History UsefulNotes / PreColumbianCivilizations

The Aztecs are most commonly described as [[AlwaysChaoticEvil evil]] [[ReligionOfEvil incarnate]], and to be fair they did kill people, a ''lot'' of them, as part of their religion. Every month--that is, eighteen times a year--they'd have a big festival and party a bit, and then they'd have a UsefulNotes/{{human sacrifice}}. While fun for those on the right end of the knife, it did carry a deeper meaning. In Myth/AztecMythology, the gods are continually sacrificing themselves so that the universe can keep existing. So they felt indebted to the gods. Instead of praying, people would cut themselves with knives and cover some thorns with their blood, then put the thorns in the temple. The Aztecs themselves reported ''80,400'' sacrifices in a four-day period on one occasion (but they probably fudged the numbers a lot, considering that to hit that number there would have to a sacrifice every 4 seconds for all four days). Most likely, they sacrificed "only" a couple thousand a year. Fun fact: Each god had a specific sacrificial offering, and Quetzalcoatl's sacrifice consisted of butterflies and hummingbirds.\\

The other main part of Aztec society was warfare. Some of their gods required an enemy to be sacrificed in the temple, so they had to have wars a lot. Sometimes they had Flower Wars, which were ritualistic "mock" wars, more akin to giant martial challenges, fought for the purpose of obtaining captives for sacrifices, and also served to train new soldiers. In any case, every male commoner was given basic military training, and noble children were trained more thoroughly. A commoner could take a prisoner for sacrifice in order to become a professional warrior, which was a useful means of social climbing. The Aztecs ruled effectively by having a massive population of which nearly all males could be mobilized in the event of war. The Aztecs also tended to be victorious as there were no need for siege weapons at the time: Mesoamericans were effectively limited to ZergRush tactics in the event of a siege, and this is why the Aztecs, who had a massive population, nearly always won.\\

The UsefulNotes/SpanishConquestOfTheIncaEmpire was markedly different from that of the Aztecs, as the Spanish leader UsefulNotes/FranciscoPizarro managed to capture their emperor pretty early, and given that the man, Atahualpa, was not exactly popular among his subjects (many saw him as an usurper, as he had essentially snatched the throne from his brother Huáscar), a big part the empire's lower subjects and tributaries came to ingratiate themselves with Pizarro and did the rest of the job on their own. Most the subsequent conflicts would be rather waged by big players of the resultant board, either indigenous or Spanish, fighting each other for pieces of the cake (which, in fact, led to Pizarro's murder by the followers of a rival conquistador). An aristocrat named Manco Inca, formerly allied to Pizarro, attempted a native reconquest of the empire, but he had too many tribes against this idea, and was eventually driven to the bulwark of Vilcabamba, where a Neo-Inca state lasted some generations before being finally assimilated into Spanish rule.\\

Usually it means Middle (though UsefulNotes/{{Mexico}} is sometimes lumped in North) and UsefulNotes/{{South America}}n peoples in what is now known as UsefulNotes/LatinAmerica; for the UsefulNotes/{{North America}}n peoples who inhabited the lands of the UsefulNotes/UnitedStates and UsefulNotes/{{Canada}} that don't fit in the cultures mentioned below see UsefulNotes/NativeAmericans. For the inside story on Pre-Columbian gods, see Myth/AztecMythology, Myth/MayanMythology and Myth/IncaMythology.

In 1519 one UsefulNotes/HernanCortez landed with some horses and a few hundred Spanish conquistadors, armed with guns, cannons, and steel swords, and the keen advice of a mysterious native concubine named UsefulNotes/LaMalinche. Through a combination of terror tactics and shrewd alliances with the Aztecs' many enemies, he gained enough strength to march on Tenochtitlan. His forces were greeted in the city of 200,000 by Aztec leader Moctezuma II himself. A few days later, with the excuse of a rogue Aztec attack on tribes allied to the Spaniards,[[note]]These tribes, the Totonacs, had been previously part of the Aztec Empire, but upon Cortés' arrival, they had been quick to ally with him in exchange for protection. The whole attack happened because an Aztec garrison didn't get the memo and refused to ask for confirmation that the Totonacs weren't supposed to pay tributes anymore.[[/note]] Cortés took Moctezuma prisoner in his own palace. They remained in the city as "guests" for quite some time, but relations got increasingly tense, and when Cortés' lieutenant killed most of the Aztec nobility during a festivity on supposed suspicions that they were all plotting a revolt, the Aztecs decided they were having none of it. They chose a new leader and drove the Spanish and their allies out of the city. Cortés, undeterred, regrouped, gathered an army of native allies from Tlaxcala, Texcoco and other places, and went back to besiege Tenochtitlan, which by this time had been weakened by an epidemic of smallpox, which claimed almost half the city population and the new Huey Tlatoani (emperor), Cuitláhuac (pronounced coo-ee-TLA-oo-ac).\\

A few Spaniards wanted to keep the pyramids and turn them into churches, what with the view and all; after all, it's what they'd done with all the Moorish mosques back in Spain [[UsefulNotes/SpanishReconquista a generation or two earlier]]. However, most of them were [[OverdrawnAtTheBloodBank literally plastered with blood and gore]], so only the long-abandoned ones remain. To be fair, the Spaniards were no pikers.[[note]]well, not ''that'' kind of pikers[[/note]] Christianization of the land started as soon as missionaries like Toribio de Benavente and Creator/BernardinoDeSahagun arrived, although it was a slow affair due to the sheer population density -- Cortés had originally tried to force his Tlaxcaltec allies to convert, but when they flat out refused, he realized insisting would be really bad for him (as in "yet another 100,000 native warriors angry at our 500 soldiers" bad), so he passed the task to the preachers. Still, given the apparent collapse of the Aztecs, who were already the bane of other tribes in the region, the Spaniards would find no shortage of indigenous willing to convert and to force others to do the same.\\

The UsefulNotes/SpanishConquestOfTheIncaEmpire was markedly different from that of the Aztecs, as the Spanish leader UsefulNotes/FranciscoPizarro managed to capture their emperor pretty early, and given that the man, Atahualpa, was not exactly popular among his subjects (many saw him as an usurper), a big part the empire's lower subjects and tributaries came to ingratiate themselves with Pizarro and did the rest of the job on their own. Most the subsequent conflicts would be rather waged by big players of the resultant board, either indigenous or Spanish, fighting each other for pieces of the cake (which, in fact, led to Pizarro's murder by the followers of a rival conquistador). An aristocrat named Manco Inca attempted a native reconquest of the empire, but he had too many tribes against this idea, and was eventually driven to the bulwark of Vilcabamba, where a Neo-Inca state lasted some generations before being finally assimilated into Spanish rule.

The Ancestral Puebloans (often called Anasazi, though this name actually comes from the Navajo and means "ancient enemies") were groups that lived in the Southwestern region of the United States. Starting somewhat over a thousand years ago, they began building [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin pueblos]], moving on to Great Houses, which were enormous buildings with hundreds of rooms and unknown purpose. After a couple centuries of this there was a disruption in their society and new pueblos were built in highly defensible positions, including the famous cliff houses. Things did settle down though and there is clear continuity between them and the modern puebloans, such as the Zuni, Hopi, and Taos. They were conquered by the Spanish, who hoped to find [[GoldFever gold]] and the Seven Cities of Cibola (which were real puebloan settlements, but with decidedly less gold than the Spaniards would have preferred). Later they revolted and drove the Spanish out. The Spanish took them over again, but New Spain soon became Mexico. Then the United States took over half of Mexico and to this day there are people who still live in pueblos like their ancestors did a thousand years ago.\\

* Just about the only silver lining of the deforestation of UsefulNotes/TheAmazonRainforest is the discovery of multiple archaeological sites: densely-packed cities that could have held tens or hundreds of thousands of people. We currently believe these civilizations were devastated and stripped bare due to a combination of diseases from the Columbian exchange, and looting by Europeans. It's now thought that much of the biodiversity in the Amazon is due to human engineering, rather than having occurred naturally.

A few Spaniards wanted to keep the pyramids and turn them into churches, what with the view and all; after all, it's what they'd done with all the Moorish mosques back in Spain [[UsefulNotes/SpanishReconquista a generation or two earlier]]. However, most of them were [[OverdrawnAtTheBloodBank literally plastered with blood and gore]], so only the long-abandoned ones remain. To be fair, the Spaniards were no pikers.[[note]]well, not ''that'' kind of pikers[[/note]] Christianization of the land started as soon as missionaries like Toribio de Benavente and UsefulNotes/BernardinoDeSahagun arrived, although it was a slow affair due to the sheer population density -- Cortés had originally tried to force his Tlaxcaltec allies to convert, but when they flat out refused, he realized insisting would be really bad for him (as in "yet another 100,000 native warriors angry at our 500 soldiers" bad), so he passed the task to the preachers. Still, given the apparent collapse of the Aztecs, who were already the bane of other tribes in the region, the Spaniards would find no shortage of indigenous willing to convert and to force others to do the same.\\

Around the year 900 AD, classical Mayan civilization went into steep decline. Historians can't quite figure out why. Maybe their governing system collapsed, or maybe there was a famine, or maybe there was some kind of disease or something. By the time of the [[UsefulNotes/SpanishConquestOfTheMaya Spanish invasion]], Mayan civilization still existed on a complex level organized into several kingdoms, confederations, and city-states (much like Italy at the time). However, by this time, the trend of Pan-Mesoamericanism (Mesoamerican cultures were becoming similar across the board due to increased trade and communication) had caused their culture to shift dramatically. Their states lasted centuries longer than any other Mesoamerican civilization into the 17th century, probably due to their decentralized structure. Their descendants live in Mexico and Guatemala, but their civilization has died out and their cities are abandoned.\\

The Aztecs are most commonly described as [[AlwaysChaoticEvil evil]] [[ReligionOfEvil incarnate]], and to be fair they did kill people, a lot of them, as part of their religion. Every month--that is, eighteen times a year--they'd have a big festival and party a bit, and then they'd have a UsefulNotes/{{human sacrifice}}. While fun for those on the right end of the knife, it did carry a deeper meaning. In Myth/AztecMythology, the gods are continually sacrificing themselves so that the universe can keep existing. So they felt indebted to the gods. Instead of praying, people would cut themselves with knives and cover some thorns with their blood, then put the thorns in the temple. The Aztecs themselves reported ''80,400'' sacrifices in a four-day period on one occasion (but they probably fudged the numbers a lot, considering that to hit that number there would have to a sacrifice every 4 seconds for all four days). Most likely, they sacrificed "only" a couple thousand a year. Fun fact: Each god had a specific sacrificial offering, and Quetzalcoatl's sacrifice consisted of butterflies and hummingbirds.\\

Now we've shooed the elephant out of the room, we can talk about the stuff people usually don't know about the Aztecs. Let's start with history. The [[OlderThanTheyThink Mexica]] (pronounced "Mesheeka"), a tribe of Nahua people, migrated to central Mexico in the 13th century from the north; they called their ancestral land in the north "Aztlan," but where it was (and it might not have been anywhere in particular) nobody knows.[[note]]Hypotheses range from Nayarit (in western Mexico, where the local indigenous peoples speak languages reasonably closely related to Nahuatl) to the Sonoran Desert (currently the hypothesized ''Urheimat'' of the Uto-Aztecan language family, whose members at time of contact with Europeans were spoken as far north as UsefulNotes/{{Idaho}} and as far south as UsefulNotes/{{Nicaragua}}). There's also the possibility that "Aztlan" is a mythical location not intended to correspond to any particular place in the vagabond history of the Nahua peoples.[[/note]] After arriving in the Valley of Mexico, they founded the city-state of Tenochtitlan. Some time after, they allied with two other Nahua city-states, Texcoco and Tlacopan, creating together the Aztec Triple Alliance, better known as the Aztec or Mexica Empire, in 1428. The Aztecs had a different way of looking at an empire; rather than seeing the lowest parts as something to be ruled from the top, they considered the top to be constituted of the parts. (No, that doesn't mean you get a room in the palace. Get back in the field and keep constituting.) They fell apart around 100 years later, with the conquistadors allying themselves with the Aztecs' nemesis the Tlaxcala Confederacy (another Nahuatl-speaking polity/alliance) and soundly defeating them and destroying the capital.\\

The other main part of Aztec society was warfare. Some of their gods required an enemy to be sacrificed in the temple, so they had to have wars a lot. Sometimes they had Flower Wars, which were ritualistic "mock" wars, more akin to giant martial challenges, fought for the purpose of obtaining captives for sacrifices, and also served to train new soldiers. In any case, every male commoner was given basic military training, and noble children were trained more thoroughly. A commoner could take a prisoner for sacrifice in order to become a professional warrior, which was a useful means of social climbing. The Aztecs ruled effectively by having a massive population of which nearly all males could be mobilized in the event of war. The Aztecs also tended to be victorious as there were no need for siege weapons at the time. Mesoamericans were effectively limited to ZergRush tactics in the event of a siege. This is why the Aztecs, who had a massive population, nearly always won.\\

In 1519 one UsefulNotes/HernanCortez landed with some horses and a few hundred Spanish conquistadors, armed with guns, cannons, and steel swords. Through a combination of terror tactics and shrewd alliances with the Aztecs' many enemies, he gained enough strength to march on Tenochtitlan. His forces were greeted in the city of 200,000 by Aztec leader Moctezuma II himself. A few days later, with the excuse of a rogue Aztec attack on tribes allied to the Spaniards,[[note]]These tribes, the Totonacs, had been previously part of the Aztec Empire, but upon Cortés' arrival, they had been quick to ally with him in exchange for protection. The whole attack happened because an Aztec garrison didn't get the memo and refused to ask for confirmation that the Totonacs weren't supposed to pay tributes anymore.[[/note]] Cortés took Moctezuma prisoner in his own palace. They remained in the city as "guests" for quite some time, but relations got increasingly tense, and when Cortés' lieutenant killed most of the Aztec nobility during a festivity on supposed suspicions that they were all plotting a revolt, the Aztecs decided they were having none of it. They chose a new leader and drove the Spanish and their allies out of the city. Cortés, undeterred, regrouped, gathered an army of native allies, and went back to besiege Tenochtitlan, which by this time had been weakened by an epidemic of smallpox, which claimed almost half the city population and the new Huey Tlatoani (emperor), Cuitláhuac (pronounced coo-ee-TLA-oo-ac).\\

A few Spaniards wanted to keep the pyramids and turn them into churches, what with the view and all; after all, it's what they'd done with all the Moorish mosques back in Spain [[UsefulNotes/SpanishReconquista a generation or two earlier]]. However, most of them were [[OverdrawnAtTheBloodBank literally plastered with blood and gore]], so only the long-abandoned ones remain. To be fair, the Spaniards were no pikers [[note]]well, not ''that'' kind of pikers[[/note]]: entire tribes would be decimated under the policy of "convert or else"; and given the apparent collapse of the Aztecs, who were already the bane of other tribes in the region, they had no shortage of indigenous willing to convert (and to force others to do the same).\\

The Aztec language, Nahuatl, is still spoken today, among other reasons because King of Spain UsefulNotes/PhilipII made it an official language of his empire and ordered to promote it through Mesoamerica, reasoning it was easier to do that than forcing the whole continent to speak Spanish (Charles II later undid this, but by then enough natives had learned some Spanish). It still flavors the Spanish in much of Mexico and has given the world some fairly useful words like tomato (from ''xitomatl''), [[FireBreathingDiner chilli]] (from ''chīlli''), chocolate (from ''xocolātl''), and coyote (from ''cóyotl''). The image associated with the myth of the founding of Tenochtitlan, an eagle devouring a snake on a cactus, is today depicted in the Coat of Arms of Mexico and on the Mexican flag.

The UsefulNotes/SpanishConquestOfTheIncaEmpire was markedly different from that of the Aztecs, as the Spanish leader UsefulNotes/FranciscoPizarro managed to capture their emperor pretty early, after which many of the empire's lower subjects and tributaries came to ingratiate themselves with him and did the rest of the job on their own. Most the subsequent conflicts would be rather waged by big players of the resultant board, either indigenous or Spanish, fighting each other for pieces of the cake (which, in fact, led to Pizarro's murder by the followers of a rival conquistador). An aristocrat named Manco Inca attempted a native reconquest of the empire, but he had too many tribes against this idea and was eventually driven to the bulwark of Vilcabamba, where a Neo-Inca state lasted some generations before being finally assimilated into Spanish rule.

Moreso than any other culture in the region, the Inca chose to survive and adapt to Spanish conquest, with the last Inca Emperor instructing his citizens to convert to Christianity and worship Inca traditions on the side, which some Quechua people continue to do today. Their language and much of their agrarian lifestyle has also survived. They were aided in this by the mountainous nature of the region which left the Spaniards dependent on Inca infrastructure and foodstuffs, a fact which protected the Inca from wholesale dismantling. In particular, Incan roads inhibited Spanish spread: European mountain roads consist of multiple switchbacks in order to accommodate the proclivities of the Eurasian horse, while in contrast, Incan roads were built with the llama and alpaca in mind and consist of stairsteps up the sides of mountains, which Eurasian horses '''hated'''.\\

The Aztecs are most commonly described as [[AlwaysChaoticEvil evil]] [[ReligionOfEvil incarnate]], and to be fair they did kill people, a lot of them, as part of their religion. Every month--that is, eighteen times a year--they'd have a big festival and party a bit, and then they'd have a human sacrifice. While fun for those on the right end of the knife, it did carry a deeper meaning. In Myth/AztecMythology, the gods are continually sacrificing themselves so that the universe can keep existing. So they felt indebted to the gods. Instead of praying, people would cut themselves with knives and cover some thorns with their blood, then put the thorns in the temple. The Aztecs themselves reported ''80,400'' sacrifices in a four-day period on one occasion (but they probably fudged the numbers a lot, considering that to hit that number there would have to a sacrifice every 4 seconds for all four days). Most likely, they sacrificed "only" a couple thousand a year. Fun fact: Each god had a specific sacrificial offering, and Quetzalcoatl's sacrifice consisted of butterflies and hummingbirds.\\