never happened before in Aztec history.

He was the first Huey Latawani to be repudiated by his own people and replaced by someone else. But if it turns out to Wapaw, what did he think was gonna happen? He seemed like he had his wits about him, right?

He did, and the Spanish accounts referred to that he had a regal bearing, was clearly intelligent, and he was adapted to the situation. He learned to speak Spanish very, very quickly. He learned to play cards chess.

Yeah, so he was, I think, trying to integrate himself as much as possible. At the same time though, I think he was also reaching out to his own people, and he was waiting perhaps for his opportunity to fully mobilize them. Perhaps he just felt he never quite got the opportunity to do that, because bear in mind, the deal was if he provided Cortez and he walked into that room and said, I can fill it up this high with gold and silver, and Pizarro had promised he'd be released at that point, perhaps he actually felt that this was a man of his word, but Pizarro in no case was and had him go run into death after getting what he wanted.

So it may just be that he misinterpreted Pizarro as someone who was on the same level that kings don't do this to other kings, but he was dealing with a free booting entrepreneur's pirate essentially, not someone operating in good faith at all.

Yeah, the conquistadors really didn't appreciate what they'd accomplished, many of them. Some of them died doing what they did. The ones who were lucky or good, lived long enough to settle down on what were called encomendas, that's local estates, with many of the local peoples to farm the land for them, kind of peon serfdom.

The later iteration was the bureaucrats, right? Once the conquistadors had cleared the ground, the bureaucrats would arrive from Spain, and they would begin running and administering what would become Mexico, Peru, South America generally. The conquistadors in South America rebelled against that, had to be put down by force to retain South America within the Spanish Empire.

Once that was accomplished though, the whole process became very integrated into the Spanish Imperial orbit. The first empire in which the sun never sets. Once the Spanish had discovered and exploited a mountain of silver at Potosi, in what's now Bolivia, they put the last piece and puzzle for, of the puzzle in place for true globalization.

Initially, the gold silver was all going east, as you say, into the coffers of King Philip the fifth and, oh sorry, King Charles the fifth and his son, King Philip the second, for their wars of evangelical, defense and expansion against the Ottomans, to keep The Netherlands under their control, to ideally, through the armada, bring the one true apostolic faith of Catholicism back to England. Most of those ventures of course were failures and as you say, the net impact for Spain was ultimately quite negative because by infusing Europe with this enormous expansion of liquidity through the silver that was pouring off the treasure ships every year arriving in Spain, all they were doing was importing inflation, pushing prices up to levels, and real wages in Spain actually fell during this period because, yes, there was excess liquidity, but this meant prices for even staple goods were much higher than they had been previously. And the ultimate negative effect was that the seductive drug essentially of having silver on tap meant that Spain never developed towards what we call functional capitalism.

It never developed capital markets or independent banking systems the way that were emerging in places like The Netherlands and England during this period. So those powers moved ahead, while Spain and Portugal were left behind, didn't really fully industrialize during the nineteenth century, were left very rural and poor and backward by the twentieth century. Still now, they're catching up from that.

So the average Spanish gain from this was quite marginal. Yes, we can afford fleets necessary to face off against the Ottomans at Lopanto in 1571, which is good, but in terms of the development of the society, that really plateaued and stayed that way for hundreds of years. The other side of the equation, as you mentioned, is China.

Yes, once the Spanish had fully become able to exploit the silver mines of South America, They could then take advantage of their developing knowledge of the Pacific Ocean's wind currents to send those great ships west to The Philippines, to Manila, their base in the Orient, and from there meet with merchants coming from Japan, from Siam, and most of all from China, bringing goods with real practical value for exchange for that extracted silver. And so as you say, the Spanish are buying goods with value, with a success liquidity. And the real benefit from that is not something that's structurally to the advantage of the country as a whole.

So yes, what the conquistadors did was historically put the last pieces of the puzzle in place for true globalization. Trade is no longer trans Eurasian or even transatlantic, it's transglobal. The networks now affect everybody at some point along the line.

And the Ming found that out in the mid-1640s when there was a cash crisis, having fully transferred the basis of exchange in their empire to silver when access to silver was cut off, or at least minimized for a number of reasons during the first half of the seventeenth century, the Meng at the worst possible time with the Manchu at the gates could no longer fund their armies. They couldn't pay to put a military in place to hold them off. So the Manchus moved in at a moment of supreme advantage, blew out the Meng and replaced them as the new hegemons over the Chinese imperial zone.

Yeah.

The two latecomers to the game of imperialism, Protestant powers marginalized for that reason in Europe, and The Netherlands especially has nothing. Natural resources? Absolutely zero.

So in that environment, you're forced to innovate and think about how you can achieve capital gain and true economic expansion. Everybody wants the quick fix, understand it. We played the lottery for that exact reason, right?

But be careful what you wish for because you may just actually get it. Those societies that have arrived at the quick fix, whether that's gold or silver or monocultural crop production of some kind, which gives you a monopoly on its provision, they become satisfied with that. They become trapped within an environment that exists solely for that purpose, and they don't develop beyond the essential thresholds that that allows for.

Even here in The US, we can look at the difference between the North and the South, that geographic line below that line, yes, you can get the quick fix, you can put all your capital into buying slaves and have them work at providing cash crops, which is tobacco, the original one, indigo and sugar, and of course the big one, cotton. The North didn't have those advantages. You couldn't just buy land and then extract the resource from it.

You had to think about how to make money, and that's why all the investment money in the North was going into things with long term productivity, into trade and commerce, into advanced capital markets and the banking system, and of course, into industrialization. That all happened in the North. So when the rupture came in the 1860s and the North and South went to war, all those advantages were with the North, not just population, but the industrial base, the capital markets necessary for it to put in place a winning long term strategy for actually defeating the South in that conflict.

That again is the long term lesson, that having life too easy from the beginning leads to a certain, I don't want call it laziness, but lack of vision perhaps in alternatives that may in the longer term, actually be more advantageous.

was rewarded by increase in status. The warriors would be recognized for bringing captives back to Tenochtitlan for sacrifice. There was even like a hierarchy in terms of the prisoners, like that four Totonacs were worth one Chichimac because the Chichimac were a wilder tribe to the north and fought more fiercely than the Totonacs did.

To a degree, there's a certain overlap with European cultures. There was great advantage throughout the feudal era in taking your enemies alive as opposed to killing them because then you can ransom them back to their families and you can come out of that ahead in terms of at least financial gain. In a way the Aztec model makes more sense because sacrificing your enemy means you'll never see him again, whereas selling your enemy back to his family means he's up for round two and you might face off against the same guy across a future battlefield.

Even kings, the kings of France after the battles of Portier and Pavia were captured and then subject to various indignities. So to a degree, there was a certain level of overlap, but more holistically, you're right. Yes, the Aztecs did fight ideally to capture, not to kill.

There were multiple episodes when they did have Cortez himself under their knives, but was so desperate to haul him off. His compatriots sometimes sacrificing themselves were able to rescue him. So that was an aspect of their warfare ingrained in their culture, in their faith, in the religious expression of the values of entire people.

Difficult to tilt that within the framework that we're talking about. I'd be asking people here if we're fighting aliens from another planet to give up Christianity because there's too much invested in terms of its morality and more effective combat skills will be derived from following some other faith. It was not possible to reorient an entire society in that limited timeframe to do that.

The Cuzco situation, we could, to use a famous film example, the movie 300. The Spartans are able to hold the Pass Of Thermopylae because, against overwhelming numbers, it's very, very narrow. And within Cuzco, the surviving conquistadors fell back to two heavily fortified buildings with narrow entrances, and the streets of Cuzco are quite narrow as well, which means that even those overwhelming numbers could only be channeled down through those narrow avenues, and those could be blocked relatively effectively, even by the small numbers of conquistadors and their increasing numbers of native allies, able to put in place with their metal armor blocking operations that could hold those kind of frameworks.

Beyond that, when the pressure came off, then they would unleash their horses, largely through the wider plazas and then the surrounding countryside, looking for isolated detachments to take out. And this effect was demoralizing on the Inca. They initially had the advantage.

They were rallied by Manco. We're going to deal with these barbarians once and for all. But as the frustration of the siege drags on, there's more and more defections, men slipping away at night, either to switch sides or just go back to their homes and families.

Again, this army is huge, very diverse, and many of those recruits are peoples who have been subjugated and have no institutional loyalty to the Inca. The bottom line is, they need to get home to their farms to get the harvest before the winter. The nature of warfare in the pre Columbian America and Europe for much of its history was driven by the annual cycle of planting and harvesting the crops.

You need the men on their farms to do that because if they're not there, then you face a very hard year coming up if you don't have enough crops set aside to get you through the winter and the following year. So for all those reasons, the NCAA, yes, with those huge numbers weren't able to really overwhelmingly apply them at the same time. If they'd caught perhaps the entire conquistador army marching through one of those mountain passes, yes, they may have been able to win a set piece battle in that environment.

The horses can't charge up the steep slopes. Both ends, if they're blocked cleverly with boulders and with trees, mean the infantry's not going anywhere either. You have them essentially pinned down.

All the advantages would have been useless at that point. Metal armor won't protect you from a two ton boulder rumbling from the heights right into your face. If they've been able to arrange that, on small scales they were, but to get the entire conquistadors in one place at one time like that, that never happened.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so basically it was not enough time to accumulate the strategy or... Again, it's that shockingly short steep learning curve.

It just wasn't wasn't enough time.

The kind of classic push pull factors, right? They came from a proud land, a new country, Spain and Europe would come together in 1492. And they were aware their history was one of struggle, uniting the peninsula and consummating the Reconquista.

So they had a proud warrior background, but little to show for it, really. Again, the quality of life, particularly in Extra Madura, which is the province in Spain where so many of these conquistadros originated from, was a land of hardship. It was small farms and dusty terrain and unproductive, and they were aware of a wider world around them, and as like so many men have throughout history, they see their only path forward as being anything more than dirt farmers, is to seek a career of high risk and potential, even fatal outcomes, but possible great reward as well.

Men have joined armies, militaries, fought in campaigns, not even their own, even other people's for many centuries, millennia now, for that reason. And the attraction of the new world, once they're aware that out there is a whole new land, where it's possible for even a small man like myself to become something, to become somebody. All I have as an asset is my fighting skills.

And yeah, I could keep fighting in the campaigns against the Moors or against the Turks, but those are high risk, low return ventures. Yeah, I'll be fighting in my home waters, but what will the potential rewards be? These Turks can fight, right?

The message I'm getting from the far side of the Atlantic is the risks there are much lower and the potential reward's much higher. It means traveling across the vast ocean.

Yeah, how do I understand that? Cortez and Pizarro both had men of the cloth traveling with their expeditions to provide for their spiritual needs. Cortes and Pizarro, in retrospect, would make a great deal of this in their writing, right?

They were professed to be outraged, particularly by the Aztec cult of human sacrifice, which was integral to their society. I don't see any reason why that would be untrue. Mean, it would be shocking to actually see that happen and Cortez, when Moctezuma invited him to the top of one of the two great pyramids in Tenochtitlan.

He remarks the priests were door from head to foot in black clay or body paint and the interior was black with spilled blood and it stank at Bombleby. So I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be genuinely mortified by that. And they would take a certain degree of legitimacy from tearing down the ancient idols of these superstitious peoples and raising them up to the one true faith.

You can salve your conscience in many ways by doing that, that in real terms, I'm here for what I can take, but I am performing the will of God and therefore I have some absolution when I'm called to account at the end of the day. So men will sometimes seek to find a higher purpose in what are very low endeavors, which is what was playing out at that time. Again, coming to the motivation, the initial conquests were relatively easy.

The island populations in the Caribbean, what we now call Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, Cuba, the peoples there were quite low on the tech tree, not unified, did not have a significant military presence. Of course, on islands, there's nowhere for them to run. You could run into the mountains of Cuba, but eventually they would all be hunted down.

So the feeling was, the pickings here are pretty easy and the enthusiastic attitude was, well, why would it be any different in the mainland? Of course, they did run up against heavy fighting and some of them would say afterwards, the veterans of wars against the Turks, this was some of the hardest fighting I've ever been through. But by that point, they'd seen that the potential rewards were much higher as well.

When they arrived at Lake Tyscoco, they would marvel as if we'd have just arrived in Atlantis, right? To be in this place, on this lake with these cities arranged around its edges and the biggest city of all, appeared to be floating on the water like Venice, except even more dramatic with its high temples. To them, this both awed them and inflamed that greed that they had.

Cortez himself admitted as much to Moctezuma's own voice. He said, My man and I suffer from a disease of the heart that only gold can cure. So Moctezuma sent him feathered headdresses and all the traditional regalia.

He sent him jade and obsidian, which in the Aztec world would have been symbols of great regard. And Cortes was happy to put on the headdress, and he sent it back to the king. But the little trinkets of gold that he was getting, right, that was the real end purpose.

And the local peoples would talk about how the Spanish were chattering like monkeys as they were picking up these gold and were fascinated by it. Yeah.

men and women to those huge hunting dogs they brought with them for sport, to watch them being torn apart. They could rationalize that in Mesoamerica in reference to that cult of sacrifice, which was endemic, ingrained into the mentalities of those people. There was a regular cycle of sacrifice, and that would peak according to particular crises, major campaigns, or the like.

There are accounts, again, are distorted accounts, but an almost industrial level of human sacrifice that the parade of prisoners who've been drugged to keep them pacified stretched from the Pyramid Complex all the way through to the causeways. One after the other, they'd be worn up to the top of the pyramids to the temple complex. Four priests each would take an arm and a leg, while a fifth one would use an obsidian blade to open an incision and pull out the heart, which we offer to the gods.

I've been to those pyramids, the ones at Teotihuacan. The steps leading up are very, very narrow. You almost have to walk up sideways, deliberately so, because when the heart had been taken out and burned, the body would be tumbled off the far side, and then the steps were so steep to allow it to tumble all the way to the bottom, and then the warrior who'd taken that prisoner would then take the flesh home to be consumed.

It was the consummation of his victory as a warrior to take on literally and internalize the defeated enemy. So this was, as you say, it's a cycle that the world is better off without. I'm not gonna make any excuses for it, But the motivations of those who did that, that was not selfless.

It was at best a beneficial side effect, window dressing on a process of colonization and even literal genocide. It had even less validation in South America because there was no such tradition at all. The Inca would very occasionally take a virgin sacrifice into the high mountains where she'd be drugged, and you can still find the mummified corpses of these girls.

But that was very rare and very specific.

stay in power? That's a good question. The critical difference is this is happening for the Conquistos within the Spanish orbit.

They're all Castilians, they're all Spaniards, shared common backgrounds for most of them, and their confrontations were personal rivalries within their system. If confronted by an existential crisis, to pit them against each other, I think that would have failed because their bottom line was they would have united if they felt there was a common cause against them that would have forced them to do that. Whereas for the local peoples, these are differences between entire societies, both the external and internal factors here.

Quitlahuac, who succeeded his brother, Moctezuma II, as Hueh Latawani, after driving the Spaniards out during La Noche Triste, he sent emissaries to the Lashkarans, to the Tarrascans, to build an expanded or new Triple Alliance to come together as native people with a common interest against these outsiders and the Laxcalan younger generation thought about it but the old men who still retained power who've been fighting against the Aztecs for decades and saw them as, in the end, the existential threat, repudiated this possibility. The Tarrascans wanted nothing to do with the Aztecs. No, we are enemies and always have been and always will be.

This is your problem and maybe you'll get taken out, no loss to us. So they couldn't overcome the kind of institutional hostilities, which go way, way back through their history. The only way that the indigenous people could have played the same game, and to a degree this did happen later, was to play different European powers off against each other.

But of course the problem for the Aztecs, the Inca, was the Spanish were the only game in town. They were the only outsiders they'd encountered.

to keep control over India? The Mughal, I mean it peaked under Orangiev at the beginning of the eighteenth century subsequently his successes didn't have whatever you call the authority, charisma, the ris, whatever you want to define it, to maintain that hegemony which he'd established by almost taking over all of India. The Mughals always at root had the same problem that the Manchu did when they conquered the Ming in the seventeenth century, and they built the Qing dynasty China, the greatest physical extent it ever had, but they were always outsiders.

They were not indigenous to the population. In the background, there was always that vague resentment that was being ruled here by foreigners, and that was okay while they were going from success to success, but when the momentum halts and it begins to roll backwards, that's when the local power brokers begin to feel to themselves, maybe we have more to gain from breaking away from the empire than we do from remaining within it. So both Mughal India and Manchu, China had that kind of fatal defect, as it were, coded into the ultimate basis for their authority.

So even without the Europeans, I think the Mughal Empire would have peaked and it would have disintegrated. Now, what would have happened next would be more like a patchwork quilt of different authorities, some larger, some smaller. The Maratha Confederacy, I think, would have been a major player, but not one that could incorporate the entire subcontinent within its authority.

And of course, we look at Chinese history. It's the constant cycle of the rise of a dynasty, its peak, its decline into anarchy, and then the rise of a new imperial hegemon in the region. So that cycle would play out, I think, regardless of whether the Europeans intervened.

Specifically in terms of why the British took over at the end, well, in its bluntest terms, the Royal Navy rules the waves, and in terms of projecting power, the Brits were able to force the French out of Canada and out of India because they controlled the sea lanes, and although the French had, in in terms of population, military, a larger force. If you can't project that force, it's really of no value to you.

to give one example, the British were winning the Hundred Years' War because the King of France, Charles was insane. He was convinced he was made out of glass, for example. And then the English lost the Hundred Years' War because their King Henry VI was insane, and he would just shut down for In months at a time mentally he just couldn't non democratic environment, yes, the corporations, for the reasons you outlined, profit driven and therefore not loyal to bloodlines or any other kind of extraneous circumstances, but just looking for the most competent leadership and a capacity to exchange and replace people are much more flexible than those kind of hierarchical states.

Even in many ways you could argue in democratic societies, the corporations can still outmaneuver them because they're untied to particular loyalties and it's just their brand awareness that they're trying to push. The British and Dutch were late to the game of imperialism, and you wouldn't give them much a chance given the differentials, but they unleashed the power of the free market. As you say, the East India Company, the English and Dutch equivalents, the British Hudson's Bay Company, which is really what made Canada as we understand it today.

Those corporations, driven by those motives, acting with almost plenipotentiary powers at vast distances, had the flexibility on the ground to take advantage of local circumstances to insert themselves into diplomatic arrangements, have persisted for centuries with all the accumulated grievances. Here, we're the fresh newcomers. We have obviously skills at what we do.

As you say, taking control of the tax revenue of Bengal effectively took control of the entire political orbit. What can you do without taxation? Reorient that towards the shareholders, force the local people to stop producing these crops, even if it means millions starve to death in order to produce OPM, to take advantage of that was devastating and its impact in political structures that had no real environment where that was part of their established traditions.

And even the conquistadors, even the Vikings, we go back far enough. These were business operations. The Vikings would be men who would assemble with what weapons they had enough capital up front to pay for boats, to go raiding, to make this profitable by looting churches and monasteries.

That's what the conquistadors were. They were free Buddhas operating within a capitalist system. These were not desperados of the lowest of the low.

Many of them had some education. A lot of them were hidalgos, which is the lowest rung of the petty nobility in Castile, who inherited titles and attitudes, but not much assets beyond what they could put up as soldiers of fortunes. And they called themselves campaneros, which is colleagues or companions, not soldados.

So this whole operation was, if you like, the most raw, unbridled capitalism at its finest, pooling assets to derive enormous profits from very risky ventures.

that, yeah, how little it took for them to be so dominant. They could win battles. They could not have won the war though at the end without the support of those indigenous So those are all in numbers.

Yes, you're right. They would always keep their helmets to protect the head, many of them were ditching the metal armor in favor of the local stuff because that was good enough as protection against local weapons. They would not have done that and carried it back to Europe.

That would have made them too vulnerable. But here, adapt to the circumstances, you have more freedom of mobility, it's less exhausting wearing cotton than it is to wear metal. So they would make that adaptation.

They would even sometimes for very prized allies, again, as a way of integrating them into the Spanish coalition, is provide them like local chiefs and warlords with Spanish weapons, to emphasize that you're so special to me, and this was effective in binding them together. And they were very, very clever in identifying the local sub chiefs beneath the Aztec layer of authority who would be receptive to the idea of why are you taking orders from them when you get a better deal from us? They knew, for example, the Aztec Empire it called the Triple Alliance because it was set up in 1428 by the first Shui Laitawani as a coalition between the three city states, Tenochtitlan, Tishkoko and Tacuba.

In 1516, so like two years, three years before Cortes arrived in Mesoamerica, the chief of, or king of Tishkoko died and his two sons fought a civil war for who would succeed him. Moctezuma stepped in and gave the title to one of those brothers. So what does the other brother do when the Spanish show up?

He immediately sides with them to get within his own family. His own family was on both sides of this war. This is his path to getting what he feels is his due, being the king of Tichoco.

And in the broader sense, if I'm under the Spanish versus under the Aztecs, maybe these newcomers will give me a better deal. So there was that seductive quality at the elite level. Now, what they didn't understand was so many of them thinking they were using the Spanish to their advantage.

They didn't appreciate the numbers in which the Spanish and later Europeans would arrive, right? Their closed worlds didn't allow them to think about people from such vast distances could come in such huge numbers, and in the end, as happened in, for example, Australia and New Zealand, that we'll become the minority in our own country.