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Was it smallpox that killed so many Aztecs?
Or perhaps hemorrhagic fever? The epidemiologists play detective and maybe the Spaniards get off the hook. For the pointer, thanks to www.politicaltheory.info.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 23, 2006 at 02:49 PM in History | Permalink
Comments
An alternative alternate theory says that instead of cholera it was some native respiratory disease. The Aztecs were all crowded in one place, and got hit by a mutated form of an epidemic disease they'd had around for a few centuries.
Posted by: Alan Kellogg at May 23, 2006 11:56:59 PM
Color me unimpressed. Retrospective diagnosis is a tough business. There are plenty of candidates for an imported epidemic disease, even if you can rule out smallpox. Measles for instance and lots of influenzas. Be that as it may, the issue is not who is to blame. The guilty parties, if any, are long dead. The Spanish may have been brutal, but they were nicer than many of the peoples they conquered. Cortez had no problem finding local allies.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at May 24, 2006 12:05:41 AM
Cortez had no problem finding local allies
Yeah, when your traditional enemy views you as longpork, you'll take any help you can get.
Posted by: Mitchell Young at May 24, 2006 1:05:27 AM
I remember reading Jared Diamond's 'Guns Germs and Steel'
in which he claimed that the invading spanish killed
the aztecs more by way of disease and a little by way of
superior firepower rather than any seriously thought out
military strategy.
Posted by: Kanishka at May 24, 2006 2:40:38 AM
The first hand account The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz is remarkably accessible.
Whichever pathogen(s) spread havoc, it's clear it started where the Spanish did and moved with them.
What's also interesting is how little effect guns had on the Aztec. The first major battle where the Atzecs confronted muskets the Aztecs looked around confused after the first "bang," and so the Spaniards where able to clear the field with no great loss to either side. However, in subesquent battles the Atzecs had learned that to once a gun went "booom" it was harmless, so the Aztecs learned to play a "cat-and-mouse" game to get the musketeer to discharge and then run in and butcher him. What did (militarily) make a difference were the steel breast plates that allowed the Spaniards to fight in close-ordered infantry formations. The leather-wearing jade wielding aztecs could only replicate these tactics at frightening casuality levels. Thus, the Spaniards, like a modern American armored unit, could seize any particular bit of the ground they wanted but typically could not "clear the field" of their numerically superiors opponents unaided. Hence the Spaniard's strategy of having lots of Indian allies with them (to cover the flanks and sweep up broken Aztec units) while focusing on capturing or killing the leaders of whatever force opposed them.
..but yeah, the pathogens were what brought the Aztecs low, as well as Cortes's own allies.
Posted by: tylerh at May 24, 2006 2:13:06 PM
If you read the article, it mentions many plagues, and the theory is mostly about the 1576 plague, not the 1519 invasion. The latter could be smallpox (possibly more virulent than the Aztecs were familiar with, if they were indeed familiar with a kind) and the former, much later plague, this fever.
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