> And the diseases were only a small factor in the outcome of the colonization. Guns being a much larger factor, for example.
I'm not so sure about that. Writing gave a huge advantage to the Western forces. By that I mean military men had access to a couple thousand years of military tactics books. Having advanced weapons is one thing, knowing strategy and tactics is quite another.
For example, there are battles where the Romans were outnumbered 10:1 and still defeated a better armed barbarian army. The Romans were organized, disciplined, and trained to fight as a unit. They would just slaughter the barbarians who fought as individuals.
Remember, guns at the time were muzzle-loading, and had some rube goldberg contraption to light the powder. They were unreliable, inaccurate, and very slow to reload.
People in America were not stupid, there were not repetition guns yet, like Repeating rifle or early machine guns.
The biggest significant factor for Spanish people was getting the support of the local population. It was not foreign powers against local powers. But local powers against local powers.
And that was because local empires were terrible with the subdued tribes. There was human sacrifices with subdued tribes and they were slaves. Under Spanish rule those who supported the Spaniards were soon considered Spanish citizens, a huge improvement.
And Rome usually worked the other way around. Rome did outnumber everybody and squashed any opposition. First they did because mandatory Conscription ("the draft")in the army, an army of peasants that was way more numerous than anybody else and a population that will replace casualties much faster than anybody else.
The Army of peasants did fight against elite warriors that were much better trained and equipped but were way less numerous, for example against the Macedonian Army,and they won.
Finally, after growing and organizing themselves much more, Rome will use infrastructure that only they had like the Mediterranean sea and specially roads to move massive amounts of soldiers very fast from one part of the Empire to another.
This was the equivalent of the train that will make it possible for Germany, Russia or the US moving so much people to the war front fast.
It was the Romans those who did outnumber everybody else concentrating the army at one point, defeating the enemy and moving the Army to another place.
And it was Julius Caesar who wrote "divide et impera" because that was the Roman way of doing things, dividing their enemies, and fighting them isolated with a much bigger army.
I didn't say they were. I said they lacked writing. Writing preserves orders of magnitude more information for others than oral tradition possibly can.
Yes, I know the Mayans had writing, and their books were burned by the Spanish. But the Spanish conquered the Inca and the Aztecs, not the Mayans.
The ideas of recruiting the locals to your side, and divide and conquer, are part of western military tradition. If the Aztecs and Inca used such tactics, I'd be interested if you have sources.
There were battles that the Romans fought and won against the barbarian much greater numbers. That isn't going to happen without superior organization, discipline, training and tactics.
And finally, the Roman idea of conquest was to assimilate, not exterminate.
> Writing gave a huge advantage to the Western forces. By that I mean military men had access to a couple thousand years of military tactics books. Having advanced weapons is one thing, knowing strategy and tactics is quite another.
If memory serves me correctly, military tactics didn't really become a genre until the late 16th century, after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires. And during the early 16th century, it's quite likely that most of the soldiers (including the commanders!) would have been illiterate and thus not really able to read any extant military tactics books, especially whatever survived of Greek or Roman military texts.
Since the Conquistador commanders sent back written reports, I doubt they were illiterate. And even if they were illiterate, they were trained by military people who were. And even if those were also illiterate, they were steeped in military traditions of discipline, organization, tactics, etc., that went back to the greeks.
The way they operated was clear evidence of military sophistication.
> And even if those were also illiterate, they were steeped in military traditions of discipline, organization, tactics, etc., that went back to the greeks.
And why couldn't, say, the Inca draw on the Wari, who could draw on the Moche, who could draw on the Chavin, who date back even before the Greeks?
The problem with claiming the utility of writing in developing military tactics is that Western Europe doesn't have a tradition of discussing military tactics in written texts until the Early Modern period. There's nothing like Sun Tzu's Art of War that keeps getting passed down and talked about; any transmission of tactics is going to happen via practical experience in a kind of apprenticeship--which is exactly the same method of transmission an illiterate society is going to do for military tactics.
Or you could do what the Aztecs did and send all of your boys (rich or poor) to school to learn how to become warriors, come to think of it.
The only reason we know how Pizarro conquered the Inca is because he wrote it down. The bulk of what we know about Inca life comes from the Spanish who wrote it down. Most of the rest comes from archaeology and guesswork.
If you've got evidence that the Inca military had organized tactics, like units, feinting maneuvers, flanking attacks, procedures for taking fortified positions, covering fire, strategic retreat, breastworks, defense in depth, etc., I'm interested.
We do know the Inca had no plan for when their leader was captured but not killed. But Pizarro knew about that one, and that's how he defeated an empire. Disrupting the enemy's command and control is a well-understood technique in Western military tradition.
I strongly recommend reading this for anyone who's interested. It's a really interesting view of what Mexico looked like prior to Spanish colonization, told from a Spanish perspective of course.
It also became clear that the Spanish, despite their superior technology, were so outnumbered that they wouldn't have been successful if it weren't for their local allies. They were nearly all killed in a desperate escape from Tenochtitlan when things went downhill.
I'm not so sure about that. Writing gave a huge advantage to the Western forces. By that I mean military men had access to a couple thousand years of military tactics books. Having advanced weapons is one thing, knowing strategy and tactics is quite another.
For example, there are battles where the Romans were outnumbered 10:1 and still defeated a better armed barbarian army. The Romans were organized, disciplined, and trained to fight as a unit. They would just slaughter the barbarians who fought as individuals.
Remember, guns at the time were muzzle-loading, and had some rube goldberg contraption to light the powder. They were unreliable, inaccurate, and very slow to reload.