Melcar said:
The Aztec and Maya calenders were far more accurate than the European system. They were also successful in mapping most of the "visible" sky (by visible I mean what one was able to observe with the naked eye).
Do you have any support for these propositions? These debates are totally fruitless unless you do. I could claim that the Spaniards could make lemon custard out of potatoes and therefore were better alchemists, but what's the point? Given that the Julian calendar (which correctly identified the length of years and leap years) had existed for about 1300 years before the Aztecs came up with their calendar (which used a multiday calendar correction every 52 years, thus leading to annual slippage on the seasons), I'm not really sure you can credit the Aztecs with better calendars than the Europeans. (There Aztec 52-year leap system is very, very slightly more precise than the the Julian leap year system, but it leaves you off-cycle for decades.)
For what it's worth, the Aztecs were just putting the finishing touches on their big stone calendar when Copernicus was formulating his heliocentric view of the solar system. And the Aztec calendar, in any event, was just a repackaging of the Mayan calendar. I'm not sure there's any reason to think that the Aztecs would make the jump from a religious calendar to scientific analysis, given that the Mayas over their incredibly long history.
some of their "sciences" rivaled those of their contemporaries in the Old World.
Again, I'd love to see some evidence of this. But I'm happy to agree with you that in very basic things (like observation of the seasons and making stone tools), very basic people are often more effective than more advanced people. (Doesn't Jared Diamond have an orgasm over the fact that Papua New Guineans are better at finding their way around without maps than people from the civilized world?) For predicting solstices and equinoxes, the Europeans in the 1500's weren't much better than the Druids or the Aztecs. For making beaten silver torcs, they weren't much better than the Goths or the Incas. For making stone arrowheads they were probably much worse than the Iroquois, the Aztecs, and the Incas on their worst days. But that's because they were no longer worshiping the sun and the moon, wearing crude beaten precious metals, or fighting with rocks.
By the way, it was not only Tlaxcala that fought against the Aztecs, but every single fucker in the region rose against them. Even what was possibly the 2nd greatest power of the region, the Purépechas, refused to help them out. It was the Aztecs vs. everyone else + the Spanish.
Sure, whatever you want (though as far as my memory goes, it was the Tlaxcala who were their principal allies). As far as I know, there was not a single battle the Spaniards fought against the Aztecs where the Spaniards and their native auxiliaries outnumbered the Aztecs and their allies. And at each of the major battles, it was Spanish strategy, Spanish technology (be it guns, horses, brigantines, pikes, or whatever) that made the critical difference), or Spanish discipline that made the difference.
(It also strikes me as amusing in the extreme that Cortes's statecraft in successfully undermining the Aztec empire is treated as evidence of military inadequacy by the same crowd who would no doubt glory in Sun Tzu's genius whenever he would suggest a comparable move.)
In any event, the notion that the Spaniards were not significantly superior militarily to the indigenous people of America is plainly refuted by Pizarro's conquest of the Incas, which you still haven't engaged with at all.
And, just to be clear, I don't particularly like the Spanish, I find wars of conquest disgusting, and wars of genocide (which these drifted into, at times) even worse. That said, I find both the Aztecs (with their human sacrifice, cannibalism, king-worshiping, and slavery) and the Incas (with their king-worshiping and generally low regard for human individuality -- as indicated by the King's title being "the Individual Inca") ultimately worse than the Spaniards. They practiced just as aggressive warfare on their neighbors as the Spaniards did upon them; they just weren't as good at it. So while I don't care much for what the Spaniards did, the passion to deify native Americans (presumably as part of a project of demonizing white Europeans, as melcar's earlier posts make clear) is just goofy.
Again, why the lies? While it is true that Cortes was effective in finding local allies (proof that the Spaniards were probably the lesser of two evils, smallpox notwithstanding), the critical engagements were driven by the Spaniards, not by theTlaxcala. If the Tlaxcala could have thrown of the Aztec yoke on their own, obviously they would have.
