Conquest of the Incas

I think it's less that they're taught that the native Americans were peaceful and more that they aren't really taught anything about the history of the native population. It usually starts when European settlers come here.

As an aside; I went to the Smithsonian museum of native Americans or whatever it's called. I was MASSIVELY disappointed that it focused almost solely on post-European settlement. I was really hoping for history and information about the tribes before that. They're fascinating, and it seems a little backhanded to just focus on our impact on them (important obviously, but very dismissive of their long history).

Apocalypto by Mel Gibson did a great job of imprinting a visual image of pre-Columbian Aztecs. The tribe of villagers in the movie was depicted as peaceful, but I think it's only through limited observation time and in contrast with the brutal Aztecs. Otherwise I bet even those villagers were more like we observe the Papua New Guinea tribes of today, routinely mounting some expedition of murdering and pillaging the neighbouring village.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_rejhUV0A0

There are a lot of myths about the way humans used to be, especially Native Americans. Were they utopian nature-lovers? Were they barbaric human-sacrificers?

A good book on this topic is The Dawn of Everything, written by an anthropologist and an archaeologist. A YouTube video from one of the authors is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SJi0sHrEI4

I disagree with the idea that "barbarism was common" in Native American societies. I don't think you can generalize from the Incas so directly like this

I think it varies by geographical zones. While the Incas were a violent empire, it seems the Caribbeans were indeed populated with peaceful communities?

The peaceful native Americans view is about the pre-Columbian natives of present-day US. Not about the Aztecs (are you kidding?) or the Incas.

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Absolutely! And he has gone from strength to strength with each new episode. His pacing is perfect as he really takes his time but just barely touches on the intense brutality that was certainly epidemic in the times. He thus avoids the salacious details like, for example, Dan Carlin (who does his research well, but is less my taste now after discovering FoC). Just outstanding.

The real next-level excellence is that he is really tracing the history of technology along the way, going into significant detail about how the conquerors developed and utilized new tech to effect their victories.

From horses to the Mongols' bows to gunpowder, it is really the history of civilization and how the uncivilized were the energy that pushed change to the next level-up. I first learned of these sorts of systems in Gleick's "Chaos" (IIRC), where it looks like nothing is advancing, but, in reality, a kindof pressure is building to the point where a drastic leap is made suddenly and unexpectedly.

Is this article typical of the analysis style of the podcast? Because it was awesome, direct without too many asides.

Quipu cord research is difficult, because their Rosetta Stone is a Gordian Knot.

> One interesting thing is how the Incan organizational capability mostly vanished. The original empire was really extremely well organized, but today's Bolivia and Peru don't show any particular aptitude in this direction.

All Iberian colonies follow this trajectory. This stems from a Mediterranean attitude towards wealth and work which privileges politics over industry as a means of personal enrichment; politics here encompassing both the clientelism that characterizes these societies as well as the military adventurism and propensity to revolution that this region is famous for.

> One interesting thing is how the Incan organizational capability mostly vanished. The original empire was really extremely well organized, but today's Bolivia and Peru don't show any particular aptitude in this direction.

They were relatively well organized compared to neighboring people, but they weren't particularly well organized compared to many other places in the world at the time.

The administration of modern Bolivia and Peru is far more advanced than that of the Incan Empire.

> even if local tax authorities are corrupt

Considering that generally taxes in pre-modern stats were primarily used to fund warfare or fund the lifestyle of the local elite that's not necessarily worth much (the Inca empire was not different) i.e. whether the transfer of wealth is done according to the established law or not might not matter much if the system is inherently unjust)

I would guess the difference is in survival of institutions and institutional knowledge, and similarity of institutions.

The Persian bureaucracy were equipped to work for the conquerors, and the empire would have needed them to run the new conquests.

The Arab empires were motivated to rule, and to spread their religion, but seem to have been quite happy to adopt local structures and institutions that were consistent with that AFAIK.

"Wait until they are mostly sleep and attack at night."

The Incas apparently did not fight at night.

And why they did not managed to kill the horses, were likely because they were too afraid of them and they were not used to killing large animals as none existed there.

Otherwise all it takes to stop a knight on a horse is to kill the horse. Or just hurt its legs enough, or make it stumble.

The Spanish conquistadors in Pizarro's original force, as well as his reinforcements, were really quite unique.

We tend to think of the period as being characterized by monarchs and royal armies. Pizarro and his men were anything but a royal army. The bulk of them came from Extremadura: a remote, mountainous, and relatively poor area of Spain renowned for producing soldiers. Pizarro is, famously, Cortez's second cousin once removed, from this same region. If you were a young man of Extremadura during this period, soldiering was pretty much your best prospect for advancement, and Cortez was your hero. The reconquista and other conflicts had supplied several centuries of constant warfare that honed Spanish cavalry into the very best of Europe. The Extemadurans were the best of the Spanish. The stock that Pizarro's conquistadors were drawn from was elite.

Now, consider how that stock was drawn. As I mentioned above, Pizarro's force was no "royal army". No agents of the crown went to Extremadura and mustered up an army to send to Peru. These men paid their own way to the new world as an investment. With the reconquista finished and fabulous tales of conquest coming from Cortez's campaign, many soldiers willingly went to the new world to make a fortune for themselves. The men in Pizarro's company had already been on a difficult path before they set foot in Peru, but they were not just servants of the crown loyally following orders. They were entrepreneurs desperate to make good on their investment. Pizarro basically had his pick of the most ambitious men available.

One thing that made Spanish cavalry of this period so dangerous was pure reckless courage. If you put an overwhelming force in front of them they would charge directly into it while screaming, "Santiago!". The notion was that the enemy would not expect such insanity, and God would see them through anyways. The crazy thing is that this worked almost all the time in Peru. Pizarro's men were evil, greedy men, but they routinely routed enemy forces many times their size with reckless charges. On flat open ground, mounted conquistadors were virtually untouchable. The Incas learned this far too late.

The kidnapping and ransom of Atahualpa was an insane feat that typified the conquest of Peru. Pizarro's force was billeted in guest quarters that consisted of several long buildings with many doors facing a central square. They were surrounded by a royal Inca army dozens of times their size. They were too far from the coast to retreat if things turned violent, and they were convinced the Inca meant to turn things violent. For his part, the Inca saw the Spanish as a distraction from the more important task of mopping up the civil war that had just happened. The Spanish were too small a force to offer any serious resistance. After some scheming and diplomatic back and forth, Atahualpa and several thousand of his soldiers walked right into Pizarro's trap. They entered that courtyard and Pizarro's men rode out of every door of those long buildings, screaming. The expedition's cannons were fired for added psychological impact. The Inca's were compressed from all sides and panicked. Atahualpa was snatched from his litter and taken captive. The Spanish massacred thousands in the square and then continued riding down the Inca soldiers who hadn't been able to fit in the square for hours after Atahualpa's capture. With their command decapitated, there was little resistance.

As the conquest slowly progressed, the Inca resistance was typified by brilliant logistics, massive numbers, and flawed command that just couldn't seem to come to grips with what elite Spanish cavalry could do. The Spanish were taken by surprise and surrounded in Cusco by an absolutely massive army that appeared seemingly from nowhere... and didn't attack. The Inca commanders wanted to ensure they had an absolutely overwhelming force, so they continued to amass forces instead of attacking when surprise was on their side. They initially controlled the fortress of Saqsaywaman, but the Spanish were able to take it back due to the long delay in attack. That gave them a position to endure a long siege, which they did.

Some Inca generals did have success once they knew what they were dealing with. They learned to ambush the conquistadors in mountain passes, rolling boulders down on them from above. They learned to attack on rough ground that the Spanish horses couldn't be useful on. However, the Inca rulers seemed unable to comprehend that such a tiny force could offer resistance, so they still ordered their generals to offer pitched battles on flat open ground, which went against the Inca every time. These battles, such as at Lima, were tragically expensive for the Inca because their generals led from the front and often went into battle resolved to win or die.

Naked military force wasn't the only reason the Inca lost. The Spanish were adept at turning factions against the Inca's. The Inca empire was young and had been rapidly expanding. A lot of the people they had so recently conquered were only too happy to join the Spanish, not dissimilar to how the Aztec's enemies were eager to join forces with Cortez. The Inca empire was also predicated on worship of the Inca ruler as a living god. That became a serious flaw when the Spanish set up their own puppet Incas. However, while Cortez had a massive native army at his back by the time he reached Tenochtitlan, Pizarro's forces were often shockingly outnumbered but still managed to pull off seemingly impossible victories. Spanish cavalry really was that good if you fought them on their own terms, and the Inca chose to do that more often than they were ultimately able to afford. There were also other factors, like plague, that should not be underestimated.

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It's nice to see this book referenced! I am proud to have two old copies of the book in my personal library, one from 1880 and the other with no date on it. Prescott was an ancestor of mine, and the copies were passed down.

I mean, when hundred and eighty men conquer millions you have to wonder. Surely there must have been a way for Incas to crush them.

> That “someone is wrong” link[3] is an introduction (nine-part series) where the introduction polemically critiques Terminal Narrative.

I read these posts years ago and they are even worse than I remember them being. If these rebellions could have occurred without the Spanish, they would have.

The whole motivation behind the post is silly, too:

> The Terminal Narrative […] replaces discussion of agency and autonomy with notions of superiority or condescending pity for a people vanishing from the earth.

His belief in agency never made any sense to me; how is it possible for a chain of historical events to have occurred differently from how they did? When did the laws of physics change?

The central question is whether or not the Iberians had some quality about them that allowed them to win. It’s conceivable (albeit unlikely) that they simply won as the result of a series of historical accidents; one is then left to wonder why it was the Iberians who came out on top of the coincidence each and every time. In this narrative, we have to assume they just arrived in the right place and the right time, all over South America, and then just happened (through sheer dumb luck) to be the ones who ended up in power afterwards. The simpler explanation is that the Spaniards had better models than the people they conquered.

It does seem that native allies were critical (they are mentioned several times) and parts of the article downplay that.

I have also found the same thing in popular perceptions of the British Empire - it was heavily reliant on native allies to expand, and native soldiers and police to maintain itself (at least in South Asia, which is the bit I know the most about).

> What I’ve read on the matter says that Pizarro et al were always severely outnumbered by their allies as well. Why “discounting their native allies”? Were they so few that they didn’t matter?

When your allies massively outnumber you, it's not such good news as you might imagine. At war most of the time your allies turn on you as soon as they feel they don't need you to win (and almost certainly after you win). Who wants to share a victory with losers.

The ability of conquistadors to first make local allies so effectively (without any prior knowledge of language, culture or local politics) is insane, their ability to keep their "allies" in check even more so.

When people write "look how outnumbered they were" they don't mean Zack Snyder's "300", it's more of a Machiavelli thing I'd say.

He mentioned native allies at several points actually, though he doesn’t emphasise them and their purported numbers are still like 100x lower than the forces they are facing.

> And that they overemphasize planning and tactics and downplay being at the right place at the right time through no foresight of their own.

Mentioned by the author

> Another point is that the failed conquistadors are given little consideration.

Also addressed by the article.

> That book explicitly says that it is not a racist or chauvinistic history of how Europe became so successful. But critics claim that it still manages to be chauvinistic in how it wrongly claims that the conquistadors vanquished their enemies while being comically outnumbered.

I feel modern academia (and also Guns Germs and Steel FWIW) desperately try to do the opposite these days - to claim that the natives where not militarily, technologically or logistically inferior to Europeans despite getting conquered by Europeans in what look like very lopsided battles. I feel that is just as dishonest as the opposite. Nobody does this to the Mongols or Huns or whatever. Their superiority is accepted at face value.