for history buffs: arms of the conquest

[Cato]

I am interested in the arms, swords, crossbows, helbades and firearms the spanish conquistadors used during their fight against the aztec empire.
Can you tell me something about them and how they were used?
Do you think they were an decisive advantage over aztec arms?

I ask, because that's a thesis aztec warfare expert Ross Hassig wouldn't agree with:
"Aztec warriors were equal to conquistadors on a man-to-man basis and they were quick to adapt to and avoid the nasty effects of both guns and horses with tactical responses"
[ Ross Hassig, Aztec warfare, p.2 ]
Could this be true from your point of view?
Which books or internet sites do you recommend on the firearms they used?
Should I read "Renaissance Swordsmanship" by John Clements or his book an medieval swordsmanship?

I have already read Hugh Thomas "Conquest of Mexico",and Hassigs "Aztec warfare".
I have also found an article on the conquest
and it's causes on the net which sums up the
current opinion pretty well- maybe some of you are interested: http://www.sfsu.edu/~hsa/ex-post-facto/ebert.html


Thank you very much in advance for your help!

[Jack 99]

From what I understand, the Aztec concept of war, like that of many Native American tribes, was completely different from that of the Europeans. Counting coup or touching an enemy in battle was more highly regarded than killing him. They also blunted their arrows to drive away enemies rather than kill. I could be wrong, but I seem to remember this from an advanced Sociology course in college.

[Danger Dave]

I think the Aztecs also valued prisoners highly - as slaves and as sacrifices.

Remember, the Aztecs were hampered by the idea that they might be fighting their white-skinned god Quetzacuaotl (ketz-a-ku-watel) and decimated by a smallpox epidemic. While they waited and prayed and sacrificed trying to find out what to do, the smallpox devastated their population. The Spainish, on the other hand, had no such moral quandry, and a resistance to smallpox - as did almost any European who survived to adulthood. Cortez & co. truly believed they were doing God's work converting the heathens by any means necessary (they had priests tell them as much). Then there's the greed factor...

[LawDog]

Dagnabbit, I lost my original post .

Okay, first off, you must understand that the Aztecs, or Mexica as they called themselves, had been mercenaries in the service of more powerful tribes for several generations. And they rose to power over the bodies of those who did not enter into treaties with them. Thus, they were no strangers to warfare.

The Aztecs were used to the terrain in which the war would have been fought, they lived and fought there--had the homefield advantage, as we would say.

The Spaniards had steel, but the heat made wearing armour an invitation to heatstroke, and I would imagine that the difference between getting hit with a steel sword, and getting smacked with an obsidian-toothed machatl, are academic at best.

The Spainards had crossbows, and the Aztecs had atlatls (spear-throwers), so we'll call that one a draw.

The Spaniards had guns, but I understand that the humidity encountered in Meso-America made touching off blackpowder an iffy proposition at best. I also think that the guns were probably not have been used to best effect in the jungles. Probably best for shocking the natives with thunder and lightning, and hoping the panic lasts long enough to get the place conquered before anyone realizes what happened.

Diseases? Well, the Spanish did have smallpox on their side. However, if the Aztecs had been able to fight a holding action and kept the Spaniards in the equatorial and coastal jungles, then Yellow Fever and Malaria would have done a bit of a number on Cortez and his Merry Band of Marauders.

Finally, the Aztecs had numbers on their side. Boy, howdy, did they have numbers. I'm not sure what the exact population of the Aztec Empire was, not to mention the Empire-states under the subjugation of the Aztecs, but I'll guess that the Spanish were outnumbered by at least twenty-to-one.

If Cortez hadn't had the absolute incredible dumb luck to show up when the locals were expecting their pale-skinned Quetzacoatl to reappear -- or if the Aztecs had said: "Gods, huh? Well, if you're Gods, then getting whacked with this club shouldn't bother you...Hmm. Oops, he broke. Obviously not Gods. Kill them all." -- then the story of Meso-America would have been totally different.

And I'd be writing this in Aztec hieroglyphics.



LawDog

[This message has been edited by LawDog (edited April 17, 2000).]

[Erik]

There's something about your wry old humor, Lawdog. You just gotta love it...

[Herodotus]

Before the European discovery of America, the Native Americans of the more settled and agricultural type fought their battles in disciplined ranks with edged weapons such as the Mexican machatl and various types of war clubs and defended themselves with shields. Battles usually started off with a shower of arrows. The bigger, the more disciplined or the more tactically superior would be the winners in such a battle among equals.
The introduction of firearms into a situation like this is devestating. Even very primative firearms (small canon firing shot is the worst) are enough to make the use of traditional massed tactics suicidal for even the most disciplined and professional of warriors. The side without firearms can no longer stand in the field, either in defense or offense, against an enemy so armed. The side without firearms is reduced to suprise attacks, ambushes and mere harassment of its enemy. They can fight on an equal basis only if they can get to their enemy for hand to hand combat, something a smart enemy will always deney them.
Having lost the ability to stand against their enemy as an equal in the field, the enemy cannot be stopped from taking the cities, towns and rich areas of the defender, and this is usually enough in itself to end a war.
These things happened not only in Mexico, but all over the world in the period between about 1500 to 1800. Europeans developed the the use of firearms in battle in their own ceaseless wars. This technology and its skilled use is surely one of the major factors that allowed them to dominate so much of the world at that time.
As regards to Mexico, the Aztecs did not really have such an effective numerical advantage as you might at first expect. The core of their army consisted to two societies of professional warriors, the Eagle Warriors and the Jaguar Warriors. These two professional warrior societies may have numbered no more than 4,000 effectives each. They were the hard and, until the arrival of the Spanish, the unbeatable core around which the rest of the Aztec army was formed. These warriors campaigned every single year, even if it was only in a non-serious "Flower War" that was largely symbolic. The years in which they campaigned in earnest, they were truely to be feared.
The the rest of the Aztec army consisted of masses of conscripts and allies that were not nearly so formidable.
The fire arms of the Spanish effectively nullified the offensive danger from these Eagle and Jaguar warriors. They fought the Spaniards well when they ambushed them on the causeways of the Aztec capitaol during Cortez's first retareat out of Tenochtitlan. They then lead the defense of the Aztec capital when Cortez returned after having mustered perhaps as many as 100,000 of their enemies and former subjects. They were destroyed in this defense.
After the destruction of these 8,000 men there was no more effective resistance to Spanish rule. They were accepted as the new overlords by a people long accustomed to such rule.
Most of the great empires of the past have relied on relatively small numbers of disciplined troops to effectively intimidate vast numbers of people over vast areas of land. That is why these empires usually collaped so suddenly and spectacularly. All you had to do was figure out a way to destroy what was in reality a very small number of the empire's professional and loyal troops. Then the whole empire would collapse.

[tombread]

John Keegan talks about the different ways wars were fought by different societies in his excellent "The Nature of War." Most early warfare was largely ceremonial, hit and run kinds of things. The Greeks were the first (and the only, for a long time) that closed with their enemies, intent on slaughter rather than coups or ceremony. The Romans learned from the Greeks. The Aztecs and Mayans fought a ceremonial war whose purpose was not principally to kill your opponent. They should have rethought their methods when the first Spanish came ashore.

[LawDog]

This thread spurred my interest and I hauled out the old books.

Hernando Cortez was one lucky dog. He had been picked to lead an expedition to Mexico, but the expedition had been cancelled because the Gorvernor of Cuba suspected Cortez of political ambitions (No!).

Cortez went anyway, violating a direct order. He landed on the Yucatan Peninsula with 600 warm bodies, and when his spear carriers began to wonder what the hell they were doing in darkest Mexico, Cortez burned the ships to encourage the proper mindset. Nice guy.

Little after that, our Merry Band of Marauders got jumped by the Tlaxcalans. The Tlaxcalans outnumbered Cortez's people by a factor of three hundred to one, and fought three pitched battles against the invaders before deciding to ally with the Spaniards.

Cortez decided to leave half his forces at Vera Cruz and go sightseeing (this is probably about the time we get Cortez's famous quote: "I do not wish to grub in the dirt like a peasant. I wish to find gold.") with his new-found Bestest Buddies.

Sometime during Hank's feud with the Aztecs (silly buggers took the 'Or else' option when Cortez said, "Civilize or else!"), Cortez's old boss in Cuba sent about 1400 armed reminders to Come Home. Cortez and the Tlaxcalans stomped the absolute menudo out of the arresting force and set about recruiting the survivors. Considering the Meso-American way of dealing with recalcitrant attitudes, it's not very surprising that the survivors decided that they Really Meant to Sign Up The Whole Time.

See what I mean about lucky?

As far as the Aztecs, near as I can tell the early Aztecs were basically the Hell's Angels of the Meso-American world. Before settling in the Valley of Mexico, they were considered brutish, rude, boorish, savage, violent and worst of all, they slurped their soup. Seems they got kicked out of every City-State and Empire in Mexico. They settled in (long, tongue-twisting word with too many consonants) because one of their leaders saw a eagle perched in a cactus with a snake in it's talons and marked it as a sign from the Gods.

The Aztecs spent the next 50-100 years fighting for whichever Empire or City-State needed some really good warriors. The other tribes tolerated the Azzies, as long as they didn't try to move in with the Quality after the screaming and bleeding was done. After three or four generations, the Aztecs got tired of being shown the highway as soon as the bodies quit bouncing, and they decided to make their own Empire and make darn sure that they got to be the Snobs.

At it's height, the Aztec Empire was second only to the Inca Empire in size. However, it wasn't an Empire as we would recognize it: the Aztecs simply got paid tribute from the various parts of their Empire and let the locals make their own laws and run their own governments.

(Bit of pro-RKBA trivia: the Aztecs had a militia. If you weren't a girl-child, you learned to swing a pretty mean club. If you didn't want to be a good gun-nut...err, club-nut... you could take it up with the War God. In person. Right after you quit bouncing down the pyramid steps.)

Since the Aztecs left their subjects more-or-less to themselves, a large part of their Empire was in various states of rebellion when Hernando Cortez and his Merry Band of Multi-Cultural Marauders decided to take over. It didn't take much talking for the subjugated City-States to decide to throw off the yoke of their Imperialistic Aztec Oppressors and throw in with the freedom-loving Spaniards. (Damn, that sounds familiar...)

But it still took Hank a year or so to get the job done.

LawDog

[This message has been edited by LawDog (edited April 18, 2000).]

[Danger Dave]

I think the Aztec capitol was Aztlan (Azz-it-lan). I'm sure it was located at present-day Mexico City.

[DC]

Dave...
Aztlan is the name for the Aztec empire (BTW..its also the name for the lost territories during the Mexican-American war, adopted by militant Chicano groups of present day).

The Aztec capital (present day Mexico City) was Tenochtitlan

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"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" RKBA!

[George Hill]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Counting coup or touching an enemy in battle was more highly regarded than killing him. [/quote]
That was common "battle" form for African confrontations untill Shaka Zulu had his way with it.
The Aztecs were the most feared warriors in the Americas. They also possesed some of the most advanced technologies of the time/region.
Disease was the biggest threat they had...
A few boatloads of armored Spaniards would not have been a military problem for them.

Man - TFL continues to impress me - look at the depth of knowledge shown here!