Local allies and existential risk taking

European empires were often created not from superior technology or superior culture or superior institutions or even superior arms.  These often contributed to European conquests but were not necessarily sufficient.  Time and again, the winning European strategy was the willingness to exploit domestic divisions and disputes in the targeted regions.  Cortes conquered the Aztecs only by functioning as a catalyst to native peoples conquered and suppressed by the Aztec and enlisting them as allies.  Same with Pizzaro in South America.  Same with the English in Virginia and Massachusetts colonies.  Same in India, Africa, and elsewhere.

Europeans usually conquered by the whole package of technology, arms, culture, institutions combined with alliances with local peoples threatened by the dominant indigenous power.  And in the cases of North and South America and Australasia, the addition of novel Old World diseases introduced into continents mostly cut off and unexposed to those Old World diseases.  

The necessity of local alliances as well as the consequences of uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) diseases have often been under-addressed in a narrative which tends towards oversimplification in order to achieve ideological condemnation.  European explorers - avaricious and evil; native peoples - innocent noble savages.

Some of the native peoples made extremely sophisticated calculations in adjudging whether the Europeans represented a means of overturning an oppressive regime or whether they represented a greater risk.  Usually, owing to the impact of novel diseases, the outcome was preordained but if we are not careful, we lose sight of the ingenuity and sophistication of the political calculus that was real.

I have long found this frustrating.  It denies non-Europeans their agency and therefore their humanity.  It strips an interesting story of many of its most remarkable elements.  It hides what really happened.

The Guardian has an interesting article touching on this issue.  From Don’t call us traitors: descendants of Cortés’s allies defend role in toppling Aztec empire by David Agren.

When people from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala travel to other parts of the country, they are sometimes insulted as traitors by their compatriots.

Tlaxcala is Mexico’s smallest state in size, but it played an outsized role in Mexico’s early history, not least when indigenous Tlaxcalans allied with Hernán Cortés’ tiny band of invaders to bring down the Aztec empire.

Now, as Mexico marks the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán on Friday, the role of the Tlaxcalans in the conquest is being reconsidered.

Many historians argue that without the participation of the Tlaxcalans and other indigenous soldiers, Tenochtitlán might never have fallen to the Spanish.

They are also revising the accusation of treachery, arguing that Tlaxcalans and other city states were in fact fighting a war of liberation against the oppressive Mexica (as the Aztecs were known).

“It wasn’t 600 to 800 Spaniards who conquered [Tenochtitlán]. It was thousands and thousands of Tlaxcalans, Huejotzingas or other peoples, who were under the Mexica yoke and wanted to liberate themselves,” archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma told Radio Formula.

“Cortés had 30,000 to 40,000 Mesoamericans fighting with him,” said Aurelio López Corral, an archaeologist in Tlaxcala. “He couldn’t have done it on his own.” 

This is well known by historians and most of it well known for decades but is hasn't seeped into the public awareness to much extent.  This article is sparked by a revisiting of the issues in Mexico from a Mexican perspective.  

Cortés himself is still a deeply polarizing figure in Mexican history, a rapacious villain who is also the nation’s founding father: his indigenous translator known as La Malinche gave birth to the first Mexican.

In Tlaxcala, however, his role in the fall of the Aztec empire tends to be underplayed, said Yassir Zárate Méndez, who produced a documentary which challenged the official history’s treatment of Tlaxcala.

“He is not seen exactly as a villain, unlike in other places, but as someone who played a complicated role in history,” he said. “Cortés goes somewhat unnoticed and remains below the level of local figures.”

Those include Xicohténcatl the Younger, a Tlaxcalan prince who vehemently opposed aligning with the Spanish, and remains fondly remembered in the state.

At the time of the conquest, Tlaxcalans shared a cosmovision with the Mexica and spoke the same language – Nahuátl.

But, unlike the imperial Aztecs, Tlaxcala had a more collective form of leadership, and when Cortés arrived, some in the leadership saw an opportunity to topple an old enemy, said Zárate.

The region provided soldiers for invading the island city of Tenochtitlán and allowed him to regroup after he was forced to flee an Aztec counteroffensive. Cortés reputedly built the boats used for eventually invading the Aztec capital in Tlaxcala.

“It was a question of political survival,” Zárate said. “To save yourself, you had to turn to whatever allies were necessary.”

After the fall of Tenochtitlán, the Tlaxcalans benefited handsomely from their arrangement – and Spaniards married into the local nobility. Tlaxcala received special status in the Spanish colonial period with a form of self-rule. Its residents received the right to settle other parts of the colony.

But when Mexico won independence in the 1820s, that power was lost, and an evolving national mythology focused on the fall of the Mexica, casting Tlaxcalans as traitors.

One of the best Guardian articles I have read in a very long time.  In part because it is virtually entirely straight reporting rather ideological cant.  That's refreshing.