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Why Did Native Allies Fight Alongside Cortés?

Si Sheppard says native allies, not the few hundred Spaniards, were most of the army that marched back on Tenochtitlan, and they fought for their own aims.

After the flight from the city, Cortés would have been finished if the Tlaxcalans had turned on him. None of his men would have reached the coast. They sheltered him because the alliance still served them, not from generosity. Murals in the governor's mansion there show Cortés and the conquistadors at the same scale as their partners, bargaining as equals. They wanted territory taken from the Aztecs and their own fortress in Tenochtitlan. They saw themselves as using the Spaniards.

The Aztec empire looked solid on a map and was an imperial construct. Independent peoples such as the Tlaxcalans and the Tarascans were already hostile, and subordinated peoples, including the Totonacs on the coast and the Chalco states around Lake Texcoco, wanted the demands and the chance of revenge to end. As Cortés rebuilt, indigenous fighters from across Mesoamerica joined him, and more Spaniards arrived on the coast. Sheppard puts the conquistadors at maybe one half of one percent of the force that marched on the city. The overwhelming majority were other Mesoamerican peoples treating the campaign as a final reckoning with the Aztecs.

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Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires? ·

Dwarkesh Podcast

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