Military knowledge was also abstract and published, not just empirical

From Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson. Page 231.

Western technological superiority is not merely a result of the military renaissance of the sixteenth century or an accident of history, much less the result of natural resources, but predicated on an age-old method of investigation, a peculiar mentality that dates back to the Greeks and not earlier. Although the theoretical mathematician Archimedes purportedly snapped that “the whole trade of engineering was sordid and ignoble, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit,” his machines— cranes and a purported huge reflective glass heat ray—delayed the capture of Syracuse for two years. The Roman navy in the First Punic War not only copied Greek and Carthaginian designs but went on to ensure their victories by the use of innovative improvements such as the corvus, a sort of derrick that lifted enemy ships right out of the water. Long before American B-29s dropped napalm over Tokyo, the Byzantines sprayed through brass tubes compressed blasts of Greek fire, a secret concoction of naphtha, sulfur, and quicklime that like its modern counterpart kept burning even when doused with water.

Military knowledge was also abstract and published, not just empirical. Western military manuals from Aelian (Taktike theoria) and Vegetius (Epitoma rei militaris) to the great handbooks on ballistics and tactics of the sixteenth century (e.g., Luigi Collado’s Practica manual de artiglierra[1586] or Justus Lipsius’s De militia Romana [1595–96]) incorporate firsthand knowledge and abstract theoretical investigation into practical advice. In contrast, the most brilliant of Chinese and Islamic military works are far more ambitious and holistic texts, and thus less pragmatic as actual blueprints for killing, embedded with religion, politics, or philosophy and replete with illusions and axioms from Allah to the yin and the yang, hot and cold, one and many.

Courage on the battlefield is a human characteristic. But the ability to craft weapons through mass production to offset such bravery is a cultural phenomenon. Cortés, like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Don Juan of Austria, and other Western captains, often annihilated without mercy their numerically superior foes, not because their own soldiers were necessarily better in war, but because their traditions of free inquiry, rationalism, and science most surely were.