"After having treated their prisoners well for a long time, giving them all the provisions that they could one, he who is the chief calls a great assembly of his acquaintances. He ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner and on the other end, several feet away, out of harm's way, and gives to his best friend the arm to hold; and the two of them, in the presence of the assembled group, slash him to death with their swords. That done, they roast him and eat him together, sending portions to their absent friends. They do this, not as is supposed, for nourishment as did the ancient Scythians; it represents instead an extreme form of vengeance. The proof of this is that when they saw that the Portuguese, who had allied themselves with their adversaries, executed their captives differently, burying them up to the waist and firing numerous arrows into the remainder of the body, hanging them afterward, [the Tupi] viewed these people from another world, who had spread the knowledge of many vices among their neighbors, and who were much more masterly than they in every sort of evil, must have chosen this sort of revenge for a reason. Thinking that it must be more bitter than their own, they abandoned their ancient way to imitate this one.
I am not so concerned that we should remark on the barbaric horror of such a deed, but that, while we quite rightly judge their faults, we are blind to our own."
Yes exactly. Here we have two cultures still heavily under the influence of their own general religions, and the ways that each allowed or dealt with applying violence. Each reflected the cultural view of what "reality" was. In Europe, shamanism had been replaced with Christianity, which had its own concept of the real world — one that was a prelude to an afterlife, in which one would be judged. For the Aztecs (and for other New World peoples too) reality was in no insignificant part determined by the knowledge of priestly shamans, their experiences, and the experiences that people had during rituals. All three of those were heavily influenced (according to Watson and others) by the natural presence of the world's strongest hallucinogens that were unknown in Europe. Add to that much more extreme weather, and you have the recipe for understanding the world as a potentially violent, terrifying place. If blood sacrifice or even human sacrifice seems to appease the capricious gods of that reality, then of course it makes perfect sense to do it.
Yes, this was my instant thought. What a naive Eurocentric way to think of history to insinuate that everyone except the Europeans were just barbaric savages who killed and devalued life. As if the Europeans weren't fresh off their own multi-year killing sprees for this and that reason that equally would have baffled Native Americans.
>What you see is two cultures separated by an almost unimaginable amount of time, distance, and history. The clash that occurred would have been hard to prevent whenever it happened.
Because surely there was more they had in common than that made them different.
As I said, the clash would have been hard to prevent. The biological consequences of foreign diseases are an important way things wouldn't have been other than tragic.
[1] http://www.woodsholemuseum.org/oldpages/sprtsl/v16n2-Gosnold... (page 11)
He sailed to NZ, and tried to go ashore to collect water, but the local Maori attacked and killed 4 of his men before they even got ashore, so he left. It was another 100 years before Captain Cook and his crew became the first Europeans to set foot on New Zealand.
In the 16th to 19th centuries, I suppose it would have been an insurmountable medical problem. But what if they were separated until today? Perhaps in an alternate universe, instead of a wooden sailing ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean, toxic gas bubbled up from the mid-Atlantic ridge (and a similar barrier in the Pacific), requiring pressurized aircraft to fly over. Or the two groups were on separate planets, requiring space travel to meet.
Would we be able to deal with the medical problems today?
Or, in a less unlikely scenario, there were plagues in the Americas that decimated European settlers more than the reverse, allowing the Native Americans to co-opt European shipbuilding and colonize Africa and Eurasia. Interesting to think about!
The Aztecs were not the only people living in the 1500s Mesoamerica. I don't know much, but Wikipedia mentions peoples like Purepechas, Talaxcaltecs, Matlazincas, Tecos, Mazahuas, Otomies and Chontales. And not even all Nahuas were Aztecs.
Was ritualistic human sacrifice a common practice among all these peoples, or was it something that mostly only Aztecs did?
methinks that it gave one big and convenient argument to the takeover for material and spices. they're inhuman, we shall have no shame in wiping them.
I read recently about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Ginés_de_Sepúlveda and his nemesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas (who lived in South America and could see through the cultural barrier)
Their was a movie about the meeting with the pope also.
> was it hard to just back off and accept that people whoever they are should keep their land ?
It was only "theirs" by the same process of brutal conquest that the Spaniards later turned on them.
Yes? Consider Australia's situation where the natives had 0 concept of land ownership and sovereignty. Were the british colonists looking for more land just to assume that the aboriginals own the whole entire continent? Even though they used barely any of it at one time?
Plus it's easy to come and negotiate friendly, especially in Australia where it's not like it's crowded .
One historical scene in particular plays out this idea. It occurred as Cortes marched across today's Mexico towards the city and ruler he had heard so much about. At one point — not yet at the city — Moctezuma sent some emissaries to greet him. They brought two others with them, who were sacrificed in front of the Spaniards.
You can find accounts of this story from both sides: from the chronicles of Cortes and his conquistadors (Bernal Diaz, for example) and from native accounts (as told in The Broken Spears, as another example). And the differing reactions to this event tell you everything. The Spaniards were appalled, some even cried. But the emissaries were totally baffled by their reaction to the gift.
What you see is two cultures separated by an almost unimaginable amount of time, distance, and history. The clash that occurred would have been hard to prevent whenever it happened. As others have pointed out, even basic biology (immunity) was different enough to make an enormous difference without people consciously having to do anything.
Peter Watson's "The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New" is a pretty fascinating examination of the overall contrasts between Eurasian and New World cultures. It's a story that's hard to tell, and there is a lot of speculation and ambiguity. What is clear, above all else, is that the whole ordeal ended tragically, insomuch as it ever ended at all.