What technologies could be invented to ensure the most technologically and scientifically adavanced Mesoamerica?
- Thread starter HyperMuscularDemon
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The French Gentes d'Arme or Swiss Guards are in a league of their own, but I would argue that the average mercenary in Europe was far less disciplined. The Sack of Rome where the Swiss Guards earned their fame had the Swiss defending against a mercenary army had mutinied and effectively forced their commander to march onto Rome to sack it because their pay wasn't enough.
Even the professional tercios a tier above the average mercenary suffered heavy desertion rates and mutinies. In the Army of Flanders, tercio desertion rates averaged 1% of the entire unit's strength every month in the early 1570s, and from 1573-1576, there were 3 separate mutinies, each involving thousands of soldiers and lasting months. This is the extremely early phase of professionalization, and barring the creme de la creme of soldiery (the Swiss guards, French gendarmes, tercios), the lack of discipline that the conquistadors had probably was not abnormal.
Extremadura also isn't particularly abnormal as a source of many conquistadors, primarily because it was a border state during the Reconquista (and after it too, when Portugal separated from Spain). As a result, it had a long military tradition that resulted in many sons emulating their fathers and striking it out in the New World. Both Cortes and Pizarro's fathers were officers, for instance.
The last time the conquistadors used their cavalry in battle, they had captured Atahualpa and his entire retinue with a single casualty, so they assumed that even a small cavalry detachment could hold its own. Plus, there is also the fairly reasonable assumption that the greater mobility of the cavalry would provide a scouting advantage, something which I believe was conventional doctrine in Europe. Obviously, that line of thinking backfired, but there are valid reasons for Pizarro to put cavalry in the vanguard even when local auxiliaries were available.
Why would anyone invent or use crossbows when metal armour doesn't exist? It's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist in the Americas.
Chocolate? Cocaine.
They did trade by sea, but it was limited in scale and very peripheral to both civilizational regions' economies. A "normal" product or one available anywhere isn't going to do it. Something that takes a lot of transport to move won't even get started. Something like silk could work on a very long time scale, but the determiner is a wealthy class wishing to consume foreign luxuries.
You want something that isn't bulky or heavy, and that generates its own market almost spontaneously. You want an addictive substance.
What were the key items of early European trade networks? Bullion, spices, cotton, and slaves mattered, yes. But the first three were pre-existing prestige products to conspicuously-consuming classes and the last was labor to produce bullion, cotton, and addiction. Rum, sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, and opium were all hugely successful products that created mass demand for expensive and unfamiliar products. Tobacco largely financed the US Revolutionary War, having arrived in Europe a disturbing alien habit.
Sneak coca leaves into Mayan priestly ritual, and it might just take care of itself.
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Didn’t the Mesoamericans adopt metallurgy from Ecuador around 800 AD? Plus since cocaine is naturally found in South America, I expect some form of seafaring far more advanced than OTL to be invented to facilitate more sea travel, and there is one boat in particular that could kick off a frenzy of naval development-the outrigger canoe!
the inca technically speaking didn’t even fall by the definition. That massive civil war (huascarists vs atahualpists) had the pizarrists supporting the former and they ended up winning, pizarro and his men soon found manco inca to place the role of the inca since both atahualpa and huascar were dead by this point. It was only afterwards when the pizarrist-incan lands mess up relations with the crown of spain that the latter establishes itself there all as a result of the chaos that was caused both by diego de almagro and manco inca. And yes i called Pizarro and his troops pizarrists because the conquista was privatized and had no much to do with the crown itself, which is why it ended up in conflict with it eventually as well.
But thats to say, the royal inca descedants and the panaca were very much present even as the spanish turned the inca empire into the kingdom of peru, the viceroyalty of peru. They would also on paintings portray the 14 incas, and then put charles V as the one after since to the eyes of the populace the kings of spain were seen as the continuation of the inca. So it wasnt exactly a fall if not more than “mestizaje“, or a personal union of the system if there was any word to describe the events.
they had manage to capture atahualpa because he had come to cajamarca without much of his forces by his side as a fatal mistake. However, those forces did end up showing up and they had the pizarrists and all the native allies surrounded by a humongous margin. All Atahualpa had to do was give out the order and the entire place wouldve been massacred with no contest. But that’s not what he did, in fact instead his order was to send the troops to go kill Huascar. To atahualpa Huascar was the way bigger threat than pizarro ever could be. It makes sense when you realize that the huascarists at the end of the day were the main leading force of the so called “spanish conquest” alongside other ethnicities like the chachapoyas or the huancas, etc.
yet at the same time this holds very true, what mattered and what made the spanish conquest work was the ability to form alliances that both pizarro and cortez were able to bring to the table. Pizarro not only was sided with the huascarists, but Atahualpa as a last resort to his life and legacy gave Pizarro the hand of his sister, Quispe Sisa to marriage as a way of forming an alliance. This same marriage is what also luckily saved Pizarro since when Manco Inca rebelled and decided to destroy all-related to the spanish, it was the fact that there were locals that sided with Quispe Sisa as well as other natives that pizarro had allied with that allowed lima to not be culled from 4 directions in its infancy. Put any other army in charge of a conquest of the inca and they won’t succeed at all, it wasn’t about brute force after all it was about the charisma and alliances that lead both incan and aztec lands to become part of the spanish empire.
And because of this I’m not sure to what extent a technological advancement could change things. Because if the natives get new technologies, and if it was really the conflict of natives vs natives + some conquest company tagging along, it would mean that for the thread title to hold itself that only the losing native side gets the technology but not the other somehow?
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While there's certainly truth there, the reason for the transition was that the outsiders could take a dramatically disproportionate role in the new system, and their edge - not solely alliances - made that happen.
I've been trying to get my hands on J.F. Guilmartin, “The Cutting Edge: An Analysis of the Spanish Invasion and Overthrow of the Inca Empire, 1532-1539” in Transatlantic Encounters, eds. K.J. Andrien and R. Adorno (1991), which supposedly argues that the importance of mismatched technology and military systems is if anything understated.
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That gets me thinking with ideas that could easily lead me down a rabbit hole of additional research distracting me from all the existing projects already distracting me from each other.
Just putting this out there: A timeline where the Long Pause of Austronesian expansion never happens, or is curtailed by 500+ years. As in our TL they discover South America and distribute sweet potato westward back to Asia, but in this TL they incidentally introduce Ecuadorian ritual use of coca leaves into roughtly our Guatemala, and a small group remains involved in conducting a back-and-forth trade....
This is exactly what I am talking about. If the Polynesians had maintained far greater contact with the Americas, then a triangle trade could emerge in the Pacific, between Polynesia, the Andean world, and the Mesoamerican regions. Not only that, but crops and animals could potentially get exchanged both ways, which means that not only does the Native Americans get the plants and animals of the Polynesians, but the Polynesians get the crops and animals of the Americas. Plus, with the resulting population and technology boom, the Polynesians could contact the Micronesians, and the Micronesians could contact the Philippines, and the native Filipinos could contact the rest of Asia, forming a thriving trans Pacific trade route, which would do wonders for both Polynesia and the Americas.