The year is 1492. You are the Catholic Monarchs - both of them. Isabel and Fernando, tanto monta, monta tanto. You have just finished kicking all of the Muslim powers out of Iberia, and youāre feeling so pleased with yourselves that you expel the Jews about it. You have a problem, though - thereās this annoying Genoese moron named Christopher Columbus who keeps waving some bad math at you, insisting that the world is actually smaller than everyone thinks it is and he could totally sail to India by going west. He gets on your nerves so much that you just give him a couple of ships and send him off. He definitely wonāt make it to India, but maybe heāll find some little island and give all of your newly-unemployed hidalgos something to keep them busy. Heāll probably just starve to death in the middle of the ocean, and then heās no longer your problem.
The year is 1519, and you are HernĆ”n CortĆ©s. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the āNew Worldā who isnāt rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then youāre a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.
The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, HuÄyi TlahtoÄni (great ruler) of the āAztec Empire,ā also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ālord who frowns in anger.ā Itās a fitting name, because the process of āimperial expansion and consolidationā generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.
The year is 1545, and this whole ācolonialismā thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - itās not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. Youāre starting to wonder if itās time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget aboutā¦ holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it PotosĆ. Many will call it āthe mountain that eats men.ā In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in PotosĆ found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.
The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesnāt feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. The experiment with paper money failed horribly. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you donāt have sophisticated counterfeit protections and thereās also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So youāre trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you donāt have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole āpaper moneyā thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the part with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.
Within living memory, the world was still āmedievalā in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldnāt shut up about it.
The moral of this story is that Iām going insane.
The Hernan Cortes story was much more both cool and fucked up than that. It's nuisanced as hell, since the siege and looting of Tenochtitlan, and the ultimate defeat of the Aztec empire, was done almost entirely by other mesoamerican nations that, somehow, swore fealty to the Castilian crown as a way to take down their local oppressors.
Only about 1000 castilians took part in the siege of Tenochtitlan. The reason why they managed to defeat 80k Aztec soldiers wasn't because of gunpowder or horses or armor or any technological advance, as it's often said... It's because they were fighting along 200k Tlaxcaltec soldiers who somehow Cortes had managed to bring to his side. Fucking Cortes may have been the luckiest human alive. Seriously, read his story, the motherfucker managed to roll natural 20s every single time for years and years.
And you could say "oh and how did that play for Tlaxcaltecs, who played a key role in being colonized?", and the answer is... Pretty good, actually. Tlaxcala and the other city states that allied with the Castilian crown were left alone to self govern, their nobility was granted Spanish nobility tiles and kept as rulers, and some of them managed to keep their pre-Columbian culture pretty much until after the Mexican independence.
The Spanish conquest of America is a very fucked up story, but the conquest of Mexico may be the least fucked up of it all. It's a complex and fascinating story that often gets told from the Spanish point of view, even if the major players were almost all mesoamerican on both sides. The castilians, and later Spanish, did more than enough massacres and cultural genocide everywhere, so let's acknowledge the parts where the Americans actually had agency and were the main characters of the story.
My understanding is that the Aztecs were pretty unpopular with all the people they were oppressing, so when a few foreigners with futuristic weapons showed up, it was a fairly easy sell for the Conquistadors to convince everyone else that now was a great time to do that rebellion that theyād all been thinking about doing anyways.
I'm not sure if I really accept the framing that it was the Conquistadors who did the convincing. When 200,000 locals show up with 1,000 foreigners that is definitely a local army with foreign support, not a foreign army with local support.
Considering the short timeframe and the innate biases of the sources, I find it hard to discount the possibility that what actually happened was that the 'local allies' took advantage of the Conquistadors' arrival to overthrow and conquer the Aztecs.
I was kinda trying to gesture at that idea. The conquistadors provided a focal point for timing rebellions that were already brewing.
