Aztec and Inca Empires survive

POD: The discovery of America goes different - shortly after the Spanish make contact with the Aztecs, another European nation (preferably someone who's strong enough, England [Cabot] or France) and threatens Spain with war if they should try to plunder the Aztec riches. They're still hit by European diseases, have to accept Christian missionaries and give up human sacrifices, but after the dust has settled, they are an independent nation. They trade with the Europeans, but stay independent. Same thing happens with the Incas. How could things develop?

The Aztecs had no chance; the Inca, perhaps

The Aztecs were already victims of what we today call imperial overstretch and the state itself was fragile. It used the extortion and plunder of its neighbours to survive and was universally hated by its neighbours. BTW, the Spanish Governor of Cuba, who IIRC was named Velasquez, was concerned about Cortes and attempted to prevent his departure and relieve him of command. So effectively, such a threat would have been useless. Spain could have truthfully insisted that it couldn't control Cortes and, when they tried to do so, he and his native allies defeated the Spanish attempt.

The Inca king, Wayna Capac, died of smallpox in 1528 with no clear successor. Had he made it clear, the civil war in the Inca Empire would have been averted. When the leading candidate for the throne, Atahuallpa, wanted to divert his armies to attack Pizarro's expedition, his generals told him not to worry; the Spainards were a small and insignificant force in their opinion compared to the Inca rebels. Had there been no civil war, Atahuallpa would not have delayed an assault on Pizarro, not allowing him time to accumulate support about the Inca's enemies. If they had captured Spanish arms and horses, who knows what may have happened.

What would modern Inca look like?

Well, remember that had they driven back the Spanish, they would still have had smallpox to deal with, though attrition rates may not have been as high as in OTL, but 30% would not have been exceptional. The Inca would have lost nearly 2 million of his subjects. I imagine that this would have considerably undermined the claim of the king to divinity.

However, the Inca religion bears some interesting similarities to Catholicism - the belief in one God and his son, the concept of punishment or reward beyond death, and a lot of their ceremonies were noted for their startling resemblance to the Catholic mass. They had a religion heavily around ceremony and abstinence. I don't think it is a stretch of the imagination to see a future king, perhaps even Attahaulpa himself, converting.

The Inca calendar was still very much in development at the time of the conquest, so the Inca would have adopted the Roman calendar. They already had a complex system of laws, justice, military organisation and industrial relations that weren't incompatible with European ideals. Additionally, Attahaulpa made clear to Pizarro, I believe, his willingness to pay tribute to avoid bloodshed. With Pizarro defeated as suggested in previous post, it is not incomprehensible for the Inca to pledge their loyalty to Spain in return for being left alone. Also their architecture, communications and transport system were astounding. Access to European weapons would have confirmed the hold of the Inca and possible aided their further expansion.

In short, had Inca not been attacked again, and had reached some arrangement with Castile, it would have become an imitation of the European courts in the New World and, I believe, a strong Catholic state.

Your religion idea sounds good.

"shortly after the Spanish make contact with the Aztecs, another European nation (preferably someone who's strong enough, England [Cabot] or France) and threatens Spain with war if they should try to plunder the Aztec riches."

Now why exactly should any other European nation care what the Spanish do to the Aztecs? What basically happened historically is that the other nations also started exploring the Americas in order to find the exactly same thing the Spanish found - gold! When they couldn't find it they took to stealing it from the Spanish.

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson, in his book "Carnage and Culture," has persuasively suggested that the impact of European disease on the Native Americans was not as important a factor as has been suggested. Not because it wasn't a killer- it obviously was. But because the European invaders died from tropical diseases to which they had little immunity in about the same rate as the Aztecs and Incas died from European diseases.

And he also points out that the Native allies of Cortez and Pizzaro were also affected by smallpox and other diseases.

Anaxagoras said:

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson, in his book "Carnage and Culture," has persuasively suggested that the impact of European disease on the Native Americans was not as important a factor as has been suggested. Not because it wasn't a killer- it obviously was. But because the European invaders died from tropical diseases to which they had little immunity in about the same rate as the Aztecs and Incas died from European diseases.

And he also points out that the Native allies of Cortez and Pizzaro were also affected by smallpox and other diseases.

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Semi-OT: Y'know, I always wondered about that. How come New World diseases didn't eventually decimate Europe? Were there any epidemics amongst animals as a result of the hemispheric contact?

Rabbit Scribe said:

Semi-OT: Y'know, I always wondered about that. How come New World diseases didn't eventually decimate Europe? Were there any epidemics amongst animals as a result of the hemispheric contact?

Click to expand...

The Europeans moving into Mexico and Central America suffered greatly from malaria and yellow fever, but such diseases exist in tropical areas all over the world and, unlike smallpox, they are not transmitted person-to-person. So when Europeans returned to Europe from the Americas, they obviously didn't cause such epidemics as took place in the Americas.

Incidently, some people believe this was the main reason why there are still very large indigenous populations in Latin America and only a small indigenous population in North America. Because of the basic laws of natural selection (eat it, Kansas), people who had natural resistance to tropical diseases survived better than those who did not, just as the people who had a natural resistance to smallpox survived better than those who did not. So the population of Latin America gradually became largely mestizo (part-European and part-Indian). In North America, where tropical diseases didn't exist but the Europeans brought smallpox with them, there was no such biological obstacle to the establishment of a purely European population.

Not pretty. Downright nasty, as a matter of fact. But such things are this are not subject to the laws of right and wrong.

On the other hand, the belief was widespread at the time that syphilis was introduced to Europe from the Americas. I'm not a medical expert, but I don't believe this was actually the case.

Anaxagoras said:

The Europeans moving into Mexico and Central America suffered greatly from malaria and yellow fever, but such diseases exist in tropical areas all over the world and, unlike smallpox, they are not transmitted person-to-person. So when Europeans returned to Europe from the Americas, they obviously didn't cause such epidemics as took place in the Americas.

Click to expand...

In other words, there just didn't happen to be a New World smallpox that the aboriginals generally resisted but Europeans didn't resist at all?

LacheyS said:

The Inca king, Wayna Capac, died of smallpox in 1528 with no clear successor. Had he made it clear, the civil war in the Inca Empire would have been averted. When the leading candidate for the throne, Atahuallpa, wanted to divert his armies to attack Pizarro's expedition, his generals told him not to worry; the Spainards were a small and insignificant force in their opinion compared to the Inca rebels. Had there been no civil war, Atahuallpa would not have delayed an assault on Pizarro, not allowing him time to accumulate support about the Inca's enemies. If they had captured Spanish arms and horses, who knows what may have happened.

Click to expand...

<shameless plug alert>Read THE GUNS OF THE TAWANTINSUYA. <end shameless plug alert>

Wow. Can you imagine the architecture, art, and clothing styles that the discovery of the Aztecs would spread in Europe in TTL?

Rabbit Scribe said:

In other words, there just didn't happen to be a New World smallpox that the aboriginals generally resisted but Europeans didn't resist at all?

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1491 addresses this issue in some detail. The short version is that most real killer diseases are species jumpers, (e.g. smallpox evolved from Cow pox) and the Western hemisphere didn't have the domesticated animals the would serve as the source materiel.

Anaxagoras said:

But because the European invaders died from tropical diseases to which they had little immunity in about the same rate as the Aztecs and Incas died from European diseases.

And he also points out that the Native allies of Cortez and Pizzaro were also affected by smallpox and other diseases.

Click to expand...

Of course, it's not clear that there were any such diseases in the New World, prior to European contact; the fatalities due to sickness in Portuguese and Spanish exploration of tropical areas, for the first few decades, was very low.

Check out Plagues and Peoples, for a view of how diseases effected the new world from the perspective of some one without an ideological axe to grind.

Maybe the Tarascans would stand a better chance than the Aztecs. You might be able to get some hold-out Mayan city-states, too... Some of them survived until the 1700s.

robertp6165 said:

<shameless plug alert>Read THE GUNS OF THE TAWANTINSUYA. <end shameless plug alert>

Click to expand...

And rightfully so. I've only read the first page and I'm flabbergasted. Really cool work!

Originally Posted by robertp6165
<shameless plug alert>Read THE GUNS OF THE TAWANTINSUYA. <end shameless plug alert>

LacheyS said:

And rightfully so. I've only read the first page and I'm flabbergasted. Really cool work!

Click to expand...

A very good piece of work. It handles the main military deficities of the Incas, no horses, no iron, no gunpowder whilst leaving their weakness to European disease.

@David S: If they learn how many riches the Aztecs have, they don't want that the Spanish will get all of that.

OK, let's continue. The Europeans sell the surviving Aztecs / Mayas / Incas a lot of more (guns, iron, tools, horses) or less (alcohol, luxuries of all kinds) goods and get tobacco, potatos, chocolate and of course GOLD in return. They have some harbors to trade, but the rest of the Indian empires continue (OK, the Aztecs might lose their vassals, but Tenochtitlan survives.)

I can see the Aztec and Maya states only survive as small states without big ambitions, later to be two of many other ex-colonial states, while the Inca might try to build a bigger empire after the hard years. But would they try to expand into the plains? The climate there is very different... that's why I don't expect that they'll leave the Andes.